When I ventured to quote from the calendar to Moidel, suggesting that at Jagdhaus it might certainly be the water, she remained impervious to any new views on the subject. "There was Milzbrand, and that might arise from the water, for all she knew, but at Jagdhaus it was a rod of God, which only prayer averted."
Adolf Trientl appears to be a Tyrolese priest, who travels annually through his native land watching closely the agriculture and domestic economy, and trying, countenanced by government, to help his country people to an easier working life, healthier houses and more profitable land. To the credit of the clergy of Brixen, his practical often pithy remarks are published in their church calendar. He and his colleagues must, however, use almost supernatural patience and energy before they can move a Tyroler one jot from the beaten path which his ancestors have taken for a thousand years before him. The people are perfectly content, it is pleaded, with the existing state of things: why should they change their sowing or ploughing any more than the sun his course or the mountains their position? Changes, like bad weather, breed discontent.
We had brought no books with us for our five days at the Olm, and in the pauses of our out-door enjoyment the calendar, greasy rather from contact with butter and milk than with fingers, afforded amusing, profitable reading: a lecture may often be pleasant to hear when not addressed to one's self.
Moidel, Jakob and Franz, though they had looked with blind eyes on the print, did not turn deaf ears when we spoke; only we had to manage that all we said and thought did not come as a quoted sermon, but as suggestions and inquiries from us, who did not know half as much about a dairy and farm-life as they did. First of all, we tried to make them believe that the staff of life need not of necessity be rye bread of so hard and flinty a nature as to require in every house a square wooden board and iron chopper to cut it.
"Yes," said Moidel, "it is very hard for old people, who must needs sop it, but while one's teeth are good the crunching is a pleasure. And then it must needs be dry, because the oven can only be heated once in three months. I wish it could come round oftener, for there is no going to bed on baking nights, with some three hundred loaves to pop into the oven."
"How could the poor bake often," suggested Jakob, "when there is only one oven amongst them in the village?"
"Why," said we, looking very learned, "you have a common schoolmaster, and a common swineherd, and a common goose-boy: why not have a common baker, who knew how to make good, light dough, and could bake a good batch of bread for each family weekly?"
To Franz, eating good bread only a few days old appeared woeful extravagance. "Bread," he said, "should be like rocks to last, not like snow to melt away. The rye meal would fly before the wind at that rate, and where would the poor man then be?"
Butter and cheese-making, however, involved hours of deep discussion. You would indeed have thought that man merely came into the world to make butter and cheese. Personal experience after two summers in the Tyrol had made us reflect very much upon the butter and cheese question. Whether regarded as a luxury or a necessity, the Swiss Gruyère and Emmenthal cheese and the fresh dainty pats of butter made the contrast striking in the Tyrol. The milk and cream were rich and delicious, but became simply loathsome when transformed into butter or cheese. We wondered how and why it was that we could never obtain perfectly palatable butter, until we discovered the universal practice of churning it, without salt, into huge oblong balls, large as the nave of a wheel, which naturally soon turn rancid. It does not on this account lose its value to the natives, who use very little butter, melting it down into a clarified dripping called Schmalz for their endless fryings and frizzlings. This badly made butter is, however, often adorned with the emblems of the Passion, such as the cross, ladder, crown of thorns and nails. It was so at the Hofbauer's Olm. It is considered to enhance the value of the butter Kugel or ball, especially when given to the priest in payment for masses said for dead relations. The Ursuline Sisters were paid for Moidel's education in butter.
And the native cheese!—meagre cheese, as it is justly called—a poor, insipid, not overclean curd cheese. The curds are often merely squeezed in a cloth, then turned out and placed upon an upper shelf to dry, where they look like the back portions of gigantic skulls until damp and mould somewhat destroy the resemblance. The kind called fat cheese is not much better. It is, however, made with greater care, and dried in bands of pine bark in the Alpine kitchen. This distasteful butter and cheese, the sole result of gallons of rich milk and cream and many a long summer week upon the lofty Alp, becomes still more distasteful when the milk and cream are kept in the one hot, over-crowded sleeping-room, or in a dairy where the goatherd sleeps amongst the milk-dishes. The mountain dwellings are dark and badly constructed, and if furnished with a proper dairy, the prejudiced housewife often refuses to use it, believing that cream will not set unless the milk is warm; thus, much becomes sour, and is either thrown away or turned into a still more inferior cheese. Or she purposely lets the cream become rancid before she churns, that the children may not take too great a fancy to the Schmalz, and thus it may last longer!
