Linnet: A Romance
been nobody at all; as William or Thomas or Henry or George, he would
have been lost in the multitudinous deep sea of London. But his parents
had the glorious inspiration of dubbing him Florian, and it acted like a
charm: all went well in life with him. A baronetcy would have been a far
less valuable social passport—for there are many baronets, but only one
Florian. Before the romantic rarity of that unique Christian name, the
need for a surname paled and faded away into utter nothingness. Nobody
ever dreamt of calling him “Wood”: they spoke of Florian as they once
spoke of “Randolph.” On this somewhat illogical but very natural ground,
he became from his schooldays upward the spoiled child of society. He
was a toy—a plaything. Clubs hung on his clear voice; women petted and
made much of him. When you talk of a man always by his Christian name
alone, depend upon it, he becomes in the end as one of the family: mere
association of ideas begets in you at last a friendly—nay, almost a
fraternal feeling towards him.
They walked along briskly in the direction of Zell, Florian humming as
he went a few stray snatches of Tyrolese songs (or what pass in the
world for such), by way of putting himself in emotional harmony with the
environment. For Florian was modern, intensely modern. He played with
science as he played with everything else; and he could talk of the
environment by the hour with the best of them, in his airy style, as if
environments and he had been lifelong companions. But Zell itself, when
they got to it, failed somehow to come up to either of their
expectations. Florian would have made the valley narrower, or
transplanted the village three hundred feet higher up the slope of the
hill. As for Will Deverill, less critical of Nature’s handicraft, he
found the inns over-civilised; the _Post_ and the _Bräu_ were too fine
for his taste: they had come thus far in search of solitude and Alpine
wilds, and they lighted instead on a sort of miniature Grindelwald, with
half-a-dozen inns, a respectable café, experienced (or in other words
extortionate) guides, and a regular tourist-trap for the sale of
chamois-horns and carved models of châlets. “This will never do!” Will
Deverill exclaimed, gazing round him in disgust at the Greiderer Hotel
and the comfortable Welschwirth. “This is pure civilisation!”
And Florian, looking down instinctively at his dust-encumbered boots,
murmured with a faint sigh, “A perfect Bond Street!” For Florian loved
to do everything “consummately,”—’twas his own pet adverb; he aimed at
universality, but he aimed quite as much at perfection in detail of the
most Pharisaical description. In Piccadilly, he went clad in a faultless
miniature frock-coat, surmounted by the silken sheen of Lincoln and
Bennet’s glossiest; but if he made up his mind to Alps and snow-fields,
then Alps he would have, pure, simple, and unadulterated. No half-way
houses for him! He would commune at first hand with the eternal hills;
he would behold the free life of the mountain folk in all its
unsophisticated and primitive simplicity.
So he gazed at his Tom Thumb boots with a regretful eye, and murmured
pensively once more, “A perfect Bond Street!”
“What shall we do now?” Will Deverill asked, stopping short and glancing
ahead towards the glaciers that close the valley.
“See that village on the left there,” Florian answered, in a rapt tone
of sudden inspiration, seizing his arm theatrically; “—no, _not_ the
lower one on the edge of the level, but that high-perched group of
little wooden houses with the green steeple by the edge of the ravine:
what a magnificent view of the snow-fields to the south! From there, one
must look at a single glance over all the spreading fingers and
ramifications of the valley.”
“Perhaps there’s no inn there,” Will responded, dubiously.
“No inn! You prate to me of inns?” Florian exclaimed, striking an
attitude. “In full view of these virgin peaks, you venture to raise a
question of mere earthly bedrooms—landlord, waiter, chambermaid! Who
cares where he sleeps—or whether he sleeps at all—in such a village as
that?” He struck his stick on the ground hard to enforce and emphasise
the absoluteness of his determination. “The die is cast,” he cried, with
the Caesaric firmness of five-feet-nothing. “We cross the stream at
once, and we make for the village!”
“Well, there’s probably somewhere we can put up for the night and
reconnoitre the neighbourhood,” Will Deverill answered, as he followed
his friend’s lead. “If the worst comes to the worst, we can fall back
upon Zell; but the priest will most likely find us a lodging.”
No sooner said than done. They mounted the steep slope, and rose by
gentle zig-zags towards the upland hamlet. At each step they took, the
view over the glacier-bound peaks that close the glen to southward,
opened wider and wider. Near an Alpine farmhouse they paused for breath.
It was built of brown wood, toned and darkened by age, with projecting
eaves and basking southern front, where endless cobs of Indian corn in
treble tiers and rows hung out drying in the sunshine. Florian drank in
the pretty picture with the intense enjoyment of youth and health and a
rich sensuous nature. There was a human element, too, giving life to the
foreground. Three Tyrolese children, a boy and two girls, in costumes
more obtrusively national than they had yet observed, stood playing with
one another on the platform in front of the farmhouse. Florian beamed on
them, enchanted. “What innocence!” he cried, ecstatically. “What
untrammelled forms! What freedom of limb! What Hellenic suppleness! How
different from the cramped motions of our London-bred children! You can
see in a moment those vigorous young muscles have strengthened
themselves from the cradle in the bracing air of the mountains—so fresh
they are, so lithe, so gracious, so lissom! I recognise there at once
the true note of the Tyrol.”
