A CHAPEL AND A HAY HUT AMONG THE MOUNTAINS

 

I

 

 

IT is all very well trying to wander romantically in the Tyrol. Sadly I sit on the bed, my head and shoulders emerging from the enormous overbolster like a cherub from a cloud, writing out of sheer exasperation, while Anita lies on the other bed and is amused.

Two days ago it began to rain. When I think of it I wonder. The gutter of the heavens hangs over the Tyrolese Alps.

We set off with the iridescent cloud of romance ahead, leading us southwards from the Isar towards Italy. We haven’t got far. And the iridescent cloud, turned into a column of endless water, still endures around the house.

I omit the pathos of our setting forth, in the dimmery-glimmery light of the Isar Valley, before breakfast-time, with blue chicory flowers open like wonder on either side the road. Neither will I describe our crawling at dinnertime along the foot of the mountains, the rain running down our necks from the flabby straw hats, and dripping cruelly into one’s boots from the pent-house of our rucksacks. We entered ashamed into a wayside inn, where seven ruddy, joyous peasants, three of them handsome, made a bonfire of their hearts in honour of Anita, whilst I sat in a corner and dripped...

Yesterday I admit it was fine in the afternoon and evening. We made tea by a waterfall among yellow-dangling noli-me-tangere flowers, while an inquisitive lot of mountains poked their heads up to look, and a great green grasshopper, armoured like Ivanhoe, took a flying leap into eternity over a lovely, black-blue gentian. At least I saw him no more.

They had told us there was a footpath over the mountain, three and a half hours to Glashütte. There was a faint track, and a myriad of strawberries like ruddy stars be1ow, and a few dark bilberries. We climbed one great steep slope, and scrambled down beyond, into a pine wood There it was damp and dark and depressing. But one makes the best of things, when one sets out on foot. So we toiled on for an hour, traversing the side of a slope, black, wet, gloomy, looking through the fir-trees across the gulf at another slope, black and gloomy and forbidding, shutting us back. For two hours we slipped and struggled, and still there we were, clamped between these two black slopes, listening to the water that ran uncannily, noisily along the bottom of the trap.

We grew silent and hot with exertion and the dark monotony of the struggle. A rucksack also has its moments of treachery, close friend though it seems. You are quite certain of a delicate and beautiful balance on a slippery tree-root; you take the leap; then the ironic rucksack gives you a pull from behind, and you are grovelling.

And the path had been a path. The side of the dark slope, steep as a roof, had innumerable little bogs where waters tried to ooze out and call themselves streams, and could not. Across these bogs went an old bed of fir-boughs, dancy and treacherous. So, there was a path! Suddenly there were no more fir-boughs, and one stood lost before the squalor of the slope. I wiped my brow.

‘You so soon lose your temper,’ said Anita. So I stood aside, and yielded her the lead.

She blundered into another little track lower down.

‘You see!’ she said, turning round.

I did not answer. She began to hum a little tune, because her path descended. We slipped and struggled. Then her path vanished into the loudly-snorting, chuckling stream, and did not emerge.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘But where is it?’ she said with vehemence and pathos.

‘You see even your road ends in nowhere,’ I said.

‘I hate you when you preach,’ she flashed. ‘Besides it doesn’t end in nowhere.’

‘At any rate,’ I said, ‘we can’t sleep on the end of it.’

I found another track, but I entered on it delicately, without triumph. We went in silence. And it vanished into the same loudly-snorting stream.

‘Oh, don’t look like that!’ cried Anita. So I followed the bedraggled tail of her skirts once more up the wet, dark opposition of the slope. We found another path, and once more we lost the scent in the overjoyed stream.

‘Perhaps we’re supposed to go across,’ I said meekly, as we stood beside the waters.

‘I — why did I take a damp match of a man like you!’ she cried. ‘One could scratch you for ever and you wouldn’t strike.’

I looked at her, wondering, and turned to the stream, which was cunningly bethinking itself. There were chunks of rock, and spouts and combs and rattles of sly water. So I put my raincoat over my rucksack and ventured over.

The opposite bank was very steep and high. We were swallowed in this black gorge, swallowed to the bottom, and gazing upwards I set off on all fours, climbing with my raincoat over my rucksack, cloakwise, to leave me free. I scrambled and hauled and struggled.

And from below came shriek upon shriek of laughter. I reached the top, and looked down. I could see nothing, only the whirring of laughter came up.

