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?