Part 10
A fragment of the Greek yarn was true. He was there for long under Otho, roving about with his soldiers, and that forlorn and devastated country, as it then was, made an indelible impression on him. Not Odysseus himself could have been more homesick for Greece than he was. He spoke of it in tones of wistful yearning, as of a lost Paradise--the identical tones that I have since discovered, to my surprise, in the writings of a French contemporary, Edgar Quinet.[34] Never was he so attractive, during these final years of his life, as when he sat all alone at the piano in the twilight hour before the lamps were brought in, crooning the tender Greek folk-songs of his youth to a soft, self-invented accompaniment. At such moments, he was transported; he had entered into a fairyland of which he alone possessed the key. You might have taken him for an angel. Indeed, his voice was the best part of him at all times. Even when he ramped and raved, it never lost its exquisite sweetness of timbre; his very curses sounded like a ripple of celestial laughter. He also painted sunny landscapes in oil, and composed an amusing valse or two. Such things went well with his exterior childlike equipment. Primeval ferocity was lurking underneath.
True to his freebooter instincts, he had perched himself here, at Bregenz, on a height where he could not be overlooked by any one and whence he obtained an unimpeded view of half the province and lake. The place boasted of a “flag-tower” from which five countries were visible (Austria, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden and Switzerland), and he contrived, somehow or other, to give a mediæval smack of discord and rapine to its inner regions. Here were bleak stone passages, cold as an ice-cellar in winter, and hung with matchlocks and lances; gloomy Gothic wardrobes filling up their ends. The habitable part was full of spoils plundered, without a doubt, from the rich burghers down below; a haphazard collection of Persian carpets, harmoniums, lacquer tables, Tiepolo portraits, glittering chandeliers, marbles: it all wore an authentic air of loot. Somber paneling, relieved by armorial designs, covered the walls and ceilings and made the rooms uncommonly dusky.
And here he sat for years and years, terrorizing his family, all females, into fits. People used to wonder how he managed to look so absurdly young at eighty. His secret was simplicity itself: Live well, and hand over everything in the way of worry to your women. He never spoke to servants at all; the harim were entrusted with that dirty work, and woe betide them if anything went wrong with the dinner! No one was surprised when his five daughters got engaged as fast as ever they could and fled the premises, regardless of whom they were marrying. He ruled his wife and sister-in-law, dear old ladies, like a slave-driver. One or the other was always hard at work manufacturing Latakia cigarettes for the rosy brigand, who lived on their money for seventy years and called them names to the hour of his death, although they were children of the premier baron of Scotland. A certain daughter had the imprudence, one day, to admire a graceful birch-tree that she could see from her bedroom. Next morning, as usual, she looked out of the window; the birch was gone. It had been felled overnight. That was his system. Dominate your women, or they will dominate you. Put the fear of God into them--no matter how. In his own family, he declared, wives were not allowed to sit down in the presence of their husbands, unless they had first obtained permission. It may be true. I fancy one of his ancestors was the cosmopolitan ruffian who wrote those memoirs; a kind of fifth-rate Casanova. There he remained, anyhow, like an old cock on his dunghill, crowing and gobbling; vicious and vigorous past his ninetieth year. And the strange thing is that I am considered to have inherited a great deal of his peculiar charm. It was my mother who told me this; she was his eldest daughter and knew both of us fairly well.
* * * * *
It is time, now, to confess that not all the prints and archives and natural history collections in the world would have brought me--or ought to bring any one else--to Bregenz, did the place not offer another and a greater attraction. I am alluding to the local _Blaufelchen_ whose English name at this moment escapes me: a kind of fish. They are called, in Latin, _Coregonus Wartmanni_, which has a harsh flavor. Let nobody, however, be scared by a mere name, inasmuch as things are apt to taste different from what they sound. Oriental poets, for example, have sung with such a depth of feeling about pomegranates that one almost believes they can be eaten, whereas _Coregoni Wartmanni_, I admit, convey a suggestion of something unpalatable. Try them none the less, and leave Hafiz to crack his teeth over the pomegranates.