‘What is it?’ I called, but the sound was lost amid the cackle of the waters. So I crawled over the edge and sat in the gloomy solitude, extinguished.

Directly I heard a shrill, frightened call:

‘Where are you?’

My heart exulted and melted at the same moment.

‘Come along,’ I cried, satisfied that there was one spot in this gloomy solitude to call to.

She arrived, scared with the steep climb, and the fear of loneliness in this place.

‘I might never have found you again,’ she said.

‘I don’t intend you should lose me,’ I said. So she sat down, and presently her head began to nod with laughter, and her bosom shook with laughter, and she was laughing wildly without me.

‘Well, what?’ I said.

‘You — you looked like a camel — with a hump — climbing up,’ she shrieked.

‘We’d better be moving,’ I said. She slipped and laughed and struggled. At last we came to a beautiful savage road. It was the bed of some stream that came no more this way, a mass of clear boulders leading up the slope through the gloom.

‘We are coming out now,’ said Anita, looking ahead. I also was quite sure of it. But after an hour of climbing, we were still in the bed of clear boulders, between dark trees, among the toes of the mountains.

Anita spied a hunter’s hut, made of bark, and she went to investigate. Night was coming on.

‘I can’t get in,’ she called to me, obscurely.

‘Then come,’ I said.

It was too wet and cold to sleep out of doors in the woods. But instead of coming, she stooped in the dark twilight for strawberries. I waited like the shadow of wrath. But she, unconcerned, careless and happy in her contrariety, gathered strawberries among the shadows.

‘We must find a place to sleep in,’ I said. And my utter insistence took effect.

She realized that I was lost among the mountains, as well as she, that night and the cold and the great dark slopes were close upon us, and we were of no avail, even being two, against the coldness and desolation of the mountains.

So in silence we scrambled upwards, hand in hand. Anita was sure a dozen times that we were coming out. At last even she got disheartened.

Then, in the darkness, we spied a hut beside a path among the thinning fir-trees.

‘It will be a woodman’s hut,’ she said.

‘A shrine,’ I answered.

I was right for once. It was a wooden hut just like a model, with a black old wreath hanging on the door. There was a click of the latch in the cold, watchful silence of the upper mountains, and we entered.

By the grey darkness coming in from outside we made out the tiny chapel, candles on the altar and a whole covering of ex-voto pictures on the walls, and four little praying-benches. It was all close and snug as a box.

Feeling quite safe, and exalted in this rare, upper shadow, I lit the candles, all. Point after point of flame flowed out on the night. There were six. Then I took off my hat and my rucksack, and rejoiced, my heart at home.

The walls of the chapel were covered close with naked little pictures, all coloured, painted by the peasants on wood, and framed with little frames. I glanced round, saw the cows and the horses on the green meadows, the men on their knees in their houses, and I was happy as if I had found myself among the angels.

‘What wonderful luck!’ I said to Anita.

‘But what are we going to do?’ she asked.

‘Sleep on the floor — between the praying-desks. There’s just room.’

‘But we can’t sleep on a wooden floor,’ she said.

‘What better can you find?’

‘A hay hut. There must be a hay hut somewhere near. We can’t sleep here.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

But I was bound to look at the little pictures. I climbed on to a bench. Anita stood in the open doorway like a disconsolate, eternal angel. The light of the six dusky tapers glimmered on her discontented mouth. Behind her, I could see tips of fir branches just illuminated, and then the night.

She turned and was gone like darkness into the darkness. I heard her boots upon the stones. Then I turned to the little pictures I loved. Perched upon the praying-desks, I looked at one, and then another. They were picture-writings that seemed like my own soul talking to me. They were really little pictures for God, because horses and cows and men and women and mountains, they are His own language. How should He read German and English and Russian, like a schoolmaster? The peasants could trust Him to understand their pictures: they were not so sure that He would concern Himself with their written script.

I was looking at a pale blue picture. That was a bedroom, where a woman lay in bed, and a baby lay in a cradle not far away. The bed was blue, and it seemed to be falling out of the picture, so it gave me a feeling of fear and insecurity. Also, as the distance receded, the bedstead got wider, uneasily. The woman lay looking straight at me, from under the huge, blue-striped overbolster. Her pink face was round like a penny doll’s, with the same round stare. And the baby, like a pink-faced farthing doll, also stared roundly.

 

‘Maria hat geholfen E.G. — 1777.’

