I did none of these things; no, not one. Zeal for such scholarly investigations seems to be abating; or can it have been the weather? It happened to be cloudless. Much pleasanter, bathing in the lake and climbing up, towards evening, to admire the view from St. Gebhard’s chapel.
We managed to go, none the less, to the Protestant cemetery which lies on the site of the thermae of old Brigantium, and examined the graves of no less than ten deceased relatives. Here lies, among the rest, that maternal grandfather who was responsible for the spankings aforesaid. His tombstone recounts his glories, and I do not believe in all of them; he doubtless had the memorial engraved half a century before his death, in order that posterity should make no mistake as to his merits while alive. This old feudal monster never did a stroke of work in his endless life. He was a braggart of the first water, with gray mustache that looked freshly waxed and curled—quite à la Münchhausen—at whatever hour of the day you might meet him; he radiated good health, and seemed everlastingly to have stepped that very moment out of a hot bath and the hands of a conscientious valet; he had a pink baby-complexion, and the candid eyes of the born liar. He spanked me as often as I came here in childhood, even as he had spanked his only son who died in youth—perhaps from the effects of it. Only once did I score off him during this earlier period. It was his unvarying habit to begin breakfast—a huge cup of a certain kind of chocolate, specially imported from Paris, for himself; tea or coffee for all the rest, and be damned to them—with a boiled egg. One morning of All Fool’s Day I slipped down just before the others, devoured his egg, and turned the hollow shell upside down in its cup. On taking his seat, he had his customary whack at the seemingly sound egg: empty! He glowered round the table at a cluster of trembling daughters. At last he caught my eye and grunted:
“H’m. First of April, I presume. H’m. Not bad for a kid. H’m. Let me advise you to try that on somebody else, next year. H’m.”
Even in later times, he continued to annoy me furiously by calling me a beetle-collector. This is how he talked:
“At seventeen, my lad, I was already commanding a fortress in Hungary. And here you are, catching cockroaches. Then we went to Greece with King Otho and ah! the lovely years we had there; the best of all my life! I was the first person to make excavations on the Acropolis of Athens, if you happen to have heard of such a place. Just make a note of that, young fellow. Meanwhile, here you are, hunting bugs and pinning labels to them. Afterwards—yes, Windsor! When I was aide-de-camp to your Prince Consort, he confessed that he could never have handled Victoria the way he did, unless I had told him (lowering his voice) some of my own experiences with capricious females of that class. And here you are——”
A fragment of the Greek yarn was true. He was there for long under Otho, roving about with his soldiers, and that forlorn and devastated country, as it then was, made an indelible impression on him. Not Odysseus himself could have been more homesick for Greece than he was. He spoke of it in tones of wistful yearning, as of a lost Paradise—the identical tones that I have since discovered, to my surprise, in the writings of a French contemporary, Edgar Quinet.[34] Never was he so attractive, during these final years of his life, as when he sat all alone at the piano in the twilight hour before the lamps were brought in, crooning the tender Greek folk-songs of his youth to a soft, self-invented accompaniment. At such moments, he was transported; he had entered into a fairyland of which he alone possessed the key. You might have taken him for an angel. Indeed, his voice was the best part of him at all times. Even when he ramped and raved, it never lost its exquisite sweetness of timbre; his very curses sounded like a ripple of celestial laughter. He also painted sunny landscapes in oil, and composed an amusing valse or two. Such things went well with his exterior childlike equipment. Primeval ferocity was lurking underneath.
True to his freebooter instincts, he had perched himself here, at Bregenz, on a height where he could not be overlooked by any one and whence he obtained an unimpeded view of half the province and lake. The place boasted of a “flag-tower” from which five countries were visible (Austria, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden and Switzerland), and he contrived, somehow or other, to give a mediæval smack of discord and rapine to its inner regions. Here were bleak stone passages, cold as an ice-cellar in winter, and hung with matchlocks and lances; gloomy Gothic wardrobes filling up their ends. The habitable part was full of spoils plundered, without a doubt, from the rich burghers down below; a haphazard collection of Persian carpets, harmoniums, lacquer tables, Tiepolo portraits, glittering chandeliers, marbles: it all wore an authentic air of loot. Somber paneling, relieved by armorial designs, covered the walls and ceilings and made the rooms uncommonly dusky.
And here he sat for years and years, terrorizing his family, all females, into fits. People used to wonder how he managed to look so absurdly young at eighty. His secret was simplicity itself: Live well, and hand over everything in the way of worry to your women. He never spoke to servants at all; the harim were entrusted with that dirty work, and woe betide them if anything went wrong with the dinner! No one was surprised when his five daughters got engaged as fast as ever they could and fled the premises, regardless of whom they were marrying. He ruled his wife and sister-in-law, dear old ladies, like a slave-driver. One or the other was always hard at work manufacturing Latakia cigarettes for the rosy brigand, who lived on their money for seventy years and called them names to the hour of his death, although they were children of the premier baron of Scotland. A certain daughter had the imprudence, one day, to admire a graceful birch-tree that she could see from her bedroom. Next morning, as usual, she looked out of the window; the birch was gone. It had been felled overnight. That was his system. Dominate your women, or they will dominate you. Put the fear of God into them—no matter how. In his own family, he declared, wives were not allowed to sit down in the presence of their husbands, unless they had first obtained permission. It may be true. I fancy one of his ancestors was the cosmopolitan ruffian who wrote those memoirs; a kind of fifth-rate Casanova. There he remained, anyhow, like an old cock on his dunghill, crowing and gobbling; vicious and vigorous past his ninetieth year. And the strange thing is that I am considered to have inherited a great deal of his peculiar charm. It was my mother who told me this; she was his eldest daughter and knew both of us fairly well.
It is time, now, to confess that not all the prints and archives and natural history collections in the world would have brought me—or ought to bring any one else—to Bregenz, did the place not offer another and a greater attraction. I am alluding to the local Blaufelchen whose English name at this moment escapes me: a kind of fish. They are called, in Latin, Coregonus Wartmanni, which has a harsh flavor. Let nobody, however, be scared by a mere name, inasmuch as things are apt to taste different from what they sound. Oriental poets, for example, have sung with such a depth of feeling about pomegranates that one almost believes they can be eaten, whereas Coregoni Wartmanni, I admit, convey a suggestion of something unpalatable. Try them none the less, and leave Hafiz to crack his teeth over the pomegranates.
These fish occur in some Scotch lakes and are considered so great a delicacy that Mary Queen of Scots has been credited with their introduction. But I knew one cantankerous countryman of mine (an angler, and Coregonus will not rise to the fly) who declared that they were “not to be compared to trout”—which means nothing whatever, seeing that comparison is not well possible between things so dissimilar; you might as well say that Sir Joshua Reynolds is not to be compared to a Bechstein Grand; and that, in fact, they were “hardly worth eating”—which has the merit, at least, of being a straightforward expression of opinion. Now it stands to reason that a good many things are hardly worth eating, until you know how to cook them. The average English hare is hardly worth eating; the way that quadruped is “dressed” (hyperbola!) in England is an insult to the hare’s memory and to the human stomach. As to these Blaufelchen—whoever does not approve of them at the Hotel Weisses Kreuz in Bregenz must be hard to please.[35] Let him try, as a last resort, those at the Hotel Hecht in Constance; if still dissatisfied, he should return without delay to his lukewarm whitebait fried in mutton-grease.