The tunnel might have done something, he agreed, and so might the modern rise of industrialism hereabouts which tempted men from the fields into the factories; but the real reason was the change of climate. It had grown not colder, but damper. He was fond of wine; he had paid particular attention to this matter all his life; there could be no doubt about it. Feldkirch was a case in point. All its slopes were covered with vineyards not long ago; the Feldkirchers had grown so attached to their home product that they preferred it to anything from abroad. There was now not a vine left at Feldkirch. The grapes refused to ripen properly there, as they still did in more favored localities like Sulz-Röthis. [33]
Thereafter we took the train to Bregenz. Hardly were we seated in our carriage before Mr. R. began:
“Now I want to know exactly what he said. Please repeat it.”
“We were talking about the former production of wine in this province. He maintains that owing to recent climatic changes——”
“Not your old man! My old man.”
Could anybody have remembered that rigmarole? I had to invent another one, at the end of which he said:
“So that was it? How sad, and how suggestive. The ravings of a mind diseased. Poor man! I must have that all down, word for word, in my diary....”
Despite Adelaide Procter’s sprightly verses and its own illustrious ancestry, Bregenz remains a repulsive little town on the shore of its dead lake; and associated in my mind with infantile earaches and spankings. I went there not for fun, but for a set purpose; firstly, to consult the Curator of the new Museum, who was described as a prodigiously amiable person, as to what natural curiosities, if any, had lately been discovered in our upland regions, to re-inspect a picture, a sugary-watery Ganymede attributed to Angelika Kauffmann, left to this institution by my sister’s will, a Roman votive stone found on my maternal grandfather’s estate and other objects here deposited by members of my family, and to see whether his library contained any unknown works by old Theodor (or Thomas) Bruhin; secondly, to apply for the same object to that venerable convent-school of Mehrerau, where some homeward-bound Pope expired long ago and where, according to one of Bruhin’s pamphlets, he was “Professor” and may well have left some documentary traces; thirdly, to visit the “Archiv” which contains a goodly collection of books, old and new, dealing with this province, and therefore, possibly, something of my father’s, and also to refresh my memory in the matter of local dialects, place-names and so forth, and inspect early prints of places like Jagdberg, Blumenegg and Jordan-schloss; lastly, to present myself at the offices of the Alpine Club in order to go through the files of their “Mitteilungen” and make a list of my father’s contributions to that journal, and see whether it contains some “Nachruf” of him, some obituary notice, as is likely enough, seeing that so tragic an accident to a conspicuous member can hardly have been left unrecorded.
A reasonable program.