Rain
Rain once more....
“Now this is the comble,” said Mr. R. this morning, entering my room with a pair of boots in his hand.
“What’s up?”
“Look!”
They had inserted new laces, without having been asked to do anything of the kind.
Every day, and all day long, similar little experiences are thrust upon him; he has lived in a state of chronic amazement since his arrival. That is not surprising. His acquaintance with the life of taverns has been confined to those of Italy and of France; the unpunctuality and brawling of the one, the miserliness and thinly veiled insolence of the other—the general discomfort of both. “Nobody will believe me,” he says, “when I tell them how one lives in these villages. Fortunately I have my diary.”
Our bill of fare has varied with every meal; only once were they obliged to apologize for giving us the same meat, venison, on two days running, and even then it was prepared differently. With the exception of Hasenpfeffer—close season for hares till 1st of September—we have gone through that entire list of local delicacies, and thereto added several more.
These people really make one feel at home. There is an all-pervading sense of peace and plenty, of comfort, in a word; not discomfort. Everything is in order, and the place so clean that you could dine on the floors. The household works like a well-oiled machine—if you can imagine a machine that wears throughout its parts a perennial smile. Kindliness is the tone of this house; of the whole village; of all these villages. It does one good to live among such folk. It is doing Mr. R. more good than he imagines. He begins to realize what is hard to realize in Mediterranean countries: that men can be affable and ample, and yet nowise simpletons. Match-boxes given away gratis; beefsteaks that you cannot possibly finish; four vegetables to every course of meat; electric lights burning night and day; fresh towels all the time; apples and pears thrown to the pigs; mountains of butter and lakes of honey for breakfast—in fact, a system of wanton gaspillage that would send a French house-wife into epileptics. All this, I tell him, is the merest shadow of what was. And among the numerous visitors to our inn there is never a harsh word; no sullenness, no raised voices, no complaints. We hear the house door being shut down below, every night, amid cheery talk and laughter.
Yet three out of five village taverns are closed—disastrous symptom, among so convivial a people. The depreciation of the currency.... There are men, respectable men, who have not tasted a drop of wine for the last year, which is a shameful state of affairs. Only factory hands and such-like can afford to pay the present price of 8000 kronen for half a liter. Less than that sum, namely 7000, was what our tailor gave for his two-storied house with a garden and field. We watched a pig-auction the other day (where else, but at Tiefis?). A young one, weighing about seventy pounds, went for 610,000 kronen. In olden days, they would have made you a present of him.
The peasants are particularly hard hit this year. Our valley has always been celebrated for its fertility, the result of age-long tillage and manuring, and whoever walks to-day about those cultivated fields, ignorant of their normal condition, might think that these crops of hay, wheat, maize, tobacco (every one may plant his own tobacco; the trouble begins, when you try to make it smokable), beans, hemp, flax, potatoes, cabbage, beetroot, poppies, pumpkins and what not, look sufficiently thriving. That is a mistake. The fruit-harvest promises well; these fields are in a bad way. The Engerlinge, the larvæ of the cockchafer, have been unusually active of late. This miserable worm which lives underground, gnawing away the roots, had hitherto been kept in its place by the moles. But during the war and afterwards moles were destroyed as never before, for the sake of their skins. A mole eats one and a half times its own weight every day; he prefers the Engerlinge to all other food. So the larvæ now thrive, because the war was responsible for the death of the moles. One result of the war, so far as this little economic byway is concerned.
Other results. A favorite method of preventing damage by Engerlinge is to kill the cockchafer itself. They used to be murdered by myriads, either while flying about at night, or in the early morning when they cling, weary and drunk with dew, to the trees. Boys would do this for a trifling sum, or for the fun of the thing. They are too busy nowadays; they must do the work of those who were killed. And of those who have free time on their hands, the decent ones refuse the job because they are ashamed to ask the prices now ruling (and their fathers will not let them take less); the others demand so much that the peasant cannot pay them. Our village elders have done their best to face the mischief. They have decided that every land-owner must bring in a certain measure of cockchafers or deposit a certain sum of money; whoever collects more than this stipulated measure, is paid extra out of the sum deposited by the others; whoever fails to come up to the standard, is fined in proportion. The provincial government has also forbidden the destruction of moles, and to-day’s paper, now lying before me, contains an eloquent article entitled “Spare the moles!”
