His weather-proof good humor must have helped to establish his reputation as a guide; that, and his jovial blasphemies. They made you laugh, and a guide who makes you laugh has already gone a long way towards gaining your friendship. Once you persuaded the Brunnenmacher to begin some story of his, which was not difficult, you were sure to get an adequate amount of playful bad language thrown in. An infallible method of getting more than this adequate amount was to make him relate his experiences of a trip to America, and of the agonies of four days’ sea-sickness on an empty stomach. This narrative bristled with swear words; it ended in a fixed formula: “Jo, Himmelherrgottsakraméntnochemol, do honni grod gmeint i müest ussm grosse Zähe uffi kotze!” which might as well be left untranslated ...
There is a curious cave near Bludenz called the Bährenloch, the bear’s cavern; it lies at the foot of the cliffs above the road to Rungalin village—not the field path, but that which skirts the hills. I say curious, because it is plainly not a natural cave; it is an artificial one and has been hacked by human hands out of the limestone; when, by whom, and for what purpose, no one knows. The chisel-marks are quite plain, once you are well inside. It is roughly quadrangular in shape and about the height of a man at the entrance; half way through, it takes a slight bend to the right and, growing narrower and narrower till you can hardly turn round, ends abruptly, as though the builder had grown weary of his toil, or disappointed with its result. The work of a mediæval anchorite? I doubt it. Such a person would have contented himself with a domicile less than half its length. Perhaps some crazy enthusiast dug it long ago, in the hope of discovering gold or what not among the bowels of those cliffs.
The younger Brunnenmacher first took me there, and how he managed to hit upon the precise locality of this grotto remains a mystery to me. Not only was the steep woodland below much thicker in those days—almost impenetrable, in fact—and without any trace of an upward path, but the entire base of the cliffs was defended by so dense a mass of brushwood that we had to crawl through it on hands and knees. How did he contrive to ascend undeviatingly to the cavern’s mouth? A few yards astray, and we should have been lost in that jungle where one could barely move, and had no means of seeing to right or left. All this sounds incredible at present. Most of the brushwood has been uprooted and the forest thinned out to such an extent that it has become quite transparent; moreover, that meritorious “beautification-society” of Bludenz constructed, among many other things, a convenient zigzag path which will lead you after fourteen windings to the very entrance of the Bährenloch. The horse-shoe bats, the greater and the lesser, which I used to capture here and take home as pets, may well have deserted the place; likewise the young foxes and badgers we unearthed in the neighborhood. One of these badgers grew so tame that he followed me about everywhere, and would even take me for rides on his back. I should like to see him do it nowadays.[3]
This Brunnenmacher seems to have made up his mind that I was to become a climber like himself. He took me in hand. He made me trot miles and miles, as it seemed, up the then almost trackless Galgen-tobel and showed me the fons et origo of the Bludenz water supply, as well as a spot where you could discover a certain vitriolic mineral by the simple process of applying your tongue to the rock; and still further afield, into the upper regions of the Krupsertobel, and down its savage bed. Then came the turn of the mountains—Scesaplana, to begin with. As guide, he had already gone up there some seventy times, and even I got to know it so well in later years that I could have walked up in blackest midnight. Next the Sulzfluh, famous as a haunt of the Lämmergeier; and so on. One of the last of these trips was up the Säntis, the shapely peak across the Swiss frontier, which seems to close up our valley to the west. We came back with our pockets full of rock-crystals.
So I pursue the memories, as they rise from the past, of those old days of the Brunnenmacher. He died a good many years back. But he has left behind a sturdy brood of children—I know not how many; dozens of them, let us hope, to inherit his smile....
That Säntis mountain, which I have just mentioned, has a bad name at this moment. There was a foul murder done here, some months ago; the married couple in charge of the observatory near the summit were found killed at their post. Nobody could guess who the assassin was, nor what his object might have been, till the body of a young man was discovered in some hut not far away. He had committed suicide; and he was the murderer. So far as I could gather, this youngster was of decent birth but, owing to excesses of one kind or another, had lost all balance and self-respect. One thing, nevertheless, he preserved intact: an intense love of the Säntis, his native mountain, which he seems to have regarded as a sort of private domain. He knew its territory inch by inch and could never bring himself to forsake it; this affection, indeed, was his undoing, for after the crime he made no attempt to quit the country, as he easily might have done. The all-absorbing attachment to this piece of ground kept him chained there, and it was supposed, though nowise proved, I fancy, that he killed the old people out of an insane envy, and in the equally insane hope of being thereafter installed at the observatory as their successor, and having the Säntis all to himself for the rest of his life. Murders are committed for a considerable variety of amorous motives, but seldom for one of such a glacially nonsexual and idealistic tinge; it is the kind of etherealized horror that might be imagined to take place on some other planet. Altogether, an interesting problem in psychology, if the facts they gave me are correct. To fall in love with a mountain is not the common lot of man. And so disastrously!
It was a tragedy of unreciprocated passion, from beginning to end. The Säntis is no longer in the first flush of youth; it can be trusted, I feel sure, to behave with perfect decorum under the most trying and delicate circumstances. Its reputation, previous to this little affair, had been of the best; nor is there any reason to suppose that it gave its brain-sick admirer the slightest encouragement to act as he did, or to think himself singled out for favors denied to the rest of us. The locality is doubtless attractive, as such places go, but that is not its own fault—who ever heard of blame attaching to beauty?—so attractive, that a man might well be pardoned for growing fond of it, and fonder, and fonder. Even in the case of superlative fondness, I, at least, would still try not to feel jealous of other people’s familiarity with its charms, and would certainly think twice before murdering a respectable married couple pour ses beaux yeux.
I have now seen four generations of these delightful folk who own our tavern, the latest arrival being a great-grandchild of the first. Though barely born, it already wears a laughable resemblance to its grandfather.
He is the present head of the family, a village magnate who knows the ins and outs of the countryside as well as any one alive; a Nimrod in his day, and the only marksman, beside my father, to whom they hung up a diploma of honor in the Ludesch shooting range; he has lived for years in Milan and traveled, officially, to Vienna, to set forth to the Government some claim of our district. The face might be that of one of those good-natured but intelligent Roman emperors like Titus, with round head and ruddy hair; a face such as you find all over the Roman province to this day, and all over this province as well. His family came originally from the Bregenzerwald region, at the back of our hills, and is connected with that of Angelika Kauffmann who was born there.[4]
Having been friends with him for the last half century, we never lack subjects of conversation; there is fresh ground to explore as often as we meet, and old ground to traverse again. What I now want to know is this: how about the rain? Are we in for a Landregen? He thinks not; the weather is too cold, and snow lies too low; where his own cattle are, on the alp of Zürs near Lech, it must be lying at this moment. Unless the weather clears, he will have to go up and look after them; also on account of the foot-and-mouth disease, which has broken out in the neighborhood. Lech: who has the chamois shooting there? Nearly all the shoots in the country, he explains, have been taken by Swiss, and no wonder; look at their exchange! And what of the projected Anschluss (annexation) to Switzerland? Well, Germany would be better, on the whole. Besides, the truth of the matter is (laughing) the Swiss won’t have us; they say we are too Catholic and too lazy and too fond of drinking. As if our people could afford to pay for wine nowadays! By the way, just try this Schnapps, as a curiosity.