by Ouida
In the next school Herr Joachim himself, who took no notice of their entrance, was giving a simple little lecture on the useful herbs and the edible tubers, the way to know them and to turn them to profit. There were several girls listening here.
‘Those girls will not poison their people at home with a false cryptogram,’ said Wanda, as they passed on to another place, where a lesson on farriery and the treatment of cattle was going on, and another where a teacher was instructing a mixed group of boys and little maidens in the lore of the forests, of the grasses, of the various causes that kill a tree in its prime, of the insects that dwell in them, and of the different soils that they needed. In another chamber there was a spinning-class and a sewing-class under a kindly-faced old dame; and in yet another there were music-classes, some playing on the zither, and others singing part-songs and glees with baby voices.
‘Now you have seen all I have to show you,’ said Wanda. ‘In these two other châlets are the workshops, where the boys learn any trade they choose, and the girls are also taught to make a shoe or a jacket. My children would not pass examinations in cities, certainly; but they are being fitted in the best way they can for their future life, which will pass either in these mountains and forests, as I hope, or in the armies of the Emperor, and the humble work-a-day ways of poor folks everywhere. If there be a Grillparzer or a Kaulbach amongst them, the education is large and simple enough to let the originality he has been born with develop itself; if, as is far more likely, they are all made of ordinary human stuff, then the teaching they receive is such as to make them contented, pious, honest, and useful working people. At least that is what I strive for; and this is certain, that the children come some of them a German mile and more with joy and willingness to their schools, and that this at least they take away with them into their future life — the sense of duty as a supreme rein over all instincts, and mercifulness towards every living thing that God has given us.’
She had spoken with unusual animation, and with an earnestness that brought warmth over her cheek and moisture into her eyes.
Sabran looked at her timidly; then as timidly he touched the tips of her fingers, and raised them to his lips.
‘You are a noble woman,’ he said very low; a sense of his own utter unworthiness overwhelmed him and held him mute.
She glanced at him in some surprise, vaguely tinged with displeasure.
‘There are schools on every estate,’ she said, a little angrily and disconnectedly. ‘These are modelled on my own whim; that is all. The world would say I ought to teach these little peasants the science that dissects its own sources, and the philosophies that resolve all creation into an egg. But I follow ancient ways enough to think the country life the best, the healthiest, the sweetest: it is for this that they are born, and to this I train them. If we had more naturalists we should have fewer Communists.’
‘Yes, Audubon would scarcely have been a regicide, or Humboldt a Camorrist,’ he answered her, regaining his self-possession. ‘No doubt a love of nature is a triple armour against self-love. How can I say how right I think your system with these children? You seem not to believe me. There is only one thing in which I differ with you; you think the ‘eyes that see’ bring content. Surely not! surely not!’
‘It depends on what they see,’ she said meditatively. ‘When they are wide open in the woods and fields, when they have been taught to see how the tree-bee forms her cell and the mole his fortress, how the warbler builds his nest for his love and the water-spider makes his little raft, how the leaf comes forth from the hard stem and the fungi from the rank mould, then I think that sight is content — content in the simple life of the woodland place, and in such delighted wonder that the heart of its own accord goes up in peace and praise to the Creator. The printed page may teach envy, desire, covetousness, hatred, but the Book of Nature teaches resignation, hope, willingness to labour and live, submission to die. The world has gone further and further from peace since larger and larger have grown its cities and its shepherd kings are no more.’
He was silent.
Her voice moved him like sweet remembered music; yet in his own remembrance what were there? Only ‘envy, desire, covetousness, hatred,’ the unlovely shapes that were to her as emblems of the powers of evil. His reason was with her, and his emotions were with her also, but memory was busy in him, and in it he saw ‘as in a glass darkly,’ all his passionate, cold, embittered youth, all his warped, irresolute, useless, and untrue manhood.