 

I looked at them. And I knew that I was the husband looking and wondering. G., the husband, did not appear himself. It was from the little picture on his retina that this picture was reproduced. He could not sum it up, and explain it, this vision of his wife suffering in child-birth, and then lying still and at peace with the baby in the cradle. He could not make head or tail of it. But at least he could represent it, and hang it up like a mirror before the eyes of God, giving the statement even if he could get no explanation. And he was satisfied. And so, perforce, was I, though my heart began to knock for knowledge.

The men never actually saw themselves unless in precarious conditions. When their lives were threatened, then they had a fearful flash of self-consciousness, which haunted them till they had represented it. They represented themselves in all kinds of ridiculous postures, at the moment when the accident occurred.

Joseph Rieck, for example, was in a toppling-backward attitude rather like a footballer giving a very high kick and losing his balance. But on his left ankle had fallen a great grey stone, that might have killed him, squashing out much blood, orange-coloured — or so it looked by the candle-light — whilst the Holy Mary stood above in a bolster-frame of clouds, holding up her hands in mild surprise.

 

 ‘Joseph Rieck

Gott sey Danck gasagt 1834.’

 

It was curious that he thanked God because a stone had fallen on his ankle. But perhaps the thanks were because it had not fallen on his head. Or perhaps because the ankle had got better, though it looked a nasty smash, according to the picture. It didn’t occur to him to thank God that all the mountains of the Tyrol had not tumbled on him the first day he was born. It doesn’t occur to any of us. We wait till a big stone falls on our ankle. Then we paint a vivid picture and say: ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ and we thank God that we’ve escaped. All kinds of men were saying: ‘Gott sey Danck’; either because big stones had squashed them, or because trees had come down on them whilst they were felling, or else because they’d tumbled over cliffs, or got carried away in streams: all little events which caused them to ejaculate: ‘God be thanked, I’m still alive’.

Then some of the women had picture prayers that were touching, because they were prayers for other people, for their children and not for themselves. In a sort of cell kneeled a woman, wearing a Catherine of Russia kind of dress, opposite a kneeling man in Vicar of Wakefield attire. Between them, on the stone wall, hung two long iron chains with iron rings dangling at the end. Above these, framed in an oval of bolster-clouds, Christ on the Cross, and above Him, a little Maria, short in stature, something like Queen Victoria, with a very blue cloth over her head, falling down her dumpy figure. She, the Holy Mother of heaven, looked distressed. The woman kneeling in the cell put up her hands, saying:

 

‘O Mutter Gottes von Rerelmos, Ich bitte mach mir mein Kind von Gefangenschaft los mach im von Eissen und Bandten frey wansz des Gottliche Willen sey.

Susanna Grillen 1783.’

 

I suppose Herr Grillen knew that it was not the affair of the Mutter Gottes. Poor Susanna Grillen! It was natural and womanly in her to identify the powers that be with the eternal powers. What I can’t see, is whether the boy had really done anything wrong, or whether he had merely transgressed some law of some duke or king or community. I suppose the poor thing did not know herself how to make the distinction. But evidently the father, knowing he was in temporal difficulty, was not very active in asking help of the eternal.

One must look up the history of the Tyrol for the 1783 period.

A few pictures were family utterances, but the voice which spoke was always the voice of the mother. Marie Schneeberger thanked God for healing her son. She kneeled on one side of the bedroom, with her three daughters behind her; Schneeberger kneeled facing her, with a space between them, and his one son behind him. The Holy Mary floated above the space of their thanks. The whole family united this time to bless the heavenly powers that the bad had not been worse. And, in the face of the divine power, the man was separate from the woman, the daughter from the son, the sister from the brother — one set on one side, one set on the other, separate before the eternal grace, or the eternal fear.

The last set of pictures thanked God for the salvation of property. One lady had six cows — all red ones — painted feeding on a meadow with rocks behind. All the cows I have seen in these parts have been dun or buff coloured. But these are red. And the goodwife thanks God very sincerely for restoring to her that which was lost for five days, viz, her six cows and the little cow-girl Kate. The little girl did not appear in the picture nor in the thanks: she was only mentioned as having been lost along with the cows. I do not know what became of her. Cows can always eat grass. I suppose she milked her beasts, and perhaps cranberries were ripe. But five days was a long time for poor Kathel.

