But, first of all, a word for your guidance. Make love neither to the waitress nor the chamber-maid nor the she-cook. Make love to the manager. Lure him into some corner, and unbosom yourself freely. Whisper in his ear that you are an Ainu by birth; that while out there, at Yezo, you accidentally met a countryman of his (mentioning name and general appearance) who spoke in such glowing terms of the Bodensee Blaufelchen that you were unable to sleep either by day or night until, traveling via the trans-Siberian railway, you should be able to taste them for yourself under his hospitable roof. Then see whether you get what is “hardly worth eating.” I blush to record that we had a veritable surfeit of Blaufelchen. I devoured two at a sitting, and the waitress informed me that she had never seen a tourist—even a German—perform a similar feat; nor should I, indeed, have been successful, had I not kept saying to myself all the time: “When shall I be at Bregenz again? Possibly never!” Mr. R. declared himself satisfied with one; and small wonder. It was a leviathan....
A timely warning, apropos of surfeits. On arrival at our village, we found the family in a state of distress. One of their two cows (the rest are on the alp) had died that afternoon; died of over-eating. She, the proprietress, had told him, the proprietor, to beware how he left the beast to itself; he, the proprietor, swore he had known that particular cow from the day of its birth, and that it was far more sensible than the rest of its kind. Left to itself, therefore, the cow had “exploded.”
I am so little of a cattle-fancier that this was news to me; troubling news. I had always regarded the cow as an exemplar of all that is sane and moderate. Far from it. Give them a chance, especially after the hay-diet of winter, and they eat till they burst. They graze, and graze, and graze; at last, stuffed to the brim, they stand there motionless, wondering what is wrong inside, while a pained and puzzled look—infallible symptom, this—creeps into their eyes. Now is your chance, your last chance, of saving their life. If you happen to have an iron chain in your pocket, thrust it into the beast’s mouth to provoke a flow of saliva or something else which relieves the oppression; if you have no chain look in that other pocket, where you may find a Gargantuan clyster to be applied to its further extremity; failing that, whip out your butcher’s knife and give the patient a well-directed stab in the stomach—a kind of Cæsarian section; the gas escapes, the cow survives. Else, after standing like a pathetic statue for a few moments, it falls heavily earthwards and “explodes inside”—a cow! Thank God we belong to another species, else how would it have fared at the Weisses Kreuz? A gentle cow! The episode has shattered one of my dearest illusions.
This, then, must be the explanation of a strange sight which has attracted me from time immemorial. Often, in pouring rain, you may see a cow at pasture and its owner standing dismally near at hand, soaked to the skin. Why, I used to wonder—why not let the beast graze by itself and go home and get a Schnapps and a change of clothes? Now I know. The peasant cannot move from the spot. He dare not leave the cow alone. He must stay there and keep his eye fixed on hers, lest that symptom should appear.
OLD ANNA
Old Anna
STOOD awhile yesterday beside a block of gneiss which projects upon the right-hand side of the Tiefis path, some two hundred yards above the petrifying stream, at the foot of a young oak. It has been broken long ago, and is shaped like a very low and narrow bench. How one changes—how one looks at things with other eyes! Is it possible that this stone used to be my Ultima Thule in days of infancy; this, or the walnut tree a little higher up, whose stump remains to this day, and from under whose branches you had a broad view over the valley? The upward path was shadier than now, and here, sure enough, I played through the morning hours, while the old Anna extracted out of her pocket that invariable Frühschoppen (she, being Tyrolese, called it “merenda”)—some salted bread and a quarter of red wine. Sometimes the same pocket produced also a chocolate for me; in fact, she had a trick of conjuring chocolate out of the most improbable places. On one occasion she actually shook a piece down from a tree; a miracle....
Later on, the Gleziska became our favorite haunt. This is a flat green meadow to the east of the village where stood, at that time, a glorious barn containing an ante-chamber and two separate compartments full of delicious hay to swim about in; it has now been replaced by an anæmic structure of the new type. The first walk I ever took, all by myself, was from the village church to the Gleziska; that was a proud day. Soon, when my sister had learnt to toddle, the old thing took us further afield; once as far as the church of St. Martin at Ludesch (built about 1430; some of its rare Gothic furniture is in the Bregenz Museum), where we two discovered, in a crypt, an immense accumulation of human skulls; we dragged four or five into the daylight, and had a game of skittles with them.