Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

In 1847 the village began to be in great trouble. A large part of it was burned; sickness swept it; whole families were homeless, or without father or brother to support them. Now shone out the virtues of this "King of Oberammergau," who would not be its burgomaster. He supported the village: to those who could work he gave work, whether the work had present value to him or not; to those who could not work he gave food, shelter, clothes. He was a rich man in 1847, when the troubles began. In 1849 he was poor, simply from his lavish giving. He had only two sons, to both of whom he gave an education in the law. Thus the spell of the succession of the craft of wood-workers was broken. No doubt ambition had entered into the heart of the "King of Oberammergau" to place his sons higher in the social scale than any success in mere trade could lift them. One of these sons is now burgomaster of the village; he is better known to the outside world as the Caiaphas of the Passion Play. To one knowing the antecedents of his house, the dramatic power with which he assumes and renders the Jewish High-Priest's haughty scorn, impatience of opposition, contempt for the Nazarene, will be seen to have a basis in his own pride of birth and inherited habit of authority.

The other son, having been only moderately successful in making his way in the world as a lawyer, returned to Oberammergau, succeeded to his father's business in 1856, but lived only a short time, dying in 1859. He left a widow and six children,—three sons and three daughters. For a time the widow and a sister-in-law carried on the business. As the sons grew up, two of them gradually assumed more and more the lead in affairs, and now bid fair to revive and restore the old traditions of the family power and success. One of them is in charge of a branch of the business in England, the other in Oberammergau. The third son is an officer in the Bavarian army. The aunt is still the accountant and manager of the house, and the young people evidently defer to her advice and authority.

The daughters have been educated in Munich and at convents, and are gentle, pleasing, refined young women. At the time of the Passion Play in 1880 they did the honors of their house to hundreds of strangers, who were at once bewildered and delighted to find, standing behind their chairs at dinner, young women speaking both English and French, and as courteously attentive to their guests' every wish as if they had been extending the hospitality of the "King of Oberammergau," a half-century back.

Their house is in itself a record. It stands fronting an irregular open, where five straggling roadways meet, making common centre of a big spring, from which water runs ceaselessly day and night into three large tanks. The house thus commands the village, and it would seem no less than natural that all post and postal service should centre in it. It is the largest and far the best house in the place. Its two huge carved doors stand wide open from morning till night, like those of an inn. On the right-hand side of the hall is the post-office, combined with which is the usual universal shop of a country village, holding everything conceivable, from a Norway dried herring down to French sewing-silk. On the left-hand side are the warerooms of wood-carvings: the first two rooms for their sale; behind these, rooms for storing and for packing the goods, to send away; there are four of these rooms, and their piled-up cases bear testimony to the extent of the business they represent.

A broad, dark, winding stairway leads up to the second floor. Here are the living-rooms of the family; spacious, sunny, comfortable. At the farther end of this hall a great iron door leads into the barn; whenever it is opened, a whiff of the odor of hay sweeps through; and to put out your head from your chamber-door of a morning, and looking down the hall, to see straight into a big haymow, is an odd experience the first time it happens. The house faces southeast, and has a dozen windows, all the time blazing in sunlight,—a goodly thing in Oberammergau, where shadow and shade mean reeking damp and chill. On the south side of the house is an old garden, chiefly apple-orchard; under these trees, in sunny weather, the family take their meals, and at the time of the Passion Play more than fifty people often sat down at outdoor tables there. These trees were like one great aviary, so full were they of little sparrow-like birds, with breasts of cinnamon brown color, and black crests on their heads. They chatted and chattered like magpies, and I hardly ever knew them to be quiet except for a few minutes every morning, when, at half-past five, the village herd of fifty cows went by, each cow with a bell at her neck; and all fifty bells half ringing, half tolling, a broken, drowsy, sleepy, delicious chime, as if some old sacristan, but half awake, was trying to ring a peal. At the first note of this the birds always stopped,—half envious, I fancied. As the chime died away, they broke out again as shrill as ever, and even the sunrise did not interrupt them.

The open square in front of the house is a perpetual stage of tableaux. The people come and go, and linger there around the great water-tanks as at a sort of Bethesda, sunk to profaner uses of every-day cleansing. The commonest labors become picturesque performed in open air, with a background of mountains, by men and women with bare heads and bare legs and feet. Whenever I looked out of my windows I saw a picture worth painting. For instance, a woman washing her windows in the tanks, holding each window under the running stream, tipping it and turning it so quickly in the sunshine that the waters gliding off it took millions of prismatic hues, till she seemed to be scrubbing with rainbows; another with two tubs full of clothes, which she had brought there to wash, her petticoat tucked up to her knees, her arms bare to the shoulder, a bright red handkerchief knotted round her head, and her eyes flashing as she beat and lifted, wringing and tossing the clothes, and flinging out a sharp or a laughing word to every passer; another coming home at night with a big bundle of green grass under one arm, her rake over her shoulder, a free, open glance, and a smile and a bow to a gay postilion watering his horses; another who had brought, apparently, her whole stock of kitchen utensils there to be made clean,—jugs and crocks, and brass pans. How they glittered as she splashed them in and out! She did not wipe them, only set them down on the ground to dry, which seemed likely to leave them but half clean, after all. Then there came a dashing young fellow from the Tyrol, with three kinds of feathers in his green hat, short brown breeches, bare knees, gray yarn stockings with a pattern of green wreath knit in at the top, a happy-go-lucky look on his face, stooping down to take a mouthful of the swift-running water from the spout, and getting well splashed by missing aim with his mouth, to the uproarious delight of two women just coming in from their hay-making in the meadows, one of them balancing a hay-rake and pitchfork on her shoulder with one hand, and with the other holding her dark-blue petticoat carefully gathered up in front, full of hay; the other drawing behind her (not wheeling it) a low, scoop-shaped wheelbarrow full of green grass and clover,—these are a few of any day's pictures. And thither came every day Issa Kattan, from Bethlehem of Judæa,—a brown-skinned, deer-eyed Syrian, who had come all the way from the Holy Land to offer to the Passion Play pilgrims mother-of-pearl trinkets wrought in Jerusalem; rosaries of pearl, of olive-wood, of seeds, scarlet, yellow, and black, wonderfully smooth, hard, and shining. He wore a brilliant red fez, and told his gentle lies in a voice as soft as the murmuring of wind in pines. He carried his wares in a small tray, hung, like a muff, by a cord round his neck, the rosaries and some strips of bright stuffs hanging down at each side and swinging back and forth in time to his slow tread. Issa paced the streets patiently from morn till night, but took good care to be at this watering-place many times in the course of the day, chiefly at the morning, and when the laborers were coming home at sunset.