‘Do not think,’ she added, unconscious of the pain that she had caused him, ‘that I undervalue the blessing of great books; but I do think that, to recognise the beauty of literature, as much culture and comprehension are needed as to understand Leonardo’s painting, or the structure of Wagner’s music. Those who read well are as rare as those who love well. The curse of our age is superficial knowledge; it is a cryptogram of the rankest sort, and I will not let my scholars touch it. Do you not think it is better for a country child to know what flowers are poisonous for her cattle, and what herbs are useful in her neighbours’ fever, than to be able to spell through a Jesuit’s newspaper, or suck evil from a Communist’s pamphlet? You will not have your horse well shod if the smith be thinking of Bakounine while he hammers the iron.’
‘I have held the views of Bakounine myself,’ said Sabran, with hesitation. ‘I do not know what you will think of me. I have even been tempted to be an anarchist, a Nihilist.’
‘You speak in the past tense. You must have abandoned those views? You are received at Frohsdorf?’
‘They have, perhaps, abandoned me. My life has been idle, sinful often. I have liked luxury, and have not denied myself folly. I recognised the absurdity of such a man as I was joining in any movement of seriousness and self-negation, so I threw away my political persuasions, as one throws off a knapsack when tired of a journey on foot.’
‘That was not very conscientious, surely?’
‘No, madame. It is perhaps, however, better than helping to adjust the contradictions of the world with dynamite. And I cannot even claim that they were persuasions; I fear they were mere personal impatience with narrow fortunes and useless ambitions.’
‘I cannot pardon anyone of an old nobility turning Republican; it is like a son insulting the tombs of his fathers!’ she said, with emphasis; then, fearing she had reproved him too strongly, she added, with a smile, ‘And yet I also could almost join the anarchists when I see the enormous wealth of baseborn speculators and Hebrew capitalists in such bitter contrast with the hunger of the poor, who starve all over the world in winter like birds frozen on the snow. Oh, do not suppose that, though I am an Austrian, I cannot see that feudalism is doomed. We are still feudal here, but then in so much we are still as we were in crusading days. The nobles have been, almost everywhere except here, ousted by capitalists, and the capitalists will in turn be devoured by the democracy. Les loups se mangeront entre eux. You see, though I may be prejudiced, I am not blind. But you, as a Breton, should think feudalism a loss, as I do.’
‘In those days, Barbe Bleue or Gilles de Retz were the nearest neighbours of Romaris,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Yet if feudalism could be sure of such châtelaines as the Countess von Szalras, I would wish it back to-morrow.’
‘That is very prettily put for a Socialist. But you cannot be a Socialist. You are received at Frohsdorf. Bretons are always royal; they are born with the cultus of God and the King.’
He laughed a little, not quite easily.
‘Paris is a witch’s caldron, in which all cultes are melted down, and evaporate in a steam of disillusion and mockery; into the caldron we have long flung, alas! cross and crown, actual and allegoric. I am not a Breton; I am that idle creation of modern life, a boulevardier.’
‘But do you never visit Romaris?’
‘Why should I? There is nothing but a few sea-tormented oaks, endless sands, endless marshes, and a dark dirty village jammed among rocks, and reeking with the smell of the oil an
d the fish.’
‘Then I would go and make the village clean and the marshes healthy, were I you. There must be something of interest in any people who remain natural in their ways and dwell beside a sea, Is Romaris not prosperous?’
‘Prosperous! God and man have forgotten it ever since the world began, I should say. It is on a bay, so treacherous that it is called the Pool of Death. The landes separate it by leagues from any town. All it has to live on is the fishing. It is dull as a grave, harried by every storm, unutterably horrible.’
‘Well, I would not forsake its horrors were I a son of Romaris,’ she said softly; then, as she perceived that some association made the name and memory of the old Armorican village painful to him, she blew the whistle she always used, and at the summons the eldest pupil of the school, a handsome boy of fourteen, came out and stood bareheaded before her.