There were hundreds of cattle painted standing on meadows like a child’s Noah’s Ark toys arranged in groups: a group of red cows, a group of brown horses, a group of brown goats, a few grey sheep; as if they had all been summoned into their classes. Then Maria in her cloud-frame blessed them. But standing there so hieroglyphic, the animals had a symbolic power. They did not merely represent property. They were the wonderful animal life which man must take for food. Arrayed there in their numbers, they were almost frightening, as if they might overthrow us, like an army.

Only one woman had had an accident. She was seen falling downstairs, just landing at the bottom into her peaceful kitchen where the kitten lay asleep by the stove. The kitten slept on, but Mary in a blue mantle appeared through the ceiling, mildly shocked and deprecating.

Alone among all the women, the women who had suffered childbirth or had suffered through some child of their own, was this housewife who had fallen downstairs into the kitchen where the cat slept peacefully. Perhaps she had not any children. However that may be, her position was ignoble, as she bumped on the bottom stair.

There they all were, in their ex-voto pictures that I think the women had ordered and paid for, these peasants of the valley below, pictured in their fear. They lived under the mountains where always was fear. Sometimes they knew it to close on a man or a woman. Then there was no peace in the heart of this man till the fear had been pictured, till he was represented in the grip of terror, and till the picture had been offered to the Deity, the dread, unnamed Deity; whose might must be acknowledged, whilst in the same picture the milder divine succour was represented and named and thanked. Deepest of all things, among the mountain darknesses, was the ever-felt fear. First of all gods was the unknown god who crushed life at any moment, and threatened it always. His shadow was over the valleys. And a tacit acknowledgement and propitiation of Him were the ex-voto pictures, painted out of fear and offered to Him unnamed. Whilst upon the face of them all was Mary the divine Succour, She, who had suffered, and knew. And that which had suffered and known, had prevailed, and was openly thanked. But that which had neither known nor suffered, the dread unnamed, which had aimed and missed by a little, this must be acknowledged covertly. For his own soul’s sake, man must acknowledge his own fear, acknowledge the power beyond him.

Whilst I was reading the inscriptions high up on the wall, Anita came back. She stood below me in her weatherbeaten panama hat, looking up dissatisfied. The light fell warm on her face. She was discontented and excited.

‘There’s a gorgeous hay hut a little farther on,’ she said.

‘Hold me a candle a minute, will you?’ I said.

‘A great hay hut full of hay, in an open space. I climbed in—’

‘Do you mind giving me a candle for a moment?’

‘But no — come along —’

‘I just want to read this — give me a candle.’ In a silence of impatience, she handed me one of the tapers. I was reading a little inscription.

‘Won’t you come?’ she said.

‘We could sleep well here,’ I said. ‘It is so dry and secure.’

‘Why!’ she cried irritably. ‘Come to the hay hut and see.’

‘In one moment,’ I said.

She turned away.

‘Isn’t this altar adorable!’ she cried. ‘Lovely little paper roses, and ornaments.’

She was fingering some artificial flowers, thinking to put them in her hair. I jumped down, saying I must finish reading my pictures in the morning. So I gathered the rucksack and examined the cash-box by the door. It was open and contained six kreutzers. I put in forty pfennigs, out of my poor pocket, to pay for the candles. Then I called Anita away from the altar trinkets, and we closed the door, and were out in the darkness of the mountains.

 

 

II

 

I resented being dragged out of my kapelle into the black and dismal night. In the chapel were candles and a boarded floor. And the streams in the mountains refuse to run anywhere but down the paths made by man. Anita said: ‘You cannot imagine how lovely your chapel looked, as I came on it from the dark, its row of candles shining, and all the inside warm!’

‘Then why on earth didn’t you stay there?’ I said.

‘But think of sleeping in a hay hut,’ she cried.

‘I think a kapelle is much more soul stirring,’ I insisted.

‘But much harder to the bones,’ she replied.

We struggled out on to a small meadow, between the mountain tops. Anita called it a kettle. I presumed then that we had come in by the spout and should have to get out by the lid. At any rate, the black heads of the mountains poked up all round, and I felt tiny, like a beetle in a basin.

The hay hut stood big and dark and solid, on the clear grass.

‘I know just how to get in,’ said Anita, who was full of joy now we were going to be uncomfortably situated. ‘And now we must eat and drink tea.’

‘Where’s your water?’ I asked.

She listened intently. There was a light swishing of pine-trees on the mountain side.

