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barn containing an ante-chamber and two separate compartments full of delicious hay to swim about in; it has now been replaced by an anæmic structure of the new type.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!
Meanwhile Miss Prim, during one of her holiday visits to England, had succeeded in getting engaged. She imparted the happy news to our family, with becoming shyness, a few hours after her return; she wondered whether her fiancé might ever come out here, and proceed with his courtship on foreign soil, for a week or so? Why, of course he could; let him come when he pleased, and stay as long as ever he liked! In due course of time he arrived; and his name was Mr. Clutterbuck. Clutterbuck. Clutterbuck. The name alone sent us into fits; we thought it an incomparably funny one, as indeed it is. Mr. Clutterbuck, himself, was a droll and pertinacious individual. He used to sit, rod in hand, trying to catch trout in the reservoirs. Everybody told him he would never get a nibble there—the fish were far too well-fed; why not try a fly on the Tabalada stream, at the bottom of the valley near Gais, the fishing of which also belonged to us?
No. Mr. Clutterbuck preferred the reservoirs. He would sit on that stone margin morning and afternoon, while the Prim hovered lovingly in his neighborhood. There I see him sitting to this day.
The only way to get these pampered beasts out of the reservoir is by the prosaic method of draining off the water. Then you have them! Now just remove your trousers and wade into the mud, if you do not mind looking like a fool, and pull them out with your hands, which is far more exciting sport than you might imagine. Only then is it possible to realize how slippery and muscular a trout can be when taken, not off a hook after an hour’s playing, but fresh from its element. We used to do this periodically in later years, and some of the fish were of respectable size. The largest I remember catching weighed a fraction over four kilograms and was seventy-six centimeters in length. He kicked like an electric dynamo.
We happened to be going that afternoon to a friend in Bregenz and decided to make him a present of this trout, particularly as he had a far-famed Viennese chef who claimed to be able to make a succulent ragout out of the Devil himself. As there was no time for a special box to be built, we requisitioned the newly made coffin of a child that had died overnight but was happily not yet bestowed therein; our monster was packed inside, comfortably wrapped up in green nettles. The baby could wait; the trout was in a hurry....