‘Hansl, ask the teachers to grant you all an hour’s frolic, that you may amuse this gentleman,’ she said to him. ‘And, Hansl, take care that you do your best, all of you, in dancing, wrestling, and singing, and above all with the zither, for the honour of the empire.’
The lad, with a face of sunshine, bowed low and ran into the school-houses.
‘It is almost their hour for rest, or I would not have disturbed them,’ she said to him. ‘They come here at sunrise; bring their bread and meat, and milk is given them; they disperse according to season, a little before sunset. They have two hours’ rest at different times, but it is hardly wanted, for their labours interest them, and their classes are varied.’
Soon the children all trooped out, made their bow or curtsey reverently, but without shyness, and began with song and national airs played on the zither or the ‘jumping wood.’ Their singing and music were tender, ardent, and yet perfectly precise. There was no false note or slurred passage. Then they danced the merry national dances that make gay the long nights in the snow-covered châlets in many a mountain village which even the mountain letter-carrier, on his climbing irons, cannot reach for months together when all the highlands are ice. They ended their dances with the Hungarian czardas, into which they threw all the vigour of their healthful young limbs and happy hearts.
‘My cousin Egon taught them the czardas; have you ever seen the Magyar nobles in the madness of that dance?’
‘Your cousin Egon? Do you mean Prince Vàsàrhely?’
‘Yes. Do you know him?’
‘I have seen him.’
His face grew paler as he spoke. He ceased to watch with interest the figures of the jumping children in their picturesque national dress, as they whirled and shouted in the sunshine on the green turf, with the woods and the rocks towering beyond them.
When the czardas was ended, the girls sat down on the sward to rest, and the boys began their leaping, running, and stone-heaving, with their favourite wrestling at the close.
‘They are as strong as chamois,’ she said to him. ‘There is no need here to have a gymnasium. Their mountains teach them climbing, and every Sunday on their village green their fathers make them wrestle and shoot at marks. The favourite sport here is one I will not countenance — the finger-hooking. If I gave the word any two of those little fellows would hook their middle fingers together and pull till a joint broke.’
The boys were duly commended for their skill, and Sabran would have thrown them a shower of florin notes had she allowed it. Then she bade them sing as a farewell the Kaiser’s Hymn.
The grand melody rolled out on the fresh clear Alpine air in voices as fresh and as clear, that went upward and upward towards the zenith like the carol of the larks.
‘I would fain be the Emperor to have that prayer sung so for me,’ said Sabran, with truth, as the glad young voices dropped down into silence — the intense silence of the earth where the glaciers reign.
‘He heard them last year, and he was pleased,’ she said, as the children raised a loud ‘Hoch!’ made their reverence once more at a sign of dismissal from her, and vanished in a proud and happy crowd into the schoolhouses.
‘Do you never praise them or reward them?’ he asked in surprise.
‘Santa Claus rewards them. As for praise, they know when I smile that all is well.’
‘But surely they have shown very unusual musical talent?’
‘They sing well because they are well taught. But they are not any of them going to become singers. Those zithers and part-songs will all serve to enliven the long nights of the farmhouse or the summer solitude of the cattle-hut. We do not cultivate music one-half enough among the peasantry. It lightens labour; it purifies and strengthens the home-life; it sweetens black-bread. Do you remember that happy picture of Jordaens’ “Where the old sing, the young chirp,” where the old grandfather and grandmother, and the baby in its mother’s arms, and the hale five-year-old boy, and the rough servant, are all joining in the same melody, while the goat crops the vine-leaves off the table? I should like to see every cottage interior like that when the work was done. I would hang up an etching from Jordaens where you would hang up, perhaps, the programme of Proudhon.’
Then she walked back with him through the green sun-gleaming woods.