‘I hear it,’ she said.

‘Somewhere down some horrid chasm,’ I answered.

‘I will go and look,’ she said.

‘Well,’ I answered, ‘you needn’t go hunting on a hill-side where there isn’t the faintest sign of a rut or watercourse.’

We spoke sotto voce, because of the darkness and the stillness. I led down the meadow, nearly breaking my neck over the steepest places. Now I was very thirsty, and we had only a very little schnapps.

‘There is sure to be water in the lowest place,’ I said. She followed me stealthily and with glee. Soon we squelched in a soft place.

‘A confounded marsh,’ I said.

‘But,’ she answered, ‘I hear it trickling.’

‘What’s the good of its trickling, if it’s nasty.’

‘You are consoling,’ she mocked.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘it rises here. So if we can get at the Quelle —’

I don’t know why ‘Quelle’ was necessary, instead of ‘source’, but it was. We paddled up the wet place, and in the darkness found where the water welled out. Having filled our can, and our boots by the way, we trudged back. I slipped and spilled half the water.

‘This,’ said Anita, ‘makes me perfectly happy.’

‘I wish it did me,’ I replied.

‘Don’t you like it, dear?’ she said, grieved.

My feet were soddened and stone cold. Everywhere was wet, and very dark.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘But the chapel —’

So we sat at the back of the hut, where the wind didn’t blow so badly, and we made tea and ate sausage. The wind wafted the flame of the spirit lamp about, drops of rain began to fall. In the pitch dark, we lost our sausage and the packet of tea among the logs.

‘At last I’m perfectly happy,’ Anita repeated.

I found it irritating to hear her. I was looking for the tea. Before we had finished this precious meal, the rain came pelting down. We hurried the things into our rucksacks and bundled into the hut. There was one little bread left for morning.

The hut was as big as a small cottage. It was made of logs laid on top of one another, but they had not been properly notched, so there were stripes of light all round the Egyptian darkness. And in a hay hut one dares not strike a light.

‘There’s the ladder to the big part,’ said Anita.

The front compartment was only one-quarter occupied with hay: the back compartment was full nearly to the ceiling. I climbed up the ladder, and felt the hay, putting my hand straight into a nasty messy place where the water had leaked in among the hay from the roof.

‘That’s all puddly, and the man’ll have his whole crop rotten if he doesn’t watch it,’ I said. ‘It’s a stinkingly badly-made hay hut.’

‘Listen to the rain,’ whispered Anita.

It was rattling on the roof furiously. Then, although there were slots of light, and a hundred horse-power draught tearing across the hut, I was glad to be inside the place.

‘Hay,’ I remarked after a while, ‘has two disadvantages. It tickles like all the creeping insects, and it is porous to the wind.’

‘“Porous to the wind”,’ mocked Anita.

‘It is,’ I said.

There was a great preparation. All valuables, such as hair-pins and garters and pfennigs and hellers and trinkets and collar studs, I carefully collected in my hat. It was pitch dark. I laid the hat somewhere. We took off our soddened shoes and stockings. Imagining they would somehow generate heat and dry better, I pushed the boots into the wall of hay. Then I hung up various draggled garments, hoping they would dry.

‘I insist on your tying up your head in a hanky, and on my spreading my waistcoat for a pillow-cloth,’ I said.

Anita humbly submitted. She was too full of joy to refuse. We had no blankets, nothing but a Burberry each.

‘A good large hole,’ I said, ‘as large as a double grave. And I only hope it won’t be one.’

‘If you catch cold,’ said Anita, ‘I shall hate you.’

‘And if you catch cold,’ I answered, ‘I s’ll nurse you tenderly.’

‘You dear!’ she exclaimed, affectionately.

We dug like two moles at the grave.

‘But see the mountains of hay that come out,’ she said.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘you can amuse your German fancy by putting them back again, and sleeping underneath them.’

‘How lovely!’ she cried.

‘And how much lovelier a German fat bolster would be.’

‘Don’t!’ she implored. ‘Don’t spoil it.’

‘I’d sleep in a lobster-pot to please you,’ I said.

‘I don’t want you to please me, I want you to be pleased,’ she insisted.

‘God help me, I will be pleased,’ I promised.

At first it was pretty warm in the trough, but every minute I had to rub my nose or my neck. This hay was the most insidious, persistent stuff. However much I tried to fend it off, one blade tickled my nostrils, a seed fell on my eyelid, a great stalk went down my neck. I wrestled with it like a Hercules, to keep it at bay, but in vain. And Anita merely laughed at my puffs and snorts.