As he spoke, the younger girl, playing roughly with the boy, gave him a
violent push which nearly sent him over into a neighbouring puddle. At
that, the elder sister clutched her hard by the wrist and gave her a
good shaking, observing at the same time in very familiar accents:
“Naow then, Mariar-Ann, if you do like that to ’Arry agin, I’ll tike you
stright in, an’ tell your mother.”
It was the genuine unmistakable Cockney dialect!
In an agony of injured nerves, Florian seized the elder girl by the
collar of her dress, and, holding her at arm’s-length, as one might do
some venomous reptile, demanded of her, sternly, in his severest tone:
“Now, where on earth did you ever learn English?”
The little Tyrolese, trembling violently in his grasp, stammered out in
deadly fear: “Wy, o’ course, in London.”
“Pa was a waiter at the Criterion,” the younger sister volunteered in a
shrill little voice from a safe distance; “and ma’s an Englishwoman.
We’ve come ’ere to retire. Pa’s tiken the farm. But _we_ can’t none of
us speak any German.”
Florian relaxed his grasp, a dejected, dispirited, disappointed
mannikin. “Go, wretched little mudlark!” he exclaimed, with a frank
gesture of discomfiture, flinging her from him as he spoke. “There
isn’t, there never was, any objective Tyrol!”
The child retreated prudently to the safe shelter of the doorway, before
venturing on a repartee. Then she put out her tongue and took up a stone
in her hand. “Who are you a-callin’ a mudlark?” she answered, with the
just indignation of injured innocence. “If my pa was ’ere ’e’d punch yer
bloomin’ ’ead for yer.”
It ill became Florian Wood, that man of taste, to bandy words before the
eternal hills with social waifs from the slums of Drury Lane. He strode
on up the path in moody silence. It was some minutes, indeed, before he
had sufficiently recovered from this crushing blow to murmur in a
subdued voice: “What an incongruous circumstance!”
“Not so unusual as you’d suppose, though,” his companion answered with a
smile; for he knew the Tyrol. “There are no people on earth so vagrant
in their ways as the Tyrolese. They go away as pedlars, musicians, or
waiters; but when they’ve made their pile, almost without exception,
they come back in the end to their native valleys. I’ve more than once
met hunters or farmers in these upland glens who spoke to me in English,
not always without a tinge of American accent. Perhaps it’s not so much
that these people emigrate as that they always come back again. They
think other countries good enough to make money in, but the Zillerthal’s
the one place where they’d care to spend it.”
Florian answered nothing. He strode on, sore distressed. The only Tyrol
worth tuppence, he now knew to his cost, was the one he had erected,
anterior to experience, in his own imagination.
CHAPTER II
A FRESH ACQUAINTANCE
It was a steep pull up to the little village on the hill, which Florian
had selected by pure intuition for their immediate headquarters. But
once they had arrived there the glorious panorama which disclosed itself
in one burst to their enchanted eyes made them forget the fatigues of
their long tramp to reach it. The village was a tiny one, but comely and
prosperous; composed of great farm-houses with big boulders piled high
on their shingled roofs to keep them in place, and a quaint old church,
whose tall and tapering spire was prettily tiled with bright green
slates, after the country fashion. Moreover, what was more important
just then to the footsore travellers, a hospitable _wirthshaus_ or
village inn occupied a place of honour on the small green in the centre.
It was cheerful though homely, and clean in a certain rough countrified
way; and it faced due south, toward the sun and the snow-fields. Florian
saw at a glance there would be a ravishing outlook from the bedroom
windows; and Will Deverill, more practical, and better accustomed to
these out-of-the-way nooks, felt inclined to believe they might count at
least on decent beds, plain wholesome fare, fresh trout from the stream,
and sweet venison from the mountains.
The name over the door was Andreas Hausberger. Will entered the inn with
a polite inclination of the head, and inquired in his very best German
of the first man he saw if he could speak with the landlord.
“I am he,” the stranger said, drawing himself up with much dignity.
“This inn is my Schloss. My name is Hausberger.”
Will Deverill surveyed him with a critical air. He had seen such men
before; they are not uncommon in the rural Tyrol. Tall, powerful,
big-built, with a resolute face and a determined mien, he looked like a
man well able to keep order among the noisy frequenters of his rustic
tavern. For the _wirth_ or innkeeper of these remote villages is often,
after the priest, the most important personage of the little community:
he represents the temporal as the _pfarrer_ represents the spiritual
authority. The owner of four or five horses, the entertainer of strange
guests, the dispenser of liquor to the countryside, the organiser of
festivals, marriage-feasts, and dances, the proprietor of the one club
and assembly-room of the village, the _wirth_ is necessarily a man of
mark and of local position, beyond anything that is usual with his kind
elsewhere. In the communal council his voice is supreme; the parlour is
his court-house: he settles all quarrels, attests all deeds, arranges
all assemblies, and assists, as a matter of course, at all rural
ceremonies.
“Can we have rooms here for a week?” Will inquired, still in German.
The landlord led them upstairs and showed them two bedrooms on the first
floor, roughly furnished, but neat, and, as Florian had foreseen, with a
glorious outlook. Will proceeded to inquire, as interpreter for the