These fish occur in some Scotch lakes and are considered so great a delicacy that Mary Queen of Scots has been credited with their introduction. But I knew one cantankerous countryman of mine (an angler, and _Coregonus_ will not rise to the fly) who declared that they were “not to be compared to trout”--which means nothing whatever, seeing that comparison is not well possible between things so dissimilar; you might as well say that Sir Joshua Reynolds is not to be compared to a Bechstein Grand; and that, in fact, they were “hardly worth eating”--which has the merit, at least, of being a straightforward expression of opinion. Now it stands to reason that a good many things are hardly worth eating, until you know how to cook them. The average English hare is hardly worth eating; the way that quadruped is “dressed” (hyperbola!) in England is an insult to the hare’s memory and to the human stomach. As to these _Blaufelchen_--whoever does not approve of them at the Hotel Weisses Kreuz in Bregenz must be hard to please.[35] Let him try, as a last resort, those at the Hotel Hecht in Constance; if still dissatisfied, he should return without delay to his lukewarm whitebait fried in mutton-grease.
But, first of all, a word for your guidance. Make love neither to the waitress nor the chamber-maid nor the she-cook. Make love to the manager. Lure him into some corner, and unbosom yourself freely. Whisper in his ear that you are an Ainu by birth; that while out there, at Yezo, you accidentally met a countryman of his (mentioning name and general appearance) who spoke in such glowing terms of the Bodensee _Blaufelchen_ that you were unable to sleep either by day or night until, traveling via the trans-Siberian railway, you should be able to taste them for yourself under his hospitable roof. Then see whether you get what is “hardly worth eating.” I blush to record that we had a veritable surfeit of _Blaufelchen_. I devoured two at a sitting, and the waitress informed me that she had never seen a tourist--even a German--perform a similar feat; nor should I, indeed, have been successful, had I not kept saying to myself all the time: “When shall I be at Bregenz again? Possibly never!” Mr. R. declared himself satisfied with one; and small wonder. It was a leviathan....
A timely warning, apropos of surfeits. On arrival at our village, we found the family in a state of distress. One of their two cows (the rest are on the alp) had died that afternoon; died of over-eating. She, the proprietress, had told him, the proprietor, to beware how he left the beast to itself; he, the proprietor, swore he had known that particular cow from the day of its birth, and that it was far more sensible than the rest of its kind. Left to itself, therefore, the cow had “exploded.”
I am so little of a cattle-fancier that this was news to me; troubling news. I had always regarded the cow as an exemplar of all that is sane and moderate. Far from it. Give them a chance, especially after the hay-diet of winter, and they eat till they burst. They graze, and graze, and graze; at last, stuffed to the brim, they stand there motionless, wondering what is wrong inside, while a pained and puzzled look--infallible symptom, this--creeps into their eyes. Now is your chance, your last chance, of saving their life. If you happen to have an iron chain in your pocket, thrust it into the beast’s mouth to provoke a flow of saliva or something else which relieves the oppression; if you have no chain look in that other pocket, where you may find a Gargantuan clyster to be applied to its further extremity; failing that, whip out your butcher’s knife and give the patient a well-directed stab in the stomach--a kind of Cæsarian section; the gas escapes, the cow survives. Else, after standing like a pathetic statue for a few moments, it falls heavily earthwards and “explodes inside”--a cow! Thank God we belong to another species, else how would it have fared at the Weisses Kreuz? A gentle cow! The episode has shattered one of my dearest illusions.
This, then, must be the explanation of a strange sight which has attracted me from time immemorial. Often, in pouring rain, you may see a cow at pasture and its owner standing dismally near at hand, soaked to the skin. Why, I used to wonder--why not let the beast graze by itself and go home and get a _Schnapps_ and a change of clothes? Now I know. The peasant cannot move from the spot. He dare not leave the cow alone. He must stay there and keep his eye fixed on hers, lest that symptom should appear.
