Together

Father Bruhin

This was a pious pilgrimage.

Ages ago there used to come to our house a visitor, a friend of my father’s, a Benedictine monk of the name of Bruhin. Of him I have, or till yesterday thought to have, dim, childish memories. He lived in the neighboring convent of St. Gerold—offshoot of the famous Einsiedeln—and was a naturalist, a rara avis hereabouts. I still possess seven of his papers, mostly on the fauna and flora of this particular province: thoroughly good work. He was a loving and accurate student both of animals and plants, and of their literature. St. Gerold is the second of various hamlets and villages in the long verdant Walserthal on our east, up which now runs a convenient carriage road ending (the road; not the valley) at the distant Buchboden, five hours’ march away. We went there, because I was anxious to learn, if possible, a few details of Bruhin’s life and to see whether their library contained any other works by him.

It is a pleasant, easy walk to St. Gerold, but the pilgrimage proved a disappointment. In the Prior’s absence, the archives could not be consulted; a young monk, a stranger who was undergoing a kind of rest-cure here—he looked a little haggard—accompanied us up to the library at the top of the building. It was well stored with books such as one might expect to find there, but contained not a scrap by Bruhin.

At the library our guide left us in charge of that old woman who has haunted the premises from time immemorial; her hair has grown whiter since last we met, her eyes are black as ever. She showed the way through some of those comfortably furnished bedrooms with their fine seventeenth century wood-carvings; into the church, which has been tastefully redecorated and where the recent governmental brigandage has not spared even the greater of the tin organ-pipes; finally down to the kitchen which, like the organ, is worked by electricity. There she fed Mr. R. on cider and cheese, saying she hoped they would soon be able to receive guests again and keep them overnight, if necessary; at present, everything was upside down, everything!

Had the Prior been visible, our search might have led to something; he was away on the mountains. Whether he resembles him of olden days? That one, I remember, used to come down and see us, and could generally be induced to stay for luncheon or dinner. It was his habit, while eating, to produce a formidable smacking noise—Germans call it Schmatzen—with his lips, a noise which we were strictly forbidden to make. One day at mealtime I gave a splendid imitation of the Prior over his soup, thinking that what was good enough for him would surely be good enough for me, and hoping, at all events, to gain some little applause. Instead of that, I was told: “Only His Reverence the Prior may make that noise. When you are Prior, you shall make it too. Meanwhile, try to eat like everybody else, unless you want to be sent out of the room.” A damper....

So much for Bruhin. All we gleaned at St. Gerold was that he served as “Co-operator” there from 1865 to 1868 and after that, presumably, left the convent. If so, the monk whom I hazily recall must have been a different one, unless Bruhin continued his visits to us from some other quarter after 1868. The Bregenz libraries might contain more of his writings; I shall look for them, if we go there.13

Homewards again. On leaving one of those wooded torrents that seam the road, a little incident was recalled to my mind by the sight of a certain wayside shrine which stands here. We were once passing along, as children, when we noticed that its door had been left open and a heap of coppers laid inside by some pious person or persons for the benefit of any poor travelers who might care to help themselves. I imagine it was my sister’s idea. She took a handful, and persuaded me to take one too. Nobody saw us; the governess was walking on ahead. She behaved even more flagrantly on another occasion when a plateful of money was being held aloft, for the same charitable purpose, among a congregation pouring out of some church. She reached up and swiftly grabbed a number of coins; perhaps I followed her example. Now what could we children want with money? The delicacies of the village were only three: sugar-candy in crystals, dried figs strung together, and black sticks of licorice (vulgo “Bährendreck”) and we had exhausted their charm long, long ago, in the days of the old Anna.

This nurse it was, by the way, who first took me to the hamlet of Thüringerberg, where I now found myself walking with Mr. R. who had induced me, for reasons which became apparent later on, to abandon the main road in favor of one that leads due west. It shows how little she then knew the country—she was a Tyrolese, not a native—that, after dragging me up here, aged three or four, she had to enquire the name of the place. I came home with a wonderful tale of having been to Thüringerberg, which was not believed; old Anna, afterwards, got it hot for making me walk too far. Up there, meanwhile, the kindly priest invited us to his house to rest; he gave us coffee and honey, and even offered me a pinch of his snuff—the first of several I have since taken.

