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.
I cannot even say when this business was founded. It may have been in the late thirties, for he died October, 1870, aged sixty-six, at Banchory, N. B., where he ought to have died, and there lies entombed in our vault. His object in thus exiling himself and family for a whole lifetime was to earn enough money to pay back some heavy mortgages on his ancestral estate, for which he had an idolatrous affection. This much I happen to know: that in 1856 already, by working these mills, he was able to repay £36,000 towards the cost of them, and £24,000 towards redeeming the mortgages. So he set himself to his grim task; and a grim task it must have been to master the immense technical and commercial details of such an undertaking, and all in a foreign language; to import (among other little difficulties) every scrap of machinery from Lancashire with no railway nearer, I fancy, than Zurich. He worked with single aim and lived to reap his reward, although the losses due to the American Civil War, and the Austro-German one, were such that the whole enterprise nearly came to grief.7
His portrait in old age, engraved from a photograph on one of those shell-cameos which used to be fashionable, wears an air of clean-cut, thoughtful determination. They told me of his effective way with beggars. “Work!” he would say, whenever one of them turned up with his usual tale of misery. “Work! I also work.” The other, naturally enough, professed himself quite unable to find any work. Whereupon, to the beggar’s intense disgust, he promptly found it for him. These gentlemen learnt to avoid our house in his day. I also gathered that his favorite ode of Horace was “Integer vitæ.” That sounds characteristic. My own fancy leans towards the Lady of Antium....
His eldest son carried on the business, and to him, with his love of mountaineering and multiple other activities, it must have been irksome in the extreme to sit in that office. He also stuck it out, but died young and, from all accounts, the best-loved man in the province, despite his Lutheran faith. Having occasion, during my last visit to Bregenz, to mention my name to an unknown shopkeeper who was to send me a parcel, I was pleased to hear him say “Your name, dear sir, is eternal in this country.” It is doubtless gratifying to find yourself in a district where your family is held in honor. One must try, however, not to take these things too melodramatically. We live but once; we owe nothing to posterity; and a man’s own happiness counts before that of any one else. My father’s tastes happen to have lain in a direction which commended him to his fellows. Had his nature driven him along lines that failed to secure their sympathy, or even their approval, I should have been the last to complain. The world is wide! Instead of coming here, one would have gone somewhere else.