Linnet: A Romance
such a village as this, who cares where he sleeps, or whether he sleeps
at all? He should be able to subsist here on scenery and the
affections.”
At the words, Florian’s head disappeared incontinently. That, surely,
was the unkindest cut of all. Thus convicted out of his own mouth, by
his familiar friend, he could but retire abashed to complete his toilet.
That Deverill should have slept all night long, while he lay awake, and
tossed, and turned, and wished ill to the whole ill-omened race of cows,
was bad enough in all conscience; but that he should pretend he _liked_
those disgusting bells was nothing short of atrocious.
He descended a little later to the homely parlour. Will was down there
before him, and had succeeded in ferreting out an old violin from a
corner cupboard. He was musical, was Will—not, to be sure, in the grand
perceptive and critical way, like Florian himself, who played no
instrument and understood all perfectly, but, after the inferior fashion
of the mere dexterous executant, who possesses a certain physical
suppleness and deftness of fingers to elicit from dumb strings the most
delicate fancies of a Mendelssohn or a Chopin. In pursuance of this
lesser gift of his—“the common faculty of the fiddler,” as Florian
called it—Will was just then engaged by the open window in playing over
to himself a pretty little song by some unknown composer. He played it
very well, too, Florian admitted, condescendingly; Will had a capital
ear, indeed, and was not without feeling of a sort, for the finer
touches in musical composition—up to a certain point, you know; not
quite, of course, to the high and delicate level of Florian’s own
cultivated and refined perceptions. It was a charming piece, however—a
very charming piece—and, after a while, Will began singing the words to
it. Florian listened with pleasure and a forgiving smile to the clever
twists and turns of that well-arranged melody.
As he stood there, listening, a little behind, one impressive forefinger
held up in an attitude of discriminative attention, he was aware of two
voices in the street outside catching up the tune naturally, and fitting
it as if in sport to shapeless syllables of their own invention. They
were women’s voices, too, young and rich and powerful; and what was
odder still, to Florian’s immense surprise, they took up their proper
parts as second and third in a concerted piece, like trained musicians.
Strange to find such finished vocalists in a mere peasant hamlet!—but,
there, no doubt they were some of Herr Hausberger’s Transatlantic
performers. Florian moved closer to the window to observe the unknown
but silvery-tongued strangers. As he did so, two plump and rosy-cheeked
mountain lasses, in homespun kirtles, fled, blushing and giggling, with
their hands to their mouths, away from the close scrutiny of the foreign
Herrschaft. Accustomed as he was by this time to marvellous
incongruities in this land of surprises, Florian could hardly believe
his own eyes when he further observed that the two girls with the divine
voices were driving cows home from the pasture to the milking shed.
Great heavens, yes! there was no gainsaying it. Shade of Wagner,
incredible! The accomplished vocalists whose fine sense of melody so
delighted his acute and critical ear were nothing but a pair of common
country milkmaids!
Will Deverill, too, had risen, and, with a friendly nod, was gazing out
appreciation at his unknown accompanists. Florian turned to him, all
amazement. “They _must_ have practised it before,” he cried. “They must
know it all of old. It must certainly be one of their own national
pieces.”
“Oh, no,” the poet replied in a very confident voice. “They can’t
possibly have heard it. It’s quite, quite new. I’m sure about that. It’s
never yet been published.”
“But, my dear fellow,” Florian exclaimed, with much argumentative heat,
“I assure you, none but the most instructed musicians could possibly
take up the right chords like that, and sing them second and third,
without having practised them beforehand. Allow me to know _something_
of the musical art. Even Patti herself——”
“Why, the song’s my own,” Will broke in, much amused, and unable to
restrain himself. “I ought to know; it was I who wrote it.”
“The words! ah, yes, to be sure; the words are nothing. They didn’t sing
_them_, of course; ’twas the melody they caught at. And the melody, I
venture to assert, without fear of contradiction—the melody, from the
peculiar way it modulates into the sub-dominant, must certainly be one
of their own love songs.”
“But I composed the tune too,” Will made answer with a quiet smile.
“It’s never been played before. It came up into my head in the railway
carriage yesterday, and seeing this old fiddle in the cupboard this
morning, I thought I’d try it over before scoring it down, just to hear
how it sounded.”
“_You_ wrote it!” Florian repeated, dazzled and stunned at the news.
“You compose as well as rhyme! You set your own songs to music, do you?
Well, upon my soul, Deverill, I hadn’t till this moment the slightest
idea you had such an accomplishment.”
“Oh, I’m only a beginner,” Will answered, with a faint blush, laying
down the violin,—“or rather an amateur, for I’ve always dabbled in it.
But I’ve only published one song. I just strum to amuse myself. Good
morning, Herr Hausberger; what an exquisite day! We’d better take
advantage of it for a climb up the Rauhenkopf.”
The landlord, dish in hand, bowed his courteous and courtly bow. There
was deference in it, without a tinge of servility. Florian noted with
approbation that mixture of independence and a just self-respect which
formed a component part of his preconceived idea of the Tyrolese
character. Andreas Hausberger was “right,” because he was very much as
Florian would have pictured him. “Yes; a very good day for the ascent,”
the landlord said, quietly. “We will put up some lunch—cold meat and
Pilsener. You’ll get a fine view, if you start in good time, over the
Zementhal glaciers.”
