On the right flank of this owl’s den there used to be a bare patch famous for its strawberries. It is now afforested and the strawberries are gone; they have strawed—strayed—elsewhere; they follow the clearings. But that hay-hut remains, that hut of the early school, built of massive timbers between which the hay comes leaking out; the roof is green with antique moss, and sulphur-hued lichen decks its beams. The architecture of these huts has undergone a change, not for the better, of late years; they are no longer squat and solid, but lanky, flimsy, and almost ignoble of aspect, though the hay within is more securely sheltered against damp by a covering of wooden boards. It is precisely this covering which spoils their appearance....
And here at last, below the Stag’s Leap, is the source of the ruisseau des écrevisses. I knew what to expect. Those firs were cut down a good while ago, and the rivulet now wells up amid a tangle of young deciduous trees that have profited by their absence to settle down close to the brink for a season. You can hardly discover the spring for this ephemeral luxuriance; it hides itself therein like a “nymphe pudique,” as Mr. R. observed. The scene was otherwise in olden days, when hundreds of mighty firs filled up all the vale. How otherwise! Then water rilled forth among their roots, a liquid joy, in the gloom of multitudinous over-arching boughs. Many are the hours I dreamt away as a lad, all alone, at this richly romantic spot. The firs will doubtless come to their rights again, and stifle in chill and darkness these sun-loving intruders; they are already planted. Would I not wait, if I could, to see the fountain as it used to be?
A short stroll late at night, down the main road towards Bludesch, in order to enjoy the scent of the fields....
I look up at my old home; it is brilliantly illuminated; three different families, they say, are at present living there. I should not care to enter that place again. Then we pass the doctor’s house on our left. I tell Mr. R. of all the different village Æsculaps who have inhabited that abode; chiefly of the first one, the venerable Dr. Geiger with rubicund face and enormous goggles on his nose, who cured all my childish complaints by means of camomile tea. It was his unvarying remedy, his panacea; my mother assured me, long afterwards, that he would prescribe camomile tea, and nothing else, to pregnant women. He also had one grand and mysterious word which recurred forever in his conversation and was pronounced with a solemn face: Abendsexacerbation. I used to take it for abracadabra, a kind of charm, never dreaming that it meant anything. His was an original way of curing infantile headaches.
“That pain is nothing,” he would remark, “I will just take it home with me,” and therewith pretended to snatch up the headache and put it in his pocket. The pain always vanished—or ought to have done. I must have given him a little more trouble one day when, having been forbidden to touch the verdigris on certain copper pipes, I made a square meal of the lovely green stuff. It was a close shave, they told me afterwards; camomile worked wonders on that occasion, and during convalescence he told my mother that my pulse was placid like that of “an old cow,” which it still is.
While talking of close shaves, we had reached the very spot where I had another one. No fun, driving inside that family barouche with a brace of frumpy grand-aunts—no fun at all; I therefore insisted, if one must drive, on being beside the coachman and, on that particular occasion, tumbled down from my exalted perch because the horses shied at something, and landed head first on the stony road. Ah, we are close to Bludesch now, at the ancient church of St. Nicholas; and thereby hangs another tale. It used to have windows of those small, fat, round, greenish panes of hand-made glass which were common hereabouts, till a sentimental and eccentric female relation of ours took it into her head that she would like to build a house with no other glass in its windows than these “runde Scheible”; it would be rather a gloomy sort of place inside, but so picturesque, you know! The church authorities were delighted to exchange their old-fashioned panes for others of transparent glass; so were all the peasants round about; and in briefest space of time there was not a “Butrescheibe” left in the countryside; you may see one specimen of it over the old gate at Bludenz, but this was inserted only a few years ago to give the place a more time-honored appearance. Now here again, I explain, on our return—here, immediately below my old home, stood a shrine dedicated to the Virgin. Twenty years ago, during a terrific nocturnal thunderstorm, one of those gay tumults when the sky is lilac with flashes and the Cosmos seems to be definitely cracking to pieces, it was struck by lightning. Why was it shattered, while all the neighboring houses, and even that of the unbelievers above, were spared? Nobody knows to this day. All we do know is that the priest had the débris of the disaster cleared away in record time, and another and quite insignificant structure built in its stead.
Mr. R. is not greatly moved by these and other impressive memories of my past. He prefers to extract a sort of childish fun, not for the first time, out of the shape and color of my felt hat which, being of the latest London fashion, is unfamiliar to him and therefore, in his opinion, an appropriate and inexhaustible subject for laughter in season and out of season. Young people seem to be engrossed in externals of this kind, and never to realize that a joke has its limits. I can stand as much chaff as most of us, but foresee trouble ahead unless he succeeds in discovering some fresh source of mirth.
He also thinks Tiefis a pretty village, and wants to know when we are going there again.