OLD ANNA
_Old Anna_
Stood awhile yesterday beside a block of gneiss which projects upon the right-hand side of the Tiefis path, some two hundred yards above the petrifying stream, at the foot of a young oak. It has been broken long ago, and is shaped like a very low and narrow bench. How one changes--how one looks at things with other eyes! Is it possible that this stone used to be my _Ultima Thule_ in days of infancy; this, or the walnut tree a little higher up, whose stump remains to this day, and from under whose branches you had a broad view over the valley? The upward path was shadier than now, and here, sure enough, I played through the morning hours, while the old Anna extracted out of her pocket that invariable _Frühschoppen_ (she, being Tyrolese, called it “merenda”)--some salted bread and a quarter of red wine. Sometimes the same pocket produced also a chocolate for me; in fact, she had a trick of conjuring chocolate out of the most improbable places. On one occasion she actually shook a piece down from a tree; a miracle....
Later on, the Gleziska became our favorite haunt. This is a flat green meadow to the east of the village where stood, at that time, a glorious barn containing an ante-chamber and two separate compartments full of delicious hay to swim about in; it has now been replaced by an anæmic structure of the new type. The first walk I ever took, all by myself, was from the village church to the Gleziska; that was a proud day. Soon, when my sister had learnt to toddle, the old thing took us further afield; once as far as the church of St. Martin at Ludesch (built about 1430; some of its rare Gothic furniture is in the Bregenz Museum), where we two discovered, in a crypt, an immense accumulation of human skulls; we dragged four or five into the daylight, and had a game of skittles with them.
I still own a photograph of the old Anna. She is not old in the least; about forty, I should say. There she sits at a table, half-profile, her left arm supporting the head; she does not smile, but looks rather vacuously into the world, as such photographs are apt to do. A pleasant, refined face; I can read nothing else out of it. There is a suggestion of silk about the clothing, and a black ribbon hangs down from the back of her hair. Such was the _Alte Anna_ who, being a child of nature herself, was the ideal nurse. Her only drawback was that she had too great a fondness for ghastly wolf-stories of the Little Red Riding Hood type. She possessed an endless store of such tales current, no doubt, in the Tyrol of earlier days. I wish I could still remember them, for they would now interest me as showing how strongly the popular imagination must have been impressed with this scourge, at which we can at last afford to laugh. In those days they frightened me to death; they haunted my dreams.
Old Anna faded out of sight, and there came a shadowy interregnum of German governesses, of whom I can recall nothing save that a certain Fräulein Schubert got the sack because she had a flirtation (this was doubtless a euphemism) with some young man in the factory offices. It struck me as unfair that you should be sent away just because you happen to like your friend.
Herr Som followed. He was master of the boys’ school at Bludesch (there was no school-house in our village at that time); a Swiss, I fancy, and a well-groomed, gentlemanly fellow who often lunched at our house. To his establishment I was now sent every morning--rather a long tramp for a child, across all those fields, especially through the fresh-fallen snow of winter. The school-house still exists; it is a conspicuous three-storied building that overtops all the others in this hither side of Bludesch; a house of noble lineage which has recently been made to look quite new and respectable; it was built in the seventeenth century by the family of Von der Halden zu Haldenegg, who were _Landvogts_ of Blumenegg.[36] The place was therefore not a school-house at all; only two rooms had been set apart by the village elders where boys sat at desks under Herr Som’s supervision writing in endless lines “Schwimmmmen, Schwimmmen” (it was spelt with four, or at least three, m’s in those days). Som must have been pleased with my progress, for I still possess a unique document--a school report with the mark “very good” in reading, writing and arithmetic; so pleased that, on marrying soon afterwards, he gave my exotic name to his eldest son, the first and last time such an honor has been conferred on me. “Schwimmmmen” is all that sticks in my mind of Bludesch school; that, and the view up the smiling valley from the window of the water-closet (another euphemism). It was then and there borne in upon me how needful to such apartments is a spacious prospect upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure. To this attraction I should be inclined to add, now, a choice little library and, for those of musical tastes, a pianola.