Two roads descend from Thüringerberg in the direction of the distant Satteins—the convenient new one down below, and the ancient track on the higher level. Of course we chose the latter, that old, grass-grown, abandoned path. Memories lurk about these forsaken places; and memories have become my hobby during the last week or so. This particular track reminds me of sundry strolls down here ages ago with a Sempill cousin, the jovial Jumbo, who turned up in this country at odd intervals to our infinite delight. He was so utterly different from all the other people who arrived from those remote regions! The peasants adored him; he could hold long conversations with them in their own language by imitating the sound of their voices, which amused them mightily; he knew not a word of German. He used to sit for hours in their orchards, drinking wine or playing with the babies; when any one greeted him on the road with the usual “Grüass Gott,” he would reply “Great Scot”; if they said “Gueta Tag,” he said “Good dog.” What a relief was Jumbo, after those legions of unspeakable grand-aunts! They never left us alone; they were always pulling us about, as if we had no nurses or governesses of our own, to teach us how to behave. Always interfering! You mustn’t eat this; you mustn’t do that; little girls don’t climb trees; little boys ought to know that cows are not made to be ridden about on; never jump down till the carriage stops; you know what happened to Don’t Care? He was hanged; have you said your prayers? Children should be seen and not heard; a fourth helping? Now don’t do yourself any violence, dear; it’s long past bed-time—how we loathed the entire clan! Nearly everything, in fact, that hailed from Scotland was fraught with terrors.

But the terror of terrors was our paternal grandmother. If the others of that family resembled her, their descendants are to be pitied. And to think that she may have been the best of all of them! I confess that, looking over some photographs at this distance of time, I fail to see anything terrible in her appearance; here she is, for instance, at Llandudno, looking straight at you, grave and serene, with the long upper lip peculiar to her family and a high forehead; rather a handsome old woman, and one who evidently knows her mind. That may well be. Handsome or not, she spanked me as an infant, before I could walk—so much I remember clearly; what I cannot clearly remember is, whether she had any plausible reason for doing it. Later on, she punished us in the stern judicial manner which was agreeable to the taste of her generation and which is precisely the one way children should never be punished. Wonderful tales were told us of her methods of subduing her only daughter, who died in youth—perhaps from the effects of it—and lies buried under an elaborately inscribed tombstone in the Protestant cemetery at Rome. No doubt she meant to do right; it is an old pretext for doing wrong. Children should be “broken”: that was her theory.

She never broke me. Something else happened one day, during the Christmas holidays in England. I was in my twelfth year, all alone, perfectly comfortable and perfectly well, delighted to have escaped for a season out of some absurd school, and reading the “Mysteries of Udolpho” in the library when the old thing entered with an all-too familiar silver tray, bearing the abominable mixture known as “Gregory’s Powder.” It was her universal remedy for every complaint of mine, from a sprained ankle to a toothache, the principle being that, whatever might be amiss, Gregory’s Powder, by virtue of its villainous taste alone, must inevitably do good, if not as a medical preparation, then as an incitement to humility and obedience. This filthy poison I had hitherto swallowed like a lamb; and been made duly ill in consequence. On that particular occasion, however, the sight of the tray stirred me as never before; all the accumulated bile of similar torments in the past surged up; it was my first experience of “seeing red.” Guided by a righteous demon of revolt, I seized a stick which stood in a corner at my elbow—an elaborate concern of hippopotamus-hide with carved ivory top, which some good-for-nothing uncle had brought from Natal—and therewith knocked the tray out of her hand and then went for her with such a dash that she fled out of the room. It happened in the twinkling of an eye. I knew not how the thing was done; it was plain, now, what people meant when they said that So-and-so was “not responsible for his actions.” On mature deliberation I decided, in the very words of the old lady, that all was for the best. There was an end of Gregory’s Powder. That is the way to treat grandmothers of this variety. She dared not tackle me; she was too old and I too tough, being then in the habit of winning most of the gymnastic prizes at school. As always before, she had tried to impose upon me by sheer strength of personality, and suddenly, for the first time, found herself confronted by a new and persuasive argument—brute force.

Well! To attack your grandmother with a walking-stick is not polite. On the other hard, there is no reason why boys should be needlessly tortured; they suffer quite enough, as it is. If I had not acted as I did, she would have continued to poison me with the stuff to the end of her long life. Why suffer, when you can avoid it? And there I leave this ethical problem. For the rest, in her heart of hearts, she was perhaps not quite so “surprised and grieved” (a favorite phrase of hers, like “I sincerely hope and trust”) as she professed to be; so strong was her family sense that she may well have been charmed with this premature exhibition of ancestral savagery; maybe she was anxiously waiting for it to appear, and chose Gregory’s Powder as a kind of test or provocative. If so, it worked. One thing is certain: referring to the episode, she told another of those old women, who repeated it to me long afterwards, that I was plainly the son of my father—good news, so far as it went....

Phantoms!