It is too late. The village of Bratz (=pratum), for example, is so sorely tried by the plague of these larvæ that a rich peasant owning, let us say, six cows, will not be able to cut enough fodder to keep them alive through the winter; his crop of hay is too impoverished. What shall he do? He is in the dilemma of seeing a couple of his beasts perish from starvation, or of selling them at their present value, although fully aware that by the time spring comes round and fodder is again plentiful, he will not be able, with the same amount of money, to purchase even a quarter of a cow to eat his grass; so rapid is the depreciation of the currency.
In this and other matters the peasantry, the backbone of the province, is being systematically ruined. The blow was undeserved. They were dragged into this tragic farce through no fault of their own, and are now paying for the folly of others. True, they revenge themselves on the rich factory hands and bureaucrats; they charge fantastic prices for milk and other agricultural products. The others retaliate by burning their hay-huts. There was a good deal of incendiarism in the Bludenz district last winter. Mutual ill-will is the result. And their so-called betters, the rentiers who, after a life of drudgery in office or elsewhere, laid aside sufficient money to build themselves a house wherein to end their days, are in still more pitiable plight. Such is the case of an old gentleman of my acquaintance at Bludenz, who had worked from the age of fourteen till after seventy, and had been able to acquire what seemed a considerable fortune. What are even a million kronen to-day? And how is he to earn more, at the age of eighty-six?
Industrial workmen, no doubt, are doing uncommonly well; that English eight hours’ nonsense fosters their pretensions, and as often as they consider their pay insufficient, they go on strike and obtain more. The bureaucrats also thrive in a lesser degree. There is an employee to every five men in this country; a scandalous plethora, but who would not be an employee—one of the few careers whereby a native, under existing circumstances, may hope to escape starvation? So do we foreigners. For apartments, lighting, laundry, repairs to clothes and boots, food which for excellence and variety would be unprocurable, pay what you please, in any English village five times the size of this one, for as much wine, beer, schnapps and cider as we can hold we pay a sum which works out, for both together, at three shillings a day. This includes an additional 10 per cent on the total, which I insist upon paying for service, though it cost some little argument before I could make them accept it. Such are the results of the “Valuta,” so far as Englishmen are concerned.
Valuta: that is one of three words which you may now for the first time hear repeated from mouth to mouth. The other two are “Anschluss” and “Miliz.” These matters have been adequately discussed in our own Press; I will only say, as regards the last of them, that no government, however wise and well-intentioned, can enforce its wishes if you take away its means of doing so: a militia. One does not expect high-priced inter-allied experts to be equipped with either sympathy or imagination; that would be asking too much. They should, at least, possess a little common sense and knowledge of history. Western Europe, scared to death of bolshevism in Russia, is busily engaged in manufacturing it elsewhere; and if this once gentlemanly province now exhales, as does the rest of the country, a strong reek of communistic fumes, it is our experts who are to blame. Ah, well! When the broth is boiling, the scum invariably rises to the top and stays there, until some businesslike chef comes along, to cream off this filthy product and throw it down the drain.
Valuta: wondrous are its workings. There is hardly an ounce of butter procurable in Bludenz, which is enclosed in grazing grounds. Where has it all gone? Over the mountains, into Switzerland. Valuta! Your Austrian smuggler is delighted; he receives five times the price he would get if he sold the stuff in his own country, and in Swiss money too, which may have doubled in worth by the time he reaches home again. Your Swiss buyer is delighted; he pays less than half the price he would have to pay for his own product. The local poor suffer, meanwhile, especially the children; for the nutritive value of butter, in the shape of Schmalz, is great, and this condiment used to figure in all their principal dishes, and would be doubly needful now that meat is quite beyond their reach. Altogether, these children—a shadow seems to have passed over them, witnessing the distresses of their parents. They are paler than they used to be, and graver of mien; far too many are insufficiently clad and unshod. An Englishman might think ten shillings a reasonable price for a pair of sound children’s boots; the native cannot afford 110,000 kronen, a sum for which formerly he could have bought half a village. Even the post-boy, a lively youngster who happens to be a grandson of that old gardener of ours, presents himself up here every morning without shoes or stockings. He has none.