We had tasted already too much of this milky tree of knowledge not to learn with pleasure from the Brixen calendar that in different parts of the Tyrol co-operative sennereien had been started with the greatest success. A manager was employed in each who understood perfectly the Swiss mode of cheese-making and the best manner of churning. Thus, the most excellent produce was gained from the same, or rather from a smaller, quantity of milk, when the reckless waste was deducted. Each shareholder had the right of skimming the milk from his own cows, taking what he required for his personal use, or he might send his entire share of butter, cheese, whey and goats' milk with the common stock to market, where such co-operative wares already brought the highest price. Thus, the farmer gained both ways, not only receiving more money, but saving in dairy utensils, house room and fuel, and his wife in labor.
Great was our glee over these enlightened and successful efforts; but a friendly dispute immediately arose when one amongst us expressed a surprise that the half dozen bauers who shared the Olm in common did not manage matters on this improved principle. They would find themselves richer, more care-free men. Moidel declared her inability to form an opinion. Old Franz, however, had much to say. He thought it would be foolish. Why need the Hofbauer mix himself up with others, when he only wanted to make meagre cheese for family use, while if there were any over it always brought its worth in kreuzers at the market? And then the pounds and pounds of butter were all wanted for Schmalz. It might be sweeter, it is true, if they could melt it down at the hut, but then there was the fear of setting the place on fire, and the home-melted Schmalz went fast enough, as Moidel knew. And as for the artificial Schmalz which was being sold in the towns now, it was made of palm-oil, fresh suet and butter, and colored with the yellow dye called Orleans; and people praised this machine-made Schmalz and talked of progress! But he hoped, so long as he handled a frying-pan, to stick to good old Schmalz and good old ways.
MARGARET HOWITT.[TO BE CONTINUED.]
ON THE CHURCH STEPS
CHAPTER I
What a picture she was as she sat there, my own Bessie! and what a strange place it was to rest on, those church steps! Behind us lay the Woolsey woods, with their wooing fragrance of pine and soft rushes of scented air; and the lakes were in the distance, lying very calm in the cloud-shadows and seeming to wait for us to come. But to-day Bessie would nothing of lakes or ledges: she would sit on the church steps.
In front of us, straight to the gate, ran a stiff little walk of white pebbles, hard and harsh as some bygone creed.
"Think of little bare feet coming up here, Bessie!" I said with a shiver. "It is too hard. And every carriage that comes up the hill sees us."
"And why shouldn't they see us?" said my lady, turning full upon me. "I am not ashamed to be here."
"Churches should always have soft walks of turf; and lovers," I would fain have added, "should have naught but whispering leaves about them."
But Bessie cut me short in her imperious way: "But we are not lovers this morning: at least," with a half-relenting look at my rueful face, "we are very good friends, and I choose to sit here to show people that we are."
"What do you care for people—the Bartons or the Meyricks?" as I noticed a familiar family carriage toiling up the hill, followed by a lighter phaeton. I recognized already in the latter vehicle the crimson feather of Fanny Meyrick, and "the whip that was a parasol."
"Shall I step out into the road this minute, and stop those ladies like a peaceable highwayman, and tell them you have promised to marry me, and that their anxiety as to our intimacy may be at rest? Give me but leave and I will do it. It will make Mrs. Barton comfortable. Then you and I can walk away into those beckoning woods, and I can have you all to myself."
Indeed she was worth having. With the witchery that some girls know, she had made a very picture of herself that morning, as I have said. Some soft blue muslin stuff was caught up around her in airy draperies—nothing stiff or frilled about her: all was soft and flowing, from the falling sleeve that showed the fair curve of her arm to the fold of her dress, the ruffle under which her little foot was tapping, impatiently now. A little white hat with a curling blue feather shaded her face—a face I won't trust myself to describe, save by saying that it was the brightest and truest, as I then thought, in all the world.
She said something rapidly in Italian—she is always artificial when she uses a foreign tongue—and this I caught but imperfectly, but it had a proverbial air about it of the error of too hasty assumptions.