Misguided Scotch relatives, in those days, used to send magnificent dolls to my sister by post. Little they knew what they were doing: little they knew! A parcel arrived, and somebody would say to her:
“Well, I declare. This looks uncommonly like another doll. _Another_ doll! You are a lucky child, and no mistake.”
My sister pretended to shriek delightedly:
“Oh, let me unpack it, all alone, upstairs,” and snatched away the parcel and ran. I followed. A glance, a single masonic glance, had been exchanged between us. It sufficed. I knew the part I was called upon to play.
Upstairs, in some unused room, we locked the door upon our labors. The plaything was unpacked in dead silence; a ceremonial had begun. When the last silk-paper wrapping had been removed, my sister took the splendid golden-haired creature into her arms and, with many false hugs and kisses, bore it swiftly towards the garden. I followed. Not a word was spoken. We were high priests, engaged upon some terrible but necessary ordinance. At the foot of a certain old tree in a certain shrubbery--always the same--she paused, and muttered certain mysterious words into the victim’s ear. Then she handed it solemnly to me. I took the thing by the legs, swung it through the air once or twice, and shattered its head to fragments against the trunk. After that, we tore it limb from limb amid a shower of sawdust and stamped on the remains. Forthwith the spell was released, the sacrifice at an end; and we screamed with hysterical joy.
A few days later, somebody might enquire of the child:
“Now where is that lovely doll you got from dear Cousin Annie?”
She would reply, mournfully:
“In bed. Poor little Esmeralda has a tummy-ache this morning.”
This, too, was part of the rite. The words were always the same.
Never a doll escaped assassination, and nobody, I believe, found out what happened to them. My sister hated dolls with a vindictive, unreasoning hatred. And I, of course, was only too pleased to smash anything I was bidden to smash; and still am.
Dear Cousin Annie--this one happened to be no relation at all--turned up in this country at odd intervals, as did the rest of those stark grand-aunts and female cousins, to our infinite annoyance. There were scores of them, and all of a kind; musty and sententious to the last degree. The present generation has no idea, not the faintest idea, of what a grand-aunt used to look like in those days. Dear Cousin Annie was a gaunt, tottering, gray-haired anatomy, who reeked of Macassar oil, and wore massive jet beads round her neck and a tremulous drop of rose-water at the end of her nose--just the kind of person whom a little boy would love to kiss.
“What is my name, dear?” she asked, over and over again, with a sickly smile.
You were expected to answer:
“Dear--Cousin--Annie.”
It was no use whatever saying, “Don’t know.” We tried it often, but the question was only repeated with greater persistence, and a sicklier smile than ever.
Her husband had been a physician and was even more aged than she; he exhaled an air of unbelievable eld. It occurred to me, years afterwards, that there was something pre-Victorian and Waterlooish about those white whiskers. He drank sherry-wine, and dishes of tea. Nevertheless, one could have learnt much from him had one been a little older, for he was a character, an original. Later on, in Edinburgh, I got to know him well; he was then ninety-two, and no longer communicative. An antiquarian of the old school, he had filled his head with queer knowledge upon every subject, and his house with queer objects of every kind. Judging by his pamphlets and letters to newspapers, he seems to have taken, and rightly taken, all learning to his province. I still possess a few of these things; who can tell how many he produced altogether? “Protestantism in Austria” begins thus: “I am desirous of calling the attention of your readers to this subject, which is not generally understood in Britain.” It was written here, as well as a rather incoherent “Notice of a flood at Frastanz in the autumn of 1846.”[37] He gave me another paper written by his own father, who was Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and died in 1818: “Mistresses and Servants.” How good it reads!