I glance, for further informative matter, down the columns of that paper which bids us “Spare the moles!” and observe that it contains, among its advertisements, an offer by a furrier of two hundred kronen for each moleskin brought to him. This does not sound as if the provincial government’s decree were being enforced very drastically. The same gentleman is ready to pay exactly a thousand times as much for the skin of pine martens, which can be worth little enough at this warm season of the year. The animal is of the greatest scarcity in our neighborhood.15
And here is a final, thrilling item. The midwives of Feldkirch, assembled in conclave, have regretfully decided that the charges for attendance are to be doubled in future.
Midwives, I suspect, are not the only professional ladies who have lately been obliged to raise their tariff.
Towards nightfall, a gleam of sunshine after the rain. Out for a stroll, after dinner....
They have anointed our boots with badger’s fat, in case we traverse any wet fields. We are only going along the main road towards Ludesch. That bench on the old Lutz embankment—that bench invariably occupied by a poor hump-backed woman reading—is sure to be empty at this hour.
It is. We sit down to smoke under the dripping firs, and I go ghost-hunting all alone, in the dark. The memories that are crowded into these few hundred yards! They spring up at my feet, from the damp forest earth. There was once a battle on this site, a sanguinary battle between two rival gypsy bands who used it for their camping ground and accidentally arrived both on the same evening; each claimed it for his own, and several men were killed before the matter was decided; our people were talking about the fray years afterwards. Further on, past the bridge, I murdered the first snake of many and found my first piece of phosphorescent wood. Here, too, stands the rifle-range which is connected with one of six clear memories of my father; he used to come out of the place adorned with paper decorations for his marksmanship and they even hung up a framed diploma of honor to him; the building was sacked two years ago by some local revolutionaries who disapproved of shooting in every form and carried off the diploma, but forgot to efface its mark on the wall where it had hung for fifty years.
Nearly opposite to where we are sitting is a deep incline of grass—I take it to be the bank of the prehistoric Lutz; my father once made me rush up and down this terrific slope in preparation, no doubt, for mountaineering. The quarry close by, in which one hunted vainly for crystals (it is Eocene, and has nothing but spar) is still there, but those mysterious black hillocks by the roadside with their unforgettable smell, where the charcoal-burners plied their trade, are gone and a thriving house and orchard have stepped into their place. The Madonna shrine, further on, is quite unchanged; here the old Anna used to lift me up to gaze at the Mother of God standing, as She does to this day, upon an earth girt about by the green Serpent of Evil. At the back of our bench there used to be a deep, square hole in the ground. My sister and I once informed a newly arrived German governess that it was a disused elephant trap. She said nothing but, on returning home, complained bitterly of our untruthful habits. That plantation of young trees across the road was once a bare, thistle-strewn heath, a Haide, the sole locality where, year after year, one could catch white admirals. So there were just two well-known places where you might rely upon a scarlet tiger, and neither more nor less than three, where there was a chance of seeing, though probably not of catching, a Trauermantel (Camberwell beauty). Butterflies were dropped, when stones began.
And all this time Mr. R. has had nothing whatever to say. He has grown rather silent of late, his superciliousness begins to evaporate: that augurs well! My theory works—I have observed it for some time past; my theory of the benign influence of woodland scenery upon the character of youth. How much more inspiring to live in such a pastoral and sylvan environment than on the pavements of a town! Instead of troubling about theaters and girls, his mind may well be occupied with some small literary or social problem that befits his age; why Racine went back to antiquity for the subjects of his tragedies, or whether Ronsard really deserves all the praises bestowed upon him. That is as it should be! At last I enquire:
“What have you been dreaming about, this last half hour?”
“Dreaming? Not at all. I have been thinking very seriously.”
“What about?”
“What about? About Goethe’s ‘Hermann and Dorothea.’”
“Ah! I thought so. You are getting on famously. Now, to begin with: where did you become acquainted with that masterpiece?”
“In a French translation, last Christmas. And I was just thinking how true it is, what the mother tells Hermann—when he is in love, you know—you remember?—about the night growing to be the better part of day——”
“Say no more. You are indulging certain thoughts about Tiefis.”
“Why not? Perfectly proper ones.”
“I might have expected this. Very well. It is a little late to-night, but I suppose we shall have to go there to-morrow. I only hope you share Hermann’s exalted sentiments and his purity of heart. Because otherwise, you understand, I could never be an accomplice to such an affair.”