‘Evidently,’ I said, ‘you have not so sensitive a skin as I.’

‘Oh no — not so delicate and fine,’ she mocked.

‘In fact, you can’t have,’ I said, sighing. But presently, she also sighed.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘did you choose a waistcoat for a pillow? I’ve always got my face in one of the armholes.’

‘You should arrange it better,’ I said.

We sighed, and suffered the fiendish ticklings of the hay. Then I suppose we slept, in a sort of fitful fever.

I was awakened by the cracks of thunder. Anita clutched me. It was fearfully dark. Like a great whip clacking, the thunder cracked and spattered over our hut, seemed to rattle backwards and forwards from the mountain peaks.

‘Something more for your money,’ I groaned, too sleepy to live.

‘Does thunder strike hay huts?’ Anita asked.

‘Yes, it makes a dead set at them — simply preys on hay huts, does thunder,’ I declared.

‘Now you needn’t frighten me,’ she reproached.

‘Go to sleep,’ I commanded.

But she wouldn’t. There was Anita, there was thunder, and lightning, then a raging wind and cataracts of rain, and the slow, persistent, evil tickling of the hay seeds, all warring on my sleepiness. Occasionally I got a wink. Then it began to get cold, with the icy wind rushing in through the wide slots between the logs of the walls. The miserable hay couldn’t even keep us warm. Through the chinks of it penetrated the vicious wind. And Anita would not consent to be buried, she would have her shoulders and head clear. So of course we had little protection. It grew colder and colder, miserably cold. I burrowed deeper and deeper. Then I felt Anita’s bare feet, and they were icy.

‘Woman,’ I said, ‘poke your wretched head in, and be covered up, and save what modicum of animal heat you can generate.’

‘I must breathe,’ she answered crossly.

‘The hay is quite well aerated,’ I assured her.

At last it began to get dawn. Slots of grey came in place of slots of blue-black, all round the walls. There was twilight in the crate of a hay hut. I could distinguish the ladder and the rucksacks. Somewhere outside, I thought, drowsily, a boy was kicking a salmon tin down the street; till it struck me as curious, and I remembered it was only the sound of a cow-bell, or a goat-bell.

‘It’s morning,’ said Anita.

‘Call this morning?’ I groaned.

‘Are you warm, dear?’

‘Baked.’

‘Shall we get up?’

‘Yes. At all events we can be one degree more wretched and cold.’

‘I’m perfectly happy,’ she persisted.

‘You look it,’ I said.

Immediately she was full of fear.

‘Do I look horrid?’ she asked.

She was huddled in her coat: her tousled hair was full of hay.

I pulled on my boots and clambered through the square opening.

‘But come and look!’ I exclaimed.

It had snowed terrifically during the night; not down at our level, but a little higher up. We were on a grassy place, about half a mile across, and all round us was the blackness of pine-woods, rising up. Then suddenly in the middle air, it changed, and great peaks of snow balanced, intensely white, in the pallid dawn. All the upper world around us belonged to the sky; it was wonderfully white, and fresh, and awake with joy. I felt I had only to run upwards through the pine-trees, then I could tread the slopes that were really sky-slopes, could walk up the sky.

‘No!’ cried Anita, in protest, her eyes filling with tears. ‘No!’

We had quite a solemn moment together, all because of that snow. And the fearfully gentle way we talked and moved, as if we were the only two people God had made, touches me to remember.

‘Look!’ cried Anita.

I thought at least the Archangel Gabriel was standing beside me. But she only meant my breath, that froze while on the air. It reminded me.

‘And the cold!’ I groaned. ‘It fairly reduces one to an ash.’

‘Yes, my dear — we must drink tea,’ she replied solicitously. I took the can for water. Everything looked so different in the morning. I could find the marsh, but not the water bubbling up. Anita came to look for me. She was barefoot, because her boots were wet. Over the icy mown meadow she came, took the can from me, and found the spring. I went back and prepared breakfast. There was one little roll, some tea, and some schnapps. Anita came with water, balancing it gingerly. She had a distracted look.

‘Oh, how it hurts!’ she cried. ‘The ice-cold stubbles, like blunt icy needles, they did hurt!’

I looked at her bare feet and was furious with her.