Florian sat down to the table, a trifle crestfallen; but the poached
eggs were excellent, and the coffee fragrant; and he consoled himself
for the cow-bells and the mishap about the song by the reflection that,
after all, these idyllic milkmaids, with the voice of a prima donna and
the manners of Arcadia, were in exact accordance with the operatic ideal
of his own imagined Tyrol. They sang like the Chorus of Happy Peasants;
they behaved as the mountain lass of poetry ought always to behave, and
as the mountain lass of reality often utterly fails to do.
That morning on the Rauhenkopf was to Florian a day of unmixed delights.
He was At Home with Nature. In a vague sort of way, without troubling
himself much to know anything about them, the town-bred philosopher
loved the fragrant fields, the beautiful flowers, the mossy rocks, the
bright birds, the chirping insects. And Will Deverill knew them
all—their names, and where to find them. The ragged, sweet-scented
pinks still loitered late in deep clefts of the glacier-worn rock; a few
stray sky-blue gentians still starred the rich patches of Alpine
pasture; emperors and orange-tips still flaunted their gaudy wings in
full autumn sunshine. Florian drank in all these things with pure
sensuous delight; the sweet sounds of the fields, the smell of tedded
kine filled his æsthetic soul, not so much with direct pleasure, as with
some faint afterglow of literary reminiscence.
At one of the little alp-huts among the higher pastures, Will Deverill
murmured a cheerful “Guten Morgen,” as he passed, to a buxom peasant
lass in a woollen kirtle, who stood busy at her churn by the door of her
châlet. The girl curtseyed, and looked back at them with such a
good-humoured smile that Florian, as an admirer of female beauty,
couldn’t resist the temptation of standing still for a moment to take a
good long gaze at her. “What’s she doing up here alone?” he asked at
last, turning curiously to Will, as the girl still smiled at him. “Does
she come up here every day? It’s a fearful long pull for her. But
then—this charming air! such strength! such agility!”
“Why, she lives here,” Will answered, surprised that anyone shouldn’t
know what to him was such an obvious and familiar fact. “She doesn’t
come up at all, except once in the spring; and in autumn she goes down
again. It must be nearly time for her to go down now, I should say.
There’s not much fodder left in these upper alps here.”
“Lives here!” Florian exclaimed, taken aback. “What?—and sleeps here as
well? You don’t mean to say she sleeps in that little wooden box there?”
“Certainly. She’s a _sennerin_, you know; it’s her business to do it.
All the alp girls live like that; they’ve been born and brought up to
it.”
In his innermost soul, Florian was dying to know what manner of wild
beast a _sennerin_ might be—being undecided in his own mind as to
whether it was most probably the name of a race, a religion, a caste, or
a profession. But it would have been treason to his principles to
confess this fact, so he compromised with his curiosity by murmuring
blandly in reply, “Oh, ay, to be sure, a _sennerin_! I might have
guessed it! Do you think now, Deverill, if we asked her very nicely,
she’d let us go in and inspect her châlet?”
“I’m sure she would,” Will answered, half repressing a smile. “They see
so little of any outsiders while they’re up here on their alps that
they’re only too glad, as a rule, when a stranger visits them. We’ll
give her a couple of kreuzers for a glass of milk; that’ll serve as an
introduction.”
He raised his hat jauntily, and approached the hut with a few words of
apology. The _sennerin_ smiled in return, bobbed, curtseying low, and
welcomed them affably to her hospitable shelter. After a minute’s parley
with Will, the good-humoured young woman brought out a jug of fresh
milk, still frothy from the cow, and poured it out for them liberally in
a blue stoneware mug. Will drank his off at a draught; Florian hated
milk, but as admirer of female beauty—she was a good-looking wench—he
gulped it down to the dregs without even a grimace, and handed the mug
back again. Then Deverill talked for a while with their sunburnt
entertainer in that unknown tongue which Florian didn’t understand;
though he could see from their laughing faces and their quick tones of
repartee that she was a merry brown lass, shy and bashful indeed before
the foreign gentlefolk, but frank and fearless for all that as his soul
could wish, and absolutely free from the absurd conventionalities and
_mauvaise honte_ of the women who dwell in our too civilised cities. She
was no more afraid of men than of oxen. Florian liked that well. Here,
at least, was true freedom; here, at least, was ancestral simplicity of
life; here the woman held her own on equal terms with the man; here love
was unfettered by law or by gold, untrammelled by those hampering
inconvenient restraints of parental supervision, society, or
priestcraft, which impede its true course in our too complex
communities. Florian’s lungs breathed freer in this rarified air: he had
risen above the zone of Mrs Grundy.
At the end of their brisk colloquy, which he followed but in part, the
_sennerin_, with a gesture of countrified courtesy, turned to the door
with a pretty smile and waved Florian into her châlet. “She says you may
look over it and welcome,” Will Deverill explained, interrupting.
Florian, nothing daunted, entered and gazed around. It was a rough log
hut, divided into two rooms by a wooden partition—a big one, with a
door behind, for the cows and calves; and a little one, with a door in
front, for the _sennerin’s_ own bedchamber, kitchen, and parlour. The
chief article of furniture seemed to him to consist of a great black