Part 9
The Rosenegg I knew was a truly “somber pile,” decaying alone up there, far from the habitations of men, on its sunless hillock under the shadow of those mighty Rhætian peaks. Nobody ever seemed to go near the place. There was a shattered window at a good height on the eastern flank, and you could get in here by climbing a wild cherry tree and then jumping on to its ledge. The interior was a moldering chaos of stones. Round about we used to find certain favorite plants: the rose-and-white immortelles with silvery leaves, and “fox-tail” moss, and the globular amber-hued ranunculus of spring, deliciously fragrant. Then flowers were dropped in favor of butterflies; after that, the stone-period began and Rosenegg was again frequented, for the whole neighborhood happened to be strewn with crystalline erratics great and small, and in some of them you might find brown garnets, but not in all; far from it! You had to look for them pretty closely.
That was long ago.
And now, at the other end of life, one returns anew to Rosenegg on a sunny afternoon, purged of the mists of middle years and, delving into memories of that clear dawn and seeking to recapture its spirit, marvels at the feverish joy which greeted discoveries such as these degenerate little garnets, not a single one of which had the right color, nor made the faintest pretense at being the rhombic dodecahedron it should have been. How one changes!
This was always, alas, a bad country for “stones.”... Silver ore near Dalaas of questionable worth, and rock crystals in several quarries, and gypsum beyond St. Anton, and a poor kind of amethyst at the Hanging Stone; the fossils were likewise meager--corals in the limestone of Lorüns, univalves under certain rocks at Hohenems, those oysters in the ruddy Nagelfluh (Middle Miocene) at Bregenz; last, not least, the fucoids of the Flysch (Eocene) which you could find nearly everywhere, pretty to look at, but terribly fragile. That was all. There were legends, mere legends, of ammonites being seen in the local red marble; we never saw them![29] Ah, if our father had still been alive, he might have told us where to find this or that; his stone-collection was our delight, our despair. Not everybody had his luck, we often said, to stumble in the Scesa-torrent upon a huge writhing mammoth tusk that required two or three men to carry--how had he done it, and why couldn’t we do it too?[30]
Stones were dropped when birds and beasts began, and during that slaughter-epoch Rosenegg became once more famous for producing the first stoat that ever fell to my gun, and a falcon as well. There was a pair of them here, and once, resting on that green terrace with my mother, I saw the male bird dash off the ruin overhead, and swiftly took aim at him (I refused to be parted from my gun, even during family walks). Down he fluttered and fell, stone dead, at our feet. I recall that afternoon as if it were yesterday. My mother said nothing; she suffered more intensely than did the falcon, but had long since abandoned all hope of curing my murderous instincts. I remember, too, passing alone once through the woods below this tower and becoming aware of an unusual sound at my side. Who could have guessed its origin? It was a putrid fragment of a stag, so alive with worms as to make itself heard.
At the back of Rosenegg a little path descends through the wood; here, one morning before sunrise, I came face to face with a fox who was returning from some nocturnal visit to the poultry yards of Bürs; it was a question of who should step aside to let the other pass. The fox was not to be outdone in politeness; he vanished ere I had time to slip the gun from my shoulder. This is the path we followed yesterday, proceeding thence always eastwards at the foot of the Rhætikon mountains; at their roots, one might say, for they rise up straight from the level, as does a tree. Walking along, Mr. R. encountered a tiny creature that scared him considerably; indeed, he was transfixed with astonishment and stepped a pace or two backwards; he had never yet seen anything of the kind, either on land or in water.
“A crocodile?”
“Not quite; a Quadertatsch. Pick him up and make friends with him.”
“His hands are cold.”
Cold they are, like those of a Hindu; and he himself is blacker than any Hindu, or any nigger; black as the devil, with a luster as of patent-leather boots; black but comely. It looks as if his first shape had been remodeled by some thoughtful craftsman who added a row of decorative bosses along sides and back, and pinched his tail till it became slightly quadrangular in form; creating, with these few masterly touches, something heraldic and distinguished out of quite a commonplace original. A vast improvement! And his manners are in keeping. He nods his head sagely on making your acquaintance, and at once begins climbing up your arm with a comical precision of movement, a deliberate jauntiness, that reminds one of some retired _maître de ballet_ whose limbs have grown a little creaky with age and rheumatism, but who is determined to show off his faded graces to the best advantage.