_B._ My dear Mrs. A., I am glad to see you. All well at home, I hope?
_A._ All well. Mr. A. is going about in his usual way, and the children are in good health.
_B._ When things are so, a wife and mother may truly say: “He gives all things richly to enjoy.”
So far _all well_; but Mrs. A. promptly embarks upon her pet subject of “plaguy servants.” Mrs. B., after an argument of sixteen pages, recommends her to read a certain verse in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.
Here is a short paper of his own on “Saints” (“When I was student at the University of Edinburgh, we young fellows were displeased by our professor, a worthy old man, constantly speaking to us of _Baron_ Haller”), and a strange composition touching the “Life of a domestic cat”. (“I kept a record of her kittenings. They were twenty-five in number, comprising seventy-eight individuals.”) The old fellow also burst into poetry once or twice and perpetrated, among other things, some flattering lines on our family of Tilquhillie entitled “Feugh and Dee,” lines which nothing but ingrained modesty now prevents me from reprinting, seeing that this family, though venerable enough--the oldest in the county, they tell me--was never yet, to my knowledge, hymned in verse, but has contrived to live on, from age to age, sufficiently inconspicuous; inconspicuous, and all of us rather cracked into the bargain. See, for a recent example, Dean Ramsay’s “Reminiscences.”
Thereafter came an epoch when those in authority seem to have reached a sensible conclusion, to wit, that English children should not only speak English, but also learn to read and write it. A governess was required. In due course of time she arrived; and her name was Miss Prime. We straightway called her Miss Prim, or “the Prim”; it suited her admirably. Her hair was parted down the middle; indeed, she was prim all over, but her pedagogic system proved a failure. Miss Prim must have had an indifferent time of it here, so far as the children were concerned. Her disciplinary measures never obtained the desired effect. When my sister was told to stand on a bench for some misdemeanor, she made such contortions at me that it was impossible for lessons to proceed; she was next put into a corner facing the wall, where the contortions continued more violently than ever, only this time with the back part of her body; at last she was locked up all by herself in a distant room, whence there presently issued such a din of crashing furniture that the people downstairs rushed up, asking whether the end of the world had come. In this particular room stood an enormous double bed; it inspired her with a brilliant method of eluding punishment for good and all.
“Crawl under here,” she suggested, “whenever the Prim want us _for anything_ (euphemism). She can never pull us out.”
She couldn’t. Under that bed we remained for hours, contentedly munching cakes and crunching sweets which had been stuffed into the mattress to meet contingencies such as these, until the Prim implored us, almost on her knees, to come out again. At other times, before or after “lessons,” we indulged in prolonged and uproarious fights between ourselves. “It will end in a howl,” my mother was wont to remark on such occasions.
Nobody need tell me what we required: a thorough good spanking. Who was going to administer it? Had my father not died when I was five, he would doubtless have attended to the matter. He could hurt confoundedly, he could. I have bright memories of one of his spankings when, after performing a war-dance on some bed of newly planted portulacas, I found myself suddenly seized by the scruff of the neck and carried at arm’s length rabbit-fashion, dangling and kicking in air, into a conservatory. _En route_, I had barely time to shout to the old Anna “Wait till I’m spanked!”--we were going for a walk--before I got it hotter, far hotter, than usual. That is the way to spank children. Never do it unless you are really angry yourself. Otherwise they will regard you as a cold-blooded torturer.
As to the Prim--I should like to have seen her tackling either of us two seriously. Even my sister, tiny as she was, would have throttled her to death, and then dropped her out of the window. She was regarded as a poor joke, and that is why her teaching hardly met with the success it deserved, and why I was therefore soon to be sent to an English private school, loathsomest of institutions, and thence to other schools, and yet other schools--there to be crammed for such a length of time with such a superfluity of useless learning, and by such a variety of unwholesome-looking gentlemen of different ages and nationalities, that I am only now, at the end of all these years, beginning to shake off the bad effects and discover my true self again. That fetish of education!