‘I hope that I teach them content,’ she continued. ‘It is the lesson most neglected in our day. “Niemand will ein Schuster seyn; Jederman ein Dichter.” It is true we are very happy in our surroundings. A mountaineer’s is such a beautiful life; so simple, healthful, hardy, and fine; always face to face with nature. I try to teach them what an inestimable joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the prosaic views of rural life. It is true that the peasant digging his trench sees the clod, not the sky but then when he does lift his head the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling. That is so much in itself. And here the sky is an everlasting grandeur: clouds and domes of snow are blent together. When the stars are out above the glaciers how serene the night is, how majestic! even the humblest creature feels lifted up into that eternal greatness. Then you think of the home-life in the long winters as dreary; but it is not so. Over away there, at Lahn, and other places on the Hallstadtersee, they do not see the sun for five months; the wall of rock behind them shuts them from all light of day; but they live together, they dance, they work. The young men recite poems, and the old men tell tales of the mountains and the French war, and they sing the homely songs of the Schnaderhupfeln. Then when winter passes, when the sun comes again up over the wall of rocks, when they go out into the light once more, what happiness it is! One old man said to me, ‘It is like being born again!’ and another said, ‘Where it is always warm and light I doubt they forget to thank God for the sunshine;’ and quite a young child said, all of his own accord, ‘The primroses live in the dusk all the winter, like us, and then when the sun comes up we and they run out together, and the Mother of Christ has set the waters and the little birds laughing.’ I would rather have the winter of Lahn than the winter of Belleville.’
‘But they do go away from their mountains a good deal? One meets them — —’
‘My own people never do, but from the valleys around they go — yes, sometimes; but then they always come back. The Defereggenthal men, over yonder where you see those ice summits, constantly go elsewhere on reaching manhood; but as soon as they have made a little money they return to dwell at home for the remainder of their days. I think living amidst the great mountains creates a restfulness, a steadfastness in the character. If Paris were set amidst Alps you would have had Lamartine, you would not have had Rochefort.’
When she spoke thus of her own country, of her own people, all her coldness vanished, her eyes grew full of light, her reserve was broken up into animation. They were what she truly loved, what touched her affections and her sympathies.
When he heard her speak thus, he thought if any man should succeed in arousing in her the love and the loyalty that she gave her Austrian Alps, what treasures he would win, into what a kingdom he would enter! And then something that was perhaps higher than vanity and deeper than egotism s
tirring in him whispered. ‘If any, why not you?’
Herr Joachim had at a message from her joined them. He talked of the flowers around them and of the culture and flora of Mexico. Sabran answered him with apparent interest, and with that knowledge which he had always the presence of mind to recall at need, but his heart was heavy and his mind absent.
She had spoken to him of Romaris, and he had once known Egon Vàsàrhely.
Those two facts overshadowed the sweetness and sunshine of the day; yet he knew very well that he should have been prepared for both.
The Princess Ottilie, seated in her gilt wickerwork chair under the great yew on the south side of the house, saw them approach with pleasure.
‘Come and have a cup of tea,’ she said to them. ‘But, my beloved Wanda, you should not let the doctor walk beside you. Oh, I saw him in the distance; of course he left you before you joined me. He is a worthy man, a most worthy man; but so is Hubert, and you do not walk with Hubert and converse with him about flowers.’
‘Are you so inexorable as to social grades, madame? murmured Sabran, as he took his cup from her still pretty hand.
‘Most certainly!’ said the Princess, with a little, a very little, asperity. ‘The world was much happier when distinctions and divisions were impassable. There are no sumptuary laws now. What is the consequence? That, your bourgeoise ruins her husband in wearing gowns fit only for a duchess, and your prince imagines it makes him popular to look precisely like a cabman or a bailiff.’
‘And even in the matter of utility,’ said Sabran, who always agreed with her, ‘those sumptuary laws had much in their favour. If one look through the chronicles and miniatures, say of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, how much more sensible for the change of seasons and the ease of work seems the costume of the working people? The cotte hardie was a thousand times more comfortable and more becoming than anything we have. If we could dress once more as all did under Louis Treize gentle and simple would alike benefit.’