Perhaps I ought to explain that the Quadertatsch is what the Tyrolese call a Tattermandl. The last syllable of this word proves that they have also noticed certain human traits in his demeanor. The Tattermandl is a universal favorite among Alpine folk. In his home up there, you seldom see one of them alone; they are social beings, often to be found in companies of a dozen or more. And what was this one doing here, all by himself? Like several others I have met, he has been the victim of an accident; always the same accident! He was swept off his legs in the recent torrential rains and whirled two or three thousand feet down, into our tropical regions, along one of the gullies that seam these mountains. He will have a long walk home again; and all uphill.[31]
Two hours later we had crossed the Ill at Lorüns and found ourselves, after a good while, walking up the picturesque village of Rungalin; it leans against the hillside near Bludenz in the shape of the letter Y, and should be viewed in spring, when its brown houses are all smothered in creamy apple blossoms. Thence, always uphill, past the little spring called “Halde Wässerle” and along the summit of those fine cliffs at whose foot lies the Bährenloch cavern, turning sharp to the right and emerging finally at Obdorf, beside the upper bridge that spans the Galgen-tobel.
Just across this torrent, where the path begins to climb to Latz, stands a modern peasant house which I never fail to visit with pleasure and even respect. It has a suggestive history. Years ago, there was a poor man who went, with all his family, as a dayworker to the cotton-mill at Bürs, and there earned what he could. Such people are everlastingly in want, since for some reason or other all their gains have to be spent forthwith; this particular family was no exception. The father watched his children growing thinner and paler from day to day, and stupider and wastefuller in character, and saw no prospect of any betterment in the future. “This must end,” he suddenly said, as if an inspiration had come to him; and, borrowing a little money, bought for next to nothing the tract of ground here which was then almost a marsh (nobody would believe, nowadays, that you could pick handfuls of the large single gentian on the spot), and drained it, and built a small cottage. The family became agriculturists then and there; not a single member returned to the factory, not for a day. Every year something new was done to their domain; a cow purchased, another strip of land bought, a fresh room added, and so on; with the result that these people, instead of empty heads and spendthrift habits and weakened constitutions, have now acquired prosperity and self-respect and decent manners and good health. Here was one, at least, who refused to be beguiled by the tomfoolery of industrialism.
We descended to Nüziders down the gentle slope of that deltoid tract mentioned on p. 148. It had grown late, and my companion was proportionately hungry after his long walk; he insisted on refreshing himself at the “Bädle” inn which in olden days used to be an excellent tavern run by a Swiss--as children, we were once quarantined within its walls for a week or two, to escape an epidemic of measles, and all in vain! Immediately overhead are the ruins of Sonnenberg castle, another of our feudal nests and not the least famous of them; to judge by prints, it must have been a lordly structure. It was destroyed by fire, and nothing remains upright save a wall with a couple of trees growing out of its masonry. The last survivor of this noble family ended in ignoble fashion; he was murdered by another count whom he had enraged with some saucy speech.
It was dark and moonless night before Mr. R. could be brought to confess that he had eaten enough for the time being; none the less, we risked taking the uphill path which starts at the “Bädle” and traverses the wooded saddle behind the Hanging Stone, to end near the church of St. Martin on the other side of that ridge. The now defunct “beautification-society” of Bludenz did much to improve tracks like this and those we had followed earlier in the afternoon; their labors were then lost on us, everything was pitch black before our eyes; there was no break whatever in the forest, and a man might well go astray here at a late hour, particularly at a certain point where, instead of turning to the left, he would be tempted to go straight on, and presently find himself on the edge of a nasty cliff. The place, however, was still familiar to me, since it was up here that I used to lie in wait with the saturnine Mattli, at nightfall ages ago, trying to poach roe-deer. I can still hear him whispering to me, on such an occasion, in that sepulchral voice of his:
“You know what happened there?”
“Where?”
“Down in that hollow,” and he pointed with his gun in the direction of a sunken patch, a dingle, at our feet; it lies in the center of the saddle.
“What happened?”
“_They killed the last wolf._”
“Oh!”--and I felt a little shudder running down my back.[32]
I was thinking yesterday of Mattli and his last wolf, as we moved forward through the night, and thereupon began to puzzle over a question which seems to have puzzled no one else, namely, how it comes about that this animal is extinct in all the Alpine region, notwithstanding its enormous area of inaccessible territory, whereas in relatively populous districts such as the Dordogne it is still common enough to be something of a nuisance, in spite of ceaseless persecution on the part of man. I concluded, perhaps wrongly, that the wolf has been extirpated hereabouts not so much by the human race as by hunger; his natural prey (hares, wildfowl, etc.) having grown much scarcer of late--scarcer than they are in Scandinavia or Russia, while sheep and goats and dogs, which he can still pick up in places like the Vosges or Apennines, are not so easy to capture during the severe alpine winter, being mostly kept within doors. If he could go to sleep like the bear, or had the cunning of the fox, he might have survived to this day.
At last we emerged on the level again and, passing the church of St. Martin, found ourselves under the lights of Ludesch. Never before had that village seemed so endlessly long.