Meanwhile we wandered along that ancient track towards the sunset, with the spacious Ill valley at our feet, and on its further side, the Rhætikon peaks which had grown more imposing in proportion as we ourselves had mounted upwards. On these slopes they were gathering the cherries with ladders; diminutive fruit on enormous trees. Here are also wild maples, those pleasant Alpine growths that clamber down from their homes overhead and indulge in a tasteful habit of clothing trunk and branches in a vesture of dusky green moss. The wood is so white that it is used—the nearest approach to ivory—for fashioning the sculptured images of the Crucified which one sees everywhere. The fairest maple in the whole district is that which forms a landmark on the path between Raggal and Ludescherberg; you can see it from the other side of the Walserthal, three miles off.

Presently we found ourselves in one of those narrow dells common hereabouts, dells that run parallel to the main valley, east and west; they may be due to ice-action in the past. It is curious, in such places, to observe how the plants select their aspect according to whether they relish sunshine or not; there are two different floras growing within twenty yards of each other. Here, on our left, gushes out a noble spring; it accompanies us, forming a succession of flowery marshes. They are still there—the bulrushes in the last of its hill-girdled swamps; this is one of the three places where bulrushes can be found. Thereafter you pass that peasant’s house, solitary and prosperous—what winter landscapes must be visible from its windows!—and enter the wood. Our path, once well trodden, is now hard to follow. It begins to lose itself——

Ah, and the old woman’s mania against tobacco; I had nearly forgotten this. It was sincere, like all else in her nature, yet incredible in its intensity. Somewhere about the fifties she ordered a pair of boots from the local man, under the condition that he was not to smoke while making them. They arrived. “That man has smoked!” she declared, and refused to accept them; she knew from their smell that he had broken his agreement (of course he had). This legend was still current here in the nineties. Up in Scotland, despite the visitors, she never allowed a smoking-room to be built. We were not permitted to smoke even in the grounds. A military cousin, a distinguished man, was told that if he wished to smoke after dinner he could walk to the end of the drive, and indulge his low tastes on the main road. My sister used to shoulder her rod and go “fly-fishing” at the most improbable hours and seasons of the year, solely in order to be able to enjoy her cigarette in peace.

She expired in grand style, up there. We were chamois-shooting at Lech, not far from here,14 when a message came to the effect that she was at the point of death. We packed up and rushed to the Highlands, losing a whole day at Calais because the boats could not run on account of a storm. On our arrival, the doctor said, “She ought to have been dead four days ago.” None the less, she had made up her mind not to depart till everything was in order. She went through her will, clause by clause. Was there any objection to this or that? Had she done the right thing by So-and-so? Or had she perhaps forgotten anything? It was all in perfect order, we assured her. She gave us a fine old-fashioned blessing, and was dead a few hours later....

And now we were threading our way through a veritable tangle, a branch-charmed tangle, and the light overhead grew dimmer. A golden suspense was brooding over the forest. How sweet, how intimate, are these hours of late afternoon under the trees, when all is voiceless and drowned in mellow radiance; how they conjure up sensations of other-where, and cleanse the miry places of the mind!

A few years hence, and every trace of this old path will have vanished. It ended, for us, in a kind of gulley; the gulley ended in the new road lower down. And where did the new road end?

Where else, but at Tiefis?

The mention of Llandudno reminds me that I may have been unfair to that old grandmother. For I knew full well that she detested places like Llandudno or Clifton or Cheltenham, and yet she would take us there for the Easter holidays at our own request, in order that we might gratify a taste for fossils; which is surely to her credit. Not every grandmother would have made such a sacrifice for two objectionable boys. As a set-off to this, however, I must record that she used to make me play Wagner to her, much against my will—an inexplicably modern trait of hers, this love of Wagner, and all the more singular since he, at that time, was accounted a dangerous lunatic. (Perhaps she only asked me to play because at such moments, at least, I could not be up to any other devilry.) She also insisted on our both reading “Marmion” aloud; partly because it was her dear dead husband’s favorite poem, and partly on account of a family legend to the effect that certain of its cantos were composed on our property. Can that have improved its flavor?

“Marmion” we thought dreadful rot. To revenge ourselves, we made a farce of these recitals, by going through the lines in a toneless voice and laying stress not where the poet and common sense meant it to lie, but on that precise syllable where, by the structure of the verse, it came to lie; let any one read a page of “Marmion” according to this recipe, and note the rich and unforeseen results! It was only by a miracle that we managed to keep our countenance; or rather, not by a miracle at all, but by a systematic education in the art of “not exploding.” The old lady writhed and squirmed under this outrage upon her divine Sir Walter, but said never a word; gulping down her discomfort with the same air of dour determination with which, at dinner, and solely to set us a good example, she gulped down indigestible fragments of plum-pudding, roly-poly and other hyperborean horrors glistening with suet, although well aware that such things are not fit for human consumption. Of course we were obliged to gulp them down too, with this difference, that she had Madeira and port to wash the taste out of her mouth, while we only got claret, which made it worse. What a life!