Another vender, as industrious as he, but less picturesque, also haunted the spot: a man who, knowing how dusty the Passion Play pilgrims would be, had brought brushes to sell,—brushes big, little, round, square, thick, thin, long, short, cheap, dear, good, bad, and indifferent; no brush ever made that was not to be found hanging on that man's body, if you turned him round times enough. That was the way he carried his wares,—in tiers, strings, strata, all tied together and on himself in some inexplicable way. One would think he must have slipped himself into a dozen "cat's-cradles" of twine to begin with, and then had the brushes netted in and out on this foundation. All that remained to be seen of him was his head, above this bristling ball, and his feet shuffling below. To cap the climax of his grotesqueness, he wore on his back a wooden box, shaped like an Indian pappoose frame; and in this stood three or four lofty long-handled brushes for sweeping, which rose far above his head.

Another peasant woman—a hay-maker—I remember, who came one night; never again, though I watched longingly for her, or one like her. She wore a petticoat of umber-brown, a white blouse, a blue apron, a pink-and-white handkerchief over her head, pinned under her chin; under one arm she carried a big bunch of tall green grasses, with the tasselled heads hanging loose far behind her. On the other shoulder rested her pitchfork, and in the hand that poised the pitchfork she held a bunch of dahlias, red, white, and yellow.

But the daintiest and most memorable figure of all that flitted or tarried here, was a little brown-eyed, golden-haired maiden, not more than three years old. She lived near by, and often ran away from home. I saw her sometimes led by the hand, but oftenest without guide or protector,—never alone, however; for, rain or shine, early or late, she carried always in her arms a huge puppet, with a face bigger than her own. It wore a shawl and a knit hood, the child herself being always bareheaded. It was some time before I could fathom the mystery of this doll, which seemed shapeless yet bulky, and heavier than the child could well lift, though she tugged at it faithfully and with an expression of care, as we often see poor babies in cities lugging about babies a little younger than themselves. At last I caught the puppet out one day without its shawl, and the mystery was revealed. It was a milliner's bonnet-block, on which a face had been painted. No wonder it seemed heavy and shapeless; below the face was nothing but a rough base of wood. It appeared that as soon as the thing was given to the child, she conceived for it a most inconvenient and unmanageable affection,—would go nowhere without it, would not go to sleep without it, could hardly be induced to put it for one moment out of her tired little arms, which could hardly clasp it round. It seemed but a fitting reward to perpetuate some token of such faithfulness; and after a good deal of pleading I induced the child's aunt, in whose charge she lived, to bring her to be photographed with her doll in her arms. It was not an easy thing to compass this; for the only photographer of the town, being one of the singers in the chorus, had small leisure for the practice of his trade in the Passion Play year; but, won over by the novelty of the subject, he found an odd hour for us, and made the picture. The little thing was so frightened at the sight of the strange room and instruments that she utterly refused to stand alone for a second, which was not so much of a misfortune as I thought at first, for it gave me the aunt's face also; and a very characteristic Oberammergau face it is.

At the same time I also secured a photograph of the good Frau Rutz. It was an illustration of the inborn dramatic sense in the Oberammergau people, that when I explained to Frau Rutz that I wished her to sit for a picture of an Oberammergau woman at her carving, she took the idea instantly, and appeared prompt to the minute, with a vase of her own carving, her glue-pot, and all her tools, to lay on the table by her side. "Do you not think it would be better with these?" she said simply; then she took up her vase and tool, as if to work, seated herself at the table in a pose which could not be improved, and looked up with, "Is this right?" The photographer nodded his head, and, presto! in five seconds it was done; and Frau Rutz had really been artist of her own picture. The likeness did her less than justice. Her face is even more like an old Memling portrait than is the picture. Weather-beaten, wrinkled, thin,—as old at forty-five as it should be by rights at sixty,—hers is still a noble and beautiful countenance. Nothing would so surprise Frau Rutz as to be told this. She laughed and shook her head when, on giving her one of the photographs, I said how much I liked it. "If it had another head on it, it might be very good," she said. She is one of the few women in Oberammergau who do delicate carving. In the previous winter she had made thirty vases of this pattern, besides doing much other work.