* * * * *
Those gray, weather-beaten erratics of which I spoke have been gradually disappearing from the landscape since my Rosenegg days. They used to be quite a feature of the countryside. When you crossed our petrifying stream, for instance, you beheld a horde of them scattered over the slanting field below the road, and some were of prodigious size, bearing bushes and little trees on their backs. Not one of those is left; I know of only a single remaining block which is decorated with timber; you will never find it, though you may certainly pass a spot, not far from Jordan castle, where twenty-three can still be counted lying about--dwarfs, mostly, or half submerged in the earth. The peasant makes war on these things; he shatters them in pieces with dynamite or splits them with wedges; for they take up room, they interfere with his mowing operations, their stone is admirably adapted for building purposes. And here is another little puzzle. Sometimes, in a thick wood, one may stumble upon the conscientiously piled-up fragments of what used to be a block of this kind, all forgotten and overgrown with moss; why go to the trouble of breaking up this fractious material, and then do nothing with it? Mystery!
The wall of the road leading up from the Bludesch church of St. Nicholas towards Tiefis consists largely of the primitive rock of erratics which formerly strewed the surrounding land; so does that which leaves Tiefis in the direction of our own village.
Which reminds me of our last, and most disappointing, visit to the “innkeepress and his beautiful girl.” There was no question, that day, of the _embrassez-moi_ on which Mr. R. has set his simple heart, for the baby was absent, having gone for a brief “Sommerfrische”--as if Tiefis were not fresh enough already--up to Thüringerberg, to stay with a sister of her mother’s, who comes from there. She would be back in a few days, we were told. A piece of downright bad luck for him! He seemed to be really upset; so much so, that I had to promise we should return again soon. Then he suddenly recalled my undertaking to show him over the Valduna asylum; it would be an agreeable diversion and fill up the time; we could run down to Bregenz too, as he had never seen a great inland water like the Lake of Constance.
My passion for idiots having waned of late, I was hoping he had forgotten about Valduna. But no. He may forget the past participle of every one of our irregular verbs; the prospect of an exhibition of three or four dozen lunatics is the kind of thing he can be trusted to remember. So be it. After all, there is no harm in going there; no harm whatever. The sight of those poor wretches may medicine his youthful bumptiousness and make him more contented with his own lot in life which, once a week or so, gives occasion for some ludicrously savage outburst.
VALDUNA
_Valduna_
Valduna was a surfeit of idiots. Mr. R. waxed grave; he has gained, I think, a definite acquisition of humanity. That is as it should be. Such sights of anguish are a tonic for the soul; they make us serious about things that are worth being serious about; they deepen and broaden our sympathies.
The cheery doctor became still more cheery on hearing my name--he is a local alpinist--and did not omit a single patient save one or two of the women who, presumably, were taking sun-baths in _impuris naturalibus_, as was also one of the males, a robust and pretty boy of sixteen; he had a clouded, far-away look, and could not be induced to utter a word. We saw them all; the unclean patients, the unquiet patients, as well as the simple lunatics, sad or glad. There are no violent ones here just now, but some of those who suffered from hallucinations of hearing were sufficiently abusive.
“Hello, Madam,” said the doctor to one of the ladies, “what may you be doing here? I don’t seem to have seen your face before.”
“I’ve come to visit a poor patient. Didn’t they announce my name? How unpardonably stupid of them! But I shall have to be leaving in about half an hour. So good-by, doctor, in case we don’t meet again.”
Quite mad!
There was a poor old fellow in bed, on the brink of G. P. I. He fascinated Mr. R., casting a hot, delirious glance upon him and pouring out a flood of turbid megalomania.
“What is he telling me? What? What’s that? Translate, translate!”
Translating was out of the question. The speech contained not a shred of coherence; nothing but fragmentary pictures, flashing up and swiftly engulfed again; his brain was in combustion. Moreover, the patient would have had ten words out of his mouth to every one of mine.
We visited the other establishment as well, a non-official, charitable one. The director is a priest, native of this province, and one who knows it well. He told me an interesting thing. We were speaking of the former wine-production here, and I said it was doubtless the Arlberg tunnel (I went through with the first train) which had caused the local plantation of vineyards to cease, or at least to diminish to such an extent that, for example, of the vineyards once clothing the hillsides of my particular village--our family, too, had its own--there was only a single one left; that belonging to the Prior of St. Gerold. And it was the same with the rest of the province; the reason being, of course, that the Arlberg railway had immensely reduced the price of wine from Lower Austria or South Tyrol, which used formerly to be imported by carrier, at great expense, over the Arlberg pass. Why cultivate bad wine, when you can buy a better quality for the same money?
