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——”
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.