Black Forest House: and the sociability therein--Its perfume--George positively declines to remain in bed after four o'clock in the morning--The road one cannot miss--My peculiar extra instinct--An ungrateful party--Harris as a scientist--His cheery confidence--The village: where it was, and where it ought to have been--George: his plan--We promenade a la Francais--The German coachman asleep and awake--The man who spreads the English language abroad.
There was one night when, tired out and far from town or village, we slept in a Black Forest farmhouse. The great charm about the Black Forest house is its sociability. The cows are in the next room, the horses are upstairs, the geese and ducks are in the kitchen, while the pigs, the children, and the chickens live all over the place.
You are dressing, when you hear a grunt behind you.
"Good-morning! Don't happen to have any potato peelings in here?
No, I see you haven't; good-bye."
Next there is a cackle, and you see the neck of an old hen stretched round the corner.
"Fine morning, isn't it? You don't mind my bringing this worm of mine in here, do you? It is so difficult in this house to find a room where one can enjoy one's food with any quietness. From a chicken I have always been a slow eater, and when a dozen--there, I thought they wouldn't leave me alone. Now they'll all want a bit.
You don't mind my getting on the bed, do you? Perhaps here they won't notice me."
While you are dressing various shock heads peer in at the door; they evidently regard the room as a temporary menagerie. You cannot tell whether the heads belong to boys or girls; you can only hope they are all male. It is of no use shutting the door, because there is nothing to fasten it by, and the moment you are gone they push it open again. You breakfast as the Prodigal Son is generally represented feeding: a pig or two drop in to keep you company; a party of elderly geese criticise you from the door; you gather from their whispers, added to their shocked expression, that they are talking scandal about you. Maybe a cow will condescend to give a glance in.
This Noah's Ark arrangement it is, I suppose, that gives to the Black Forest home its distinctive scent. It is not a scent you can liken to any one thing. It is as if you took roses and Limburger cheese and hair oil, some heather and onions, peaches and soapsuds, together with a dash of sea air and a corpse, and mixed them up together. You cannot define any particular odour, but you feel they are all there--all the odours that the world has yet discovered. People who live in these houses are fond of this mixture. They do not open the window and lose any of it; they keep it carefully bottled up. If you want any other scent, you can go outside and smell the wood violets and the pines; inside there is the house; and after a while, I am told, you get used to it, so that you miss it, and are unable to go to sleep in any other atmosphere.
We had a long walk before us the next day, and it was our desire, therefore, to get up early, even so early as six o'clock, if that could be managed without disturbing the whole household. We put it to our hostess whether she thought this could be done. She said she thought it could. She might not be about herself at that time; it was her morning for going into the town, some eight miles off, and she rarely got back much before seven; but, possibly, her husband or one of the boys would be returning home to lunch about that hour. Anyhow, somebody should be sent back to wake us and get our breakfast.
As it turned out, we did not need any waking. We got up at four, all by ourselves. We got up at four in order to get away from the noise and the din that was ****** our heads ache. What time the Black Forest peasant rises in the summer time I am unable to say; to us they appeared to be getting up all night. And the first thing the Black Forester does when he gets up