I cut the interview short, rather glad that I did not understand all the words he had used, paid the somewhat diminished bill, and had the landlord shown out. Far worse than the mere disagreeableness of it, was the blow to my ideals of these simple, honest people. And yet I will not believe that I had been altogether mistaken in my first estimate of them. Their education was a somewhat superficial matter. The peasant nature, with all its suspiciousness of the foreigner as such, its obstinacy and intolerance, was very close to the surface under the Herr Secundärlehrer’s thin veneer of culture. I have an idea that he suspected me of having known at the beginning that Frater and Antonio were coming and kept it from him, though as I offered when I informed him of their prospective visit to pay him either a lump sum extra or lodging rates according to the time of their stay, as he preferred, it is a little hard to see wherein he could have thought advantage was taken of him. However, I suppose it came somehow under the head of my unprincipled cosmopolitan cleverness.
Whether it was this or whether it was some other thing, I am sure he had had his feeling of ill usage inflamed by village cronies, grown worldly-wise among the tourists, and was led to believe by them that any weapon would do for getting even. Here is where I think his wife, a much stronger and finer character than he, disapproved. I think she held more or less unflattering views of us (our ways of life were very different from hers,) but I believe she felt it unworthy to embody her disapproval in the bill. While she never appeared again, she did one or two nice little things at the end for our comfort which made us feel she was trying to make up.
If this was a story, it would never end like this—the merry company scattered, the green summer gone, the honest couple who should have been our friends turned into suspicious hostiles, keeping out of sight and churlishly avoiding a farewell, the gray cold early dawn, Anna with her belongings heaped on the porch, tearfully bidding us good-bye and waiting to turn over the keys to the Frau Secundärlehrer, whom she was deadly afraid of, Suzanne, the Younger Babe and I, all bundled up in winter wraps climbing into the Red-headed Man’s carriage, and driving off to the station over the creaking snow, while all the valley and all the mountains lay hushed in still white slumber.
But this is not a story. It is a simple chronicle of facts, which I have told as they happened, the bad with the good, the sordid with the beautiful. And this was really the END.