‘No one,’ I cried, ‘but a lunatic, would dream of going down there barefoot under these conditions —’

‘“Under these conditions”,’ she mocked.

‘It ought to have hurt you more,’ I cried. ‘There is no crime but stupidity.’

‘“Crime but stupidity”,’ she echoed, laughing at me.

Then I went to look at her feet.

We ate the miserable knob of bread, and swallowed the tea. Then I bullied Anita into coming away. She performed a beautiful toilet that I called the ‘brave Tyrolese’, and at last we set out. The snow all above us was laughing with brightness. But the earth, and our boots, were soddened.

‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ cried Anita.

‘Yes — with feet of clay,’ I answered. ‘Wet, raw clay!’

Sobered, we squelched along an indefinite track. Then we spied a little, dirty farm-house, and saw an uncouth-looking man go into the cow-sheds.

‘This,’ I said, ‘is where the villains and robbers live.’

Then we saw the woman. She was wearing the blue linen trousers that peasant women wear at work.

‘Go carefully,’ said Anita. ‘Perhaps she hasn’t performed her toilet.’

‘I shouldn’t think she’s got one to perform,’ I replied.

It was a deadly lonely place, high up, cold, and dirty. Even in such a frost, it stank bravely beneath the snow peaks. But I went softly.

Seeing Anita, the woman came to the door. She was dressed in blue overalls, trousers and bodice, the trousers tight round the ankles, nearly like the old-fashioned leg-of-mutton sleeves. She was pale, seemed rather deadened, as if this continuous silence acted on her like a deadening drug. Anita asked her the way. She came out to show us, as there was no track, walking before us with strides like a man, but in a tired, deadened sort of way. Her figure was not ugly, and the nape of her neck was a woman’s, with soft wisps of hair. She pointed us the way down.

‘How old was she?’ I asked Anita, when she had gone back.

‘How old do you think?’ replied Anita.

‘Forty to forty-five.’

‘Thirty-two or three,’ answered Anita.

‘How do you know, any more than I?’

‘I am sure.’

I looked back. The woman was going up the steep path in a mechanical, lifeless way. The brilliant snow glistened up above, in peaks. The hollow green cup that formed the farm was utterly still. And the woman seemed infected with all this immobility and silence. It was as if she were gradually going dead, because she had no place there. And I saw the man at the cow-shed door. He was thin, sandy moustaches; and there was about him the same look of distance, as if silence, loneliness, and the mountains deadened him too.

We went down between the rocks, in a cleft where a river rushed. On every side, streams fell and bounded down. Some, coming over the sheer wall of a cliff drifted dreamily down like a roving rope of mist. All round, so white and candid, were the flowers they call Grass of Parnassus, looking up at us, and the regal black-blue gentian reared themselves here and there.

 

(The following ending was erased.)

 

We ran ourselves warm, but I felt as if the fires had gone out inside me. Down and down we raced the streams, that fell into beautiful green pools, and fell out again with a roar. Anita actually wanted to bathe, but I forbade it. So after two hours’ running downhill, we came out in the  level valley at Glashütte. It was raining now, a thick dree rain. We pushed on to a little Gasthaus, that was really the home of a forester. There the stove was going, so we drank quantities of coffee, ale, and went to bed.

‘You spent the night in a hay hut,’ said I to Anita. ‘And the next day in bed.’

‘But I’ve done it, and I loved it,’ said she. ‘And besides, it’s raining.’

And it continued to pour. So we stayed in the house of the Jäger, who had a good, hard wife. She made us comfortable. But she kept her children in hand. They sat still and good, with their backs against the stove, and watched.

‘Your children are good,’ I said.

‘They are wild ones,’ she answered, shaking her head sternly. And I saw the boy’s black eyes sparkle.

‘The boy is like his father,’ I said. She looked at him.

‘Yes — yes! perhaps,’ she said shortly.

But there was a proud stiffness in her neck, nevertheless. The father was a mark-worthy man, evidently. He was away in the forests now for a day or two. But he had photos of himself everywhere, a good-looking, well-made, conceited Jäger, who was photographed standing with his right foot on the shoulder of a slaughtered chamois. And soon his wife had thawed sufficiently to tell me: ‘Yes, he had accompanied the Crown Prince to shoot his first chamois.’ And finally, she recited to us this letter, from the same Crown Prince:

 

‘Lieber Karl, Ich möchte wissen wie und wann die letzte Gemse geschossen worden —’