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The Brunnenmacher

NOW what may that old Brunnenmacher have looked like? I never saw him. I only know that, like my friend his son, he was the official water-expert of the town of Bludenz, that he was older than my father, and every bit as incurable a Bergfex—mountain-maniac. His nick-name, “Bühel-Toni,” suffices to prove this. Those two were always doing impossible things up there at the risk of their lives (it was thus, indeed, that my father was killed) either together, or alone, secretly, in emulation of each other. For in those days the whole of this province was virgin soil, so far as climbing was concerned, and numberless are the peaks they are supposed to have scaled for the first time. Yet neither of them, it seems, had ever tackled the Zimba, the noblest of those pinnacles of the Rhætikon group which I can see from this window, out there, on the other side of the valley, covered with fresh snow wherever snow can come to lie among its crags. The Zimba rises to a height of 2640 meters and was regarded as inaccessible by local chamois hunters who, for the rest, were under no obligation to scramble up places of this kind, their game being abundant lower down. Inaccessible! That annoyed these two Bergfexes all the more.

“Are you never going to try?” my father would ask.

Said the Brunnenmacher:

“I am an old man, and have at least three times as many children dependent on me as you have. That makes a difference. Besides, you are rich. Rich people can afford to break their necks. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? There it is, staring you in the face all day long. I could never resist the temptation, if I were in your place. Only think: it would be quite an unusual kind of honor for you, an Englishman, to have been the first up there. In fact, I confess I should feel a little jealous and sore about it, myself.”

So it went on for months or years, and each time they met, the Brunnenmacher would say:

“So-and-so now thinks of trying the Zimba. Are you going to let him have it his own way? Is he to get all the glory? Now’s your chance,” or else: “How about the Zimba? Still afraid? What a scandal. Ah, if I were only a few years younger!”

At last my father could bear it no longer and slunk out of the house one afternoon on his usual pretext—when anything risky had to be done—of going after chamois. He rolled himself in his blanket at the Sarotla alp, near the foot of the peak, and next day, somehow or other, set foot on the virgin summit. Imagine his disgust on finding there a Steinmandl, a cairn, containing a bottle with an affectionate letter to himself from “Bühel-Toni” who had sneaked up ages ago, all by himself, without saying a word to any one.

That is the history of the Zimba, which is now climbed by numerous tourists every year. No wonder; since all the difficult places have been made easy. Even so, the mountain has claimed its victims—three, within the last few years; one of them a tough old gentleman who, to test his nerve and muscle, insisted on “doing” the Zimba once a year. It was a sporting notion; the Zimba did him, in the end; he lies buried in the new Protestant cemetery at Bludenz. And if you like to scramble up from the Rellsthal flank, you may still have some fun. Not long ago a tourist actually died of fright while climbing down here. He had gone up by the ordinary route to the satisfaction of his guide who, being from the Montavon valley and anxious to get home as soon as possible (this is my own assumption) took him down by this almost perpendicular “short cut.” At a certain point the tourist declared that he could go neither forwards nor backwards, and was going to die then and there. Which he straightway proceeded to do, rather foolishly. But there are no limits to what a real tourist can accomplish. Along the extremely convenient track which scales the cliff between the Zalim alp and the Strassburger hut (Scesaplana district) two young men contrived to slip; they were shattered to fragments. Cleverest of all was the gentleman who lately achieved the distinction of dying from exposure on the Hoher Frassen. He ought to have left us word to say how the thing was done.

We do not always realize the difficulties of the pioneers. Among other matters, there were no shelter huts in those days. That which lies below the Zimba, on the Sarotla alp, is one of some fifty now scattered about the hills of this small province. The earliest of them all was the Lünersee hut which bears the name of my father; he was then president of our local section of the Alpine Club. Built for the convenience of visitors to the Scesaplana summit, this hut was swept into the lake long ago, with all it contained, by an avalanche. It is time another avalanche came along, for the place has grown into a caravanserai of the rowdiest description. Altogether, selfish as it may sound, I should not be sorry to see every one of these structures burnt to the ground, or otherwise obliterated. Their primary object, to afford shelter to bona fide climbers, is laudable; what they actually do, is to serve as hotels—not bad ones, either—to a crowd of summer visitors whose faces and clothes and manners are an outrage on the surroundings. Abolish the huts, or cut down their comforts and menus to what a climber might reasonably expect, and the objectionable “Hüttenwanzen” would evaporate. What are they doing among these mountains? Let them guzzle and perspire in Switzerland!...

My friend the younger Brunnenmacher, son of “Bühel-Toni,” was also official water-specialist and Bergfex; he may well have been the image of his father since, from all I have heard, he had the same character and therefore, according to a theory of my own, must have resembled him also in person. If that be so, we may take it for granted that the father was an unusually hirsute creature. The mere sight of his son, at the Bludenz swimming baths, used to send us into fits. Nobody had ever seen such a “Waldmensch.” He might have been a gorilla in this respect—an uncommon kind of gorilla; for not every gorilla, I fancy, can afford to wear a regular parting down its back. No gorilla, either, could climb in better style; or smile, if they smile at all, to better purpose. The Brunnenmacher’s laughing face charmed away hunger and fatigue and wet clothes and all the ills of mountaineering. It may seem far-fetched to apply the terms “ingenuous” or “childlike” to the smile of a bearded monster of forty, but there are no other epithets available for that of the Brunnenmacher. It rose to his lips, on seeing you; it hovered there day and night, waiting for your appearance. Doubtless he had a peculiar affection for me, as being my father’s son; everybody found him a lovable person.

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.

It was juniper-spirit, of the year 1882. With all respect for its antiquity, I found myself unable to appreciate the stuff. Then he gave me, as an antidote, some of his own Obstler (made of apples) only three weeks old. A little crude, but of good promise. So we went through the lot. His own Zwetschgenwasser—excellent! Then Kirsch, from the neighboring village of Tiefis, which makes a specialty of this Schnapps, distilled from the small mountain cherries; of mighty pleasant flavor. Next, Enzian; the product of the yellow Alpine gentian. Whoever likes Enzian—and who can help liking it?—will have nothing to say against that of our Silberthal, which has a well-deserved reputation for this brand. Beerler, I enquire? No, he says; nobody makes bilberry-spirit any more.

“Which is a pity.”

“This infernal war——”

“It has shattered all the refinements of life.”

So we discuss the world, and presently the proprietress comes up to announce that she has discovered coffee. I thought she would! She sent to Bludenz for it, on the sly. Now what, I ask, is her particular method of roasting?

“Why, in the oven, of course; and very carefully. Then, when the beans begin to sweat, and are neither lighter nor darker than a capuchin’s frock, I take them out and place them, steaming hot, into a glass jar and cover them at once with a thick layer of powdered sugar. There they get cold slowly and are obliged, you see, to draw in again all the fragrance which they would otherwise have lost. Isn’t that your English way?”

I wish it were....