"Well, now I'll tell you something," she said as the carriages disappeared over the top of the hill. "Fanny Meyrick is going abroad in October, and we shall not see her for ever so long."
Going abroad? Good gracious! That was the very thing I had to tell her that morning—that I too was ordered abroad. An estate to be settled—some bothering old claim that had been handed down from generation to generation, and now springing into life again by the lapsing of two lives on the other side. But how to tell her as she looked up into my face with the half-pleading, half-imperious smile that I knew so well? How to tell her now?
So I said nothing, but foolishly pushed the little pebbles aside with my stick, fatuously waiting for the subject to pass. Of course my silence brought an instant criticism: "Why, Charlie, what ails you?"
"Nothing. And really, Bessie, what is it to us whether Fanny Meyrick go or stay?"
"I shouldn't have thought it was anything. But your silence, your confusion—Charlie, you do care a little for her, after all."
Two years ago, before Bessie and I had ever met, I had fluttered around Fanny Meyrick for a season, attracted by her bright brown eyes and the gypsy flush on her cheek. But there were other moths fluttering around that adamantine candle too; and I was not long in discovering that the brown eyes were bright for each and all, and that the gypsy flush was never stirred by feeling or by thought. It was merely a fixed ensign of health and good spirits. Consequently the charm had waned, for me at least; and in my confessions to Bessie since our near intimacy it was she, not I, who had magnified it into the shadow even of a serious thought.
"Care for her? Nonsense, Bessie! Do you want me to call her a mere doll, a hard, waxen—no, for wax will melt—a Parian creature, such as you may see by the dozens in Schwartz's window any day? It doesn't gratify you, surely, to hear me say that of any woman."
And then—what possessed me?—I was so angry at myself that I took a mental résumé of all the good that could be said of Fanny Meyrick—her generosity, her constant cheerfulness; and in somewhat headlong fashion I expressed myself: "I won't call her a dolt and an idiot, even to please you. I have seen her do generous things, and she is never out of temper."
"Thanks!" said Bessie, nodding her head till the blue feather trembled. "It is as well, as Aunt Sloman says, to keep my shortcomings before you."
"When did Aunt Sloman say that?" I interrupted, hoping for a diversion of the subject.
"This morning only. I was late at breakfast. You know, Charlie, I was so tired with that long horseback ride, and of course everything waited. Dear aunty never will begin until I come down, but sits beside the urn like the forlornest of martyrs, and reads last night's papers over and over again."
"Well? And was she sorry that she had not invited me to wait with her?"
"Yes," said Bessie. "She said all sorts of things, and," flushing slightly, "that it was a pity you shouldn't know beforehand what you were to expect."
"I wish devoutly that I had been there," seizing the little hand that was mournfully tapping the weatherbeaten stone, and forcing the downcast eyes to look at me. "I think, both together, we could have pacified Aunt Sloman."
It was a diversion, and after a little while Bessie professed she had had enough of the church steps.
"How those people do stare! Is it the W–s, do you think, Charlie? I heard yesterday they were coming."
From our lofty position on the hillside we commanded the road leading out of the village—the road that was all alive with carriages on this beautiful September morning. The W– carriage had half halted to reconnoitre, and had only not hailed us because we had sedulously looked another way.
"Let's get away," I said, "for the next carnage will not only stop, but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with "Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of the waiting woods.
Other lovers have been there before us, but the trees whisper no secrets save their own. The subject of our previous discussion was not resumed, nor was Fanny Meyrick mentioned, until on our homeward road we paused a moment on the hilltop, as we always did.
It is indeed a hill of vision, that church hill at Lenox. Sparkling far to the south, the blue Dome lay, softened and shining in the September sun. There was ineffable peace in the faint blue sky, and, stealing up from the valley, a shimmering haze that seemed to veil the bustling village and soften all the rural sounds.
Bessie drew nearer to me, shading her eyes as she looked down into the valley: "Charlie dear, let us stay here always. We shall be happier, better here than to go back to New York."
"And the law-business?" I asked like a brutal bear, bringing the realities of life into my darling's girlish dream.
"Can't you practice law in Foxcroft, and drive over there every morning? People do."
"And because they do, and there are enough of them, I must plod along in the ways that are made for me already. We can make pilgrimages here, you know."