The tunnel might have done something, he agreed, and so might the modern rise of industrialism hereabouts which tempted men from the fields into the factories; but the real reason was the change of climate. It had grown not colder, but damper. He was fond of wine; he had paid particular attention to this matter all his life; there could be no doubt about it. Feldkirch was a case in point. All its slopes were covered with vineyards not long ago; the Feldkirchers had grown so attached to their home product that they preferred it to anything from abroad. There was now not a vine left at Feldkirch. The grapes refused to ripen properly there, as they still did in more favored localities like Sulz-Röthis.[33]
Thereafter we took the train to Bregenz. Hardly were we seated in our carriage before Mr. R. began:
“Now I want to know exactly what he said. Please repeat it.”
“We were talking about the former production of wine in this province. He maintains that owing to recent climatic changes----”
“Not your old man! My old man.”
Could anybody have remembered that rigmarole? I had to invent another one, at the end of which he said:
“So that was it? How sad, and how suggestive. The ravings of a mind diseased. Poor man! I must have that all down, word for word, in my diary....”
Despite Adelaide Procter’s sprightly verses and its own illustrious ancestry, Bregenz remains a repulsive little town on the shore of its dead lake; and associated in my mind with infantile earaches and spankings. I went there not for fun, but for a set purpose; firstly, to consult the Curator of the new Museum, who was described as a prodigiously amiable person, as to what natural curiosities, if any, had lately been discovered in our upland regions, to re-inspect a picture, a sugary-watery Ganymede attributed to Angelika Kauffmann, left to this institution by my sister’s will, a Roman votive stone found on my maternal grandfather’s estate and other objects here deposited by members of my family, and to see whether his library contained any unknown works by old Theodor (or Thomas) Bruhin; secondly, to apply for the same object to that venerable convent-school of Mehrerau, where some homeward-bound Pope expired long ago and where, according to one of Bruhin’s pamphlets, he was “Professor” and may well have left some documentary traces; thirdly, to visit the “Archiv” which contains a goodly collection of books, old and new, dealing with this province, and therefore, possibly, something of my father’s, and also to refresh my memory in the matter of local dialects, place-names and so forth, and inspect early prints of places like Jagdberg, Blumenegg and Jordan-schloss; lastly, to present myself at the offices of the Alpine Club in order to go through the files of their “Mitteilungen” and make a list of my father’s contributions to that journal, and see whether it contains some “Nachruf” of him, some obituary notice, as is likely enough, seeing that so tragic an accident to a conspicuous member can hardly have been left unrecorded.
A reasonable program.
I did none of these things; no, not one. Zeal for such scholarly investigations seems to be abating; or can it have been the weather? It happened to be cloudless. Much pleasanter, bathing in the lake and climbing up, towards evening, to admire the view from St. Gebhard’s chapel.
We managed to go, none the less, to the Protestant cemetery which lies on the site of the _thermae_ of old Brigantium, and examined the graves of no less than ten deceased relatives. Here lies, among the rest, that maternal grandfather who was responsible for the spankings aforesaid. His tombstone recounts his glories, and I do not believe in all of them; he doubtless had the memorial engraved half a century before his death, in order that posterity should make no mistake as to his merits while alive. This old feudal monster never did a stroke of work in his endless life. He was a braggart of the first water, with gray mustache that looked freshly waxed and curled--quite _à la_ Münchhausen--at whatever hour of the day you might meet him; he radiated good health, and seemed everlastingly to have stepped that very moment out of a hot bath and the hands of a conscientious valet; he had a pink baby-complexion, and the candid eyes of the born liar. He spanked me as often as I came here in childhood, even as he had spanked his only son who died in youth--perhaps from the effects of it. Only once did I score off him during this earlier period. It was his unvarying habit to begin breakfast--a huge cup of a certain kind of chocolate, specially imported from Paris, for himself; tea or coffee for all the rest, and be damned to them--with a boiled egg. One morning of All Fool’s Day I slipped down just before the others, devoured his egg, and turned the hollow shell upside down in its cup. On taking his seat, he had his customary whack at the seemingly sound egg: empty! He glowered round the table at a cluster of trembling daughters. At last he caught my eye and grunted:
“H’m. First of April, I presume. H’m. Not bad for a kid. H’m. Let me advise you to try that on somebody else, next year. H’m.”
Even in later times, he continued to annoy me furiously by calling me a beetle-collector. This is how he talked:
“At seventeen, my lad, I was already commanding a fortress in Hungary. And here you are, catching cockroaches. Then we went to Greece with King Otho and ah! the lovely years we had there; the best of all my life! I was the first person to make excavations on the Acropolis of Athens, if you happen to have heard of such a place. Just make a note of that, young fellow. Meanwhile, here you are, hunting bugs and pinning labels to them. Afterwards--yes, Windsor! When I was aide-de-camp to your Prince Consort, he confessed that he could never have handled Victoria the way he did, unless I had told him (lowering his voice) some of my own experiences with capricious females of that class. _And here you are_----”