Together

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

IT rains.

It has rained ever since our arrival in this green Alpine village; rained not heavily but with a grim Scotch persistence-the kind of drizzle that will tempt some old Aberdonian, sitting unconcernedly in soaking grass by the wayside, to look up and remark: "The roads is something saft." Are we going to have a month of Landregen, as they call it? No matter. Anything for fresh air; anything to escape from the pitiless blaze of the South, and from those stifling nights when your bedroom grows into a furnace, its walls exuding inwardly all the fiery beams they have sucked up during the endless hours of noon. Let it rain!

Little I thought ever to become a guest in this tavern, familiar as it is to me from olden days. They have made us extremely comfortable. Nothing is amiss, nothing lacking. Our rooms are large and well furnished. Certain preliminary operations were of course necessary in regard to the beds. Away first of all with the Keilpolster, that wedge-shaped horror; away next with the Plumeau, another invention of the devil. And breakfast always up here please, for both of us, in my room, at half-past seven; seeing that work begins at eight sharp. Not less than a litre of milk for my friend, and two eggs; he is a milk-and-egg maniac. I am past his stage, though still young enough to revel in that delicious raspberry jelly. Why is it almost unknown in England?

On one side of my room hangs an oleograph which depicts a gay sportsman aiming at some chamois from behind a tree at twenty-five yards' distance; such luck never came my way. The picture on the further side is still more suggestive-three roe-deer, hotly pursued by a dachshund; a pug-dog would have an equal chance of success. Cheerful pictures of this kind should hang in every room. I shall look at them whenever I feel jaundiced. Our tavern by the way is famous for its dachshunds. They have a couple of thoroughbreds, with faces like orchids, who eat and sleep most of the day and whose descendants are rapidly stocking the neighborhood. Their numerous progeny drop in for a visit from the remotest villages, and are coldly received by the parents. Just now the gentleman is asleep and his spouse, not for the first time, indulging in an agitated flirtation with one of her own remote descendants who has not yet found a home for himself: a very bad example to the rest of us....

Through the silvery curtain of drizzle I glance eastwards and recognize the old, old view, the earliest that ever greeted my eyes; for our nursery windows, up yonder, looked also towards the rising sun, and once, not in the day but late at night, I was lifted out of bed and placed on the window-sill to behold a wondrous thing-the sky all a-glister with livid rays. This aurora borealis is my first memory of life and the apparition must have been recorded in the newspapers of the day, since it was the only "Nordlicht" ever seen, to my knowledge, in the country; the vexed question, therefore, of a man's earliest memory could be settled, so far as I am concerned, if one had the energy to hunt up the files. There, confronting me on its hillock, stands the church with red-topped steeple. During the war, the authorities carried off the four bells to be melted down; three new ones have since been purchased at Innsbruck. They chime pleasantly enough, but not quite the same as of yore. One would like to hear the old ones again, for memory's sake, after all these years. How gayly they used to tremble on the air at midday, while one roamed about the hills at the back of the house. And how one rushed down to be in time for luncheon, seated on a fir-branch; an excellent method of progression on steep, slippery meadows, provided there be no stones or wasps' nests on the track. One day, long ago, we three slid in this fashion and at a breathless speed down the never-ending slopes of the Furkla alp above Bludenz. Nothing happened till about half-way, when the eldest felt a jolt, a slight cavity in the ground, and called out to me to beware. It was too late; I was pitched in and out again. My sister who followed, carrying less weight, came to rest there. The cavity was a wasps' nest. Eight stings....

And the church is backed by a mountain called Hoher Frassen; even at this distance one can detect a belt of green stretching across its middle near the scattered houses of Ludescherberg; wonderful, what manure will do! Everybody goes up the Hoher Frassen (vulgo Pfannenknecht) on account of the view, which is remarkable considering its low elevation of not even two thousand meters, though personally, if one must climb places like this, I should prefer the Mondspitze or Hochgerach. You can ascend in early morning from Bludenz or anywhere else, catch a glimpse of the Rhine and Lake Constance and snow peaks innumerable-of half this small province of Vorarlberg, in fact-and be home again in time for a late luncheon. Near the top is the now inevitable hut for the convenience of fat tourists. Cows pasture about the summit among the Alpine roses and dwarf pines.[1] Here, at the right season, you may capture as many Apollo butterflies as you please. A little boy and girl, scrambling homeward one day from this summit, dislodged with infinite trouble a huge bowlder and, while somebody was not looking, sent it on a career of delirious leaps down the incline above Raggal village. Such was its momentum after a couple of hundred yards that it went clean through a hay-hut, empty but solid, tossing its wooden blocks into the air as if they were feathers. The destruction of some poor peasant's property was considered a great joke. We laughed over it for weeks and weeks.

On the other side of our valley one can discern, despite the rain, those peaks of the Rhætikon group. They have been powdered with freshly fallen snow almost down to the Kloster alp, where cows are grazing at this moment. The Kloster alp, on which I have passed many nights with no companion save a rifle, is forever memorable in my annals as being the spot where, at the age of six, I smoked my first cigar. We were on an excursion and somebody-the little Dr. Zimmermann, I daresay, the blithe veterinary surgeon-gave me, doubtless at my repeated and urgent solicitation, a long black Virginia, a so-called rat's tail, the strongest weed manufactured by the Austrian Government. Delighted with my luck, I puffed through an inch or so. Then, without any warning, death and darkness compassed me about. Death and darkness! The world was turned inside out; so was I. Not for several weeks did I try tobacco again; this time only a cigarette and in a more appropriate locality; even that made me rather unhappy. Here, on the cliffs just above the Kloster alp, you used to be able to gather a bouquet of Edelweiss with your eyes shut, so to speak; here, among the tumbled fragments of rock further on, was a numerous colony of marmots. Never, in my bloodthirstiest days, had I the heart to shoot one of these frolicsome beasts, whose settlements are scattered over most of our mountains at the proper elevation. They call them "Burmentli" in our dialect-a pungent variety of alemannic-and their fat is supposed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to; it is chiefly on account of this fat that they have been persecuted in all parts of the Alps, and exterminated in not a few. Their cheery whistle carries half a mile; if you sit perfectly motionless, they will creep out of their burrows, one by one, and frisk and gambol around you. Once, at Christmas, a hunter brought me a hibernating marmot which he had taken, together with its whole family, out of winter-quarters. I put it, drowsy but half-awake, into a cold room, where it immediately rolled itself under a

bundle of hay. There it slept, week after week. A marmot in this condition is cold to the touch but not altogether stiff, and Professor Mangili calculated long ago that during the whole of its six months' lethargy it respires only 71,000 times (awake, 72,000 times in two days)-a veritable death-in-life! Mine displayed no resentment at being aroused now and then in a warm room; indeed, it behaved with exemplary meekness and allowed itself to be pinched or caressed or carried about; but preferred sleeping, and always seemed to say, in the words of the poet's sluggard, "You have waked me too soon! I must slumber again." When summer came round, we took it back to its old home, where it trotted off without a word of thanks, as if the past experiences in our valley had been nothing but a silly dream.

One would hardly think that marmots ever fed each other, yet a skull in my collection makes me wonder how this particular animal, an old beast, can have survived without receiving nourishment from its fellows. It was shot near St. Gallenkirch in the Montavon valley on September 12th, 1886; and is remarkable since, in consequence of what looks like the fracture of a single incisor tooth, the lower jaw has been partially and slowly displaced, shifted to one side of the upper-at the cost, no doubt, of incessant pain. What happened? All four incisors therewith became not only useless but an intolerable hindrance; lacking the necessary attrition, they grew ever longer in mammoth-like curves, and sharply pointed; the shortest-the injured one, which is still deprived of enamel at its extremity-measures six and a half centimeters in length, the longest all but eight; and one of them, in the course of its circular development, has actually begun to bore into the bone of the upper jaw. I am...