Part 3
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.
LUTZ FOREST
_Lutz Forest_
Out of that side-valley on our east, the Walserthal,[5] issues the rushing Lutz torrent, almost a river. It joins the Ill, our main stream, a mile or so after quitting that valley; the Ill flows into the upper Rhine below Feldkirch; the Rhine into the Lake of Constance not far from Bregenz, our capital. We therefore drain into the North Sea. At a few hours’ walk over the hills behind us, however, and again on the other side of the Arlberg (boundary between this province and the Tyrol), the waters drop into the Lech or Inn; this as, _via_ Danube, into the Black Sea. A simple hydrographical system.
Now ever since a recent date which I forget, when the upper Rhine misbehaved itself so shockingly that the Austrian and Swiss Governments were forced to undertake some costly works with a view to ensuring better conduct in the future, our own two rivers, the Lutz and Ill, which were likewise subject to devastating floods, began to be hemmed in by stone embankments more systematically and more remorselessly than they had ever yet been in days of old, when they also gave an infinity of trouble. For it was obvious that their freakishness, coinciding with that of the Rhine and due to continued showers in these upper regions, was responsible for a certain amount of the Rhine’s damage. The consequence is, that Lutz and Ill have put on new faces and grown painfully proper; they are no longer the wantons they were. And therefore all the fascinating wilderness of gray shingle and bowlders alongside, sparsely dotted with buckthorn, or white willow, or stunted little ghosts of birches--all that broad sunny desolation of their banks, where one chased crimson-winged grasshoppers and looked for garnets in those water-worn blocks of gneiss: all, all a thing of the past! Our streams now flow, in miserably straight lines, each down its own narrow channel, and large tracts of the unprofitable soil on either side have been planted with flourishing young pines and firs--an excellent investment for such worthless gravel-land hereabouts. Gone are the garnets and grasshoppers; gone is the charm of those pallid wastes. The economist gains. The poet, as usual, looks on and counts his loss.
Our village, lying on the north side of the valley, faces south; the valley may here be two and a half miles wide, as the crow flies. First come fields, then a broad stretch of woodland through which runs the Ill river and the railway Paris-Vienna, then hills once more, in the shape of the unprepossessing mountain called Tschallenga--popularly “der Stein.” It is all quite simple.
On our way yesterday into these low-lying forests, we passed through the meadow beside the church of St. Anne. A large stretch of the adjoining woodland has recently been extirpated and converted into pasture--the uprooted trunks are still lying about; those two old lime trees remain untouched; the little stream has run dry. Here, on this meadow, was a surprise: a football ground. It wore a neglected air; the boys can only play on Sundays, since the war. Here the lords of Blumenegg used to be received in state by the people, their lieges; here, during the Thirty Years’ War, the fighting men of the countryside were to assemble at a given signal by day or night, completely armed and furnished with three days’ provision each. Here also, wholly unconcerned about the Thirty Years’ War, I used to wait for a youthful companion to whom I was fondly attached; here we sat and exchanged confidences, and fashioned rustic pipes out of the twig of some shrub whose bark, in spring, can be pulled away from its wood like the glove off a finger.
On a certain occasion--an occasion which I regard as a turning-point--I happened to be all alone under the pines a little further on, near that former bank of the river which is still marked by huge blocks of defensive stone-work, now useless and smothered under a tangle of brushwood. We visited, yesterday, the very spot where, at the callow age of seven, I formulated, and was promptly appalled by its import, a far-reaching aphorism: There is no God. For some obscure reason (perhaps to test the consequences) those awful words were spoken aloud. Nothing happened. Who can tell what previous internal broodings had led to this explosive utterance! None at all, very likely. The phenomenon may have been as natural and easy of birth as the flowering of a plant, the cutting of a wisdom tooth--which, as every one knows, is nearly always a painless process. There it was: the thing had been said. Often, later on, that little incident under the pines recurred to my memory. I used to ask myself: Why make such earth-convulsing speeches? And then again: Why not? Which means the periodical relapses into credulity, into a kind of funk, rather, occurred for the next few years. After that, my intellect ceased to be clouded by anthropomorphic interpretations of the universe. Let each think as he pleases. To me, even as a boy, it was misery to profess credence in any of this Mumbo-Jumbo or to conform to any of its rites; and a considerable relief, therefore, to escape from England into a German gymnasium where, although games were not officially encouraged and work fifty times harder than at home--theology, among other subjects, being drummed into us with pestilential persistence--one was at least not asphyxiated by the noisome atmosphere of mediæval ecclesiasticism which infected English public schools in those days, and will doubtless infect them in _saecula saeculorum_. That everlasting “chapel” with its murky Gothic ritual--and before breakfast too: what a fearsome way of beginning the morning! Let each think as he pleases. I have better uses for my leisure than to try to bring others round to any convictions of mine, such as they are; far better uses. Enough for me to have watched the virus at work; and if I seem to be sensitive on this one point--why, here are scores of respectable elderly gentlemen wrangling themselves into hysterics over sanitation and Zionism and Irish politics and other conundrums that seldom trouble my dreams.
So it came about that yesterday, at the end of nearly fifty years, I approached once more, and with a kind of reverence, the sacred spot under the trees where the Lutz used to flow, and there thanked my genius for preserving me from not the least formidable of those antediluvian nightmares which afflict mankind at its most critical period of life--the nightmare of hopes never to be realized and of torments hardly worth laughing at; and from all its mischievous and perverse complications. Well, well! Men in general are brought up so differently nowadays that they cannot realize what a disheartening trial it was for some of us youngsters at that particular age and in that particular environment, where you could heave a Liddell and Scott at your form-master’s head and only get a caning for it like anybody else, whereas, if you were suspected of doubting the miracle of the barren fig-tree, you were forthwith quarantined, isolated, despatched into a kind of leper-colony, all by yourself. Boys are gregarious; they resent such treatment. Let each think as he pleases. What I think is that a grown-up man would be a poor fellow, unless he felt fairly comfortable in any leper-colony into which these gentle ghost-worshipers may care to relegate him....
The woods grow thicker and more solemn as you proceed downward in the direction of Nenzing, tall firs of both varieties, some of them ivy-wreathed, interspersed with pine-trees whose trunks of rose and silver, struggling to obtain the same amount of light, shoot up straight as lances; sunny clearings and stretches of meadowland where the cattle graze knee-deep in spring; an undergrowth of junipers and other shrubs just sufficient to diversify the scene and please the eye--never too dense: noiselessly one treads on that emerald moss!
I had intended to take Mr. R. into a part of the forest which has always interested me and which I never fail to visit, a region of starved pigmy pines; and there to give him a little lecture in English on the formation of forest loam. The Lutz in 1625, or the Ill in 1651--it is impossible for me to decide which of the two--changed its course in consequence of a sudden flood and took a turn to the south, abandoning its former bed. The result was that an area of bleak shingle, far broader than the present river-bed, was left exposed in the middle of the forest. Myriads of pine seeds have been scattered upon it ever since, and the puny trees grow up slowly, dwarfishly; casting down but a yearly handful of needles each, to form the necessary soil for future generations. No moss has yet taken root after all these years, nor can the more fastidious firs draw sustenance; the little pines, rising from naked pebbles under foot, are in undisputed possession of the territory. Had there been leafy willows or alders at hand, as in the Scesa-tobel near Bludenz, the earthy covering would have been produced long ago and this quasi-sterile tract merged into the forest on either side of it. There were nothing but conifers on the spot, when the river forsook its old channel; and it is uphill work for them. The “flourishing” pines and firs of which I spoke just now have been judiciously planted; these are self-sown. They are paying for the privilege.
We also intended to visit the _Schnepfenstrich_, a piece of forest between Bludesch and Nenzing where, in days gone by, one used to lie in wait for the woodcock at nightfall. What excitement in the dim gloaming of March--_Oculi: da kommen sie_--among those patches of trees with their scent of dampness and sprouting leaves, listening for the call of the male bird and waiting to see him glide past, mysterious as a phantom! That was sport worthy of the name; though I now find it not altogether easy to conjure up the first fine rapture of that bird-massacring epoch. How unimaginative--unpoetic, let us say--are the English, who put up this apparition of the twilight in the vulgarest fashion with a dog, and then slaughter him as if he were nothing but a pheasant or partridge! Such is our manner. It is the same with the capercailzie, a stupid, worthless fowl--and worse than worthless: is he not supplanting the finer black game? Why not ennoble him in death, at least? Why not approach stealthily in the chill dusk of dawn, and espy him at last, drunk with passion, on his favorite fir? Then, if you can aim straight, he dies as we may all desire to die--swiftly, painlessly, and like a lover in his highest moment of exaltation. I know what Englishmen will say to this. They will say something about cruelty and breeding-season. Your Anglo-Saxon is always worth listening to, when he talks about cruel sports.
We had _intended_, I say; but those pests of horse-flies, which Mr. R. insists upon calling “fly-horses” or “flyses-horse,” became worse and worse. There must have been cattle in this wood, not long ago. At last, despite clouds of tobacco-smoke, they drove us fairly out into the fields, and not long afterwards we found ourselves on the banks of the “Feldbächle,” a cheery streamlet whose course, from start to finish, has approximately the shape of a horse-shoe or, better still, of a capital letter U, resting on its left flank. It rises in a copious and frigid fountain, soon to be visited, on the uplands behind our village, flows east through a charming swamp region, feeds the two reservoirs, tumbles downhill in a spectacular fall--the cataract whose water-power tempted my paternal grandfather to establish his cotton-mills on this spot, and which is therefore the _causa causans_ of my presence here at this moment--babbles fussily through the village, and there turns westwards through these fields, to merge itself into the Tabalada stream lower down. A short but lively career.[6]
Sometimes, in dry weather, this rivulet is blocked and allowed to flow over the parched plain. My first memory of it dates from such an occasion. There were puddles in the stream-bed here and there, puddles full of trout; and a number of Italian workmen--we employed a good many Italians at the factories--were catching these trout with their hands and eating them alive, as if they were apples. A disgusting sight, now I come to think of it.
A little later in life, I remember, and on a scorching summer afternoon, my sister and I bolted into these fields from the house, presumably after butterflies. How the sun blazed; how hot and sticky we were! And here was the old Feldbächle full of water, gadding along in its usual brisk style. An idea occurred to her. What about walking into it, clothes and all? Then, at last, we should be cool again. No; not paddle about the water like anybody else, but get right in, get properly in, in up to the neck, and lie down there as if we were in bed. A great joke. It was only on scrambling out again that we began to wonder what would happen at home and what, in fact, might be the correct thing to do under the circumstances. The problem was solved by an uphill march along the petrifying brook to far above the needful level, a flank movement eastwards in the rear of our own house, followed by a rapid descent into that of our friend the gardener who, with his usual ingenuity, lighted an immense fire at which our scanty summer garments were dried, one by one.
* * * * *
Those old cotton-mills of ours at the foot of the cataract of which I spoke are an ugly blot on the landscape; an eyesore, none the less, which I can view without resentment, since, indirectly, I owe existence to them and would not have missed the enjoyment of this life for anything, nor would I exchange it even now for that of any other creature on earth.
The paternal grandfather who built and worked them almost to the day of his death must have been a man of uncommon grit. I know little about him. A mass of family documents full of the requisite information, as well as other papers interesting to myself, were lost in one of those accidents which occur to everybody now and then; a trunk was broken open on a journey, the clothes stolen and these letters and things scattered or thrown away by the thieves. Small comfort to receive insurance money for the clothes! I would have preferred the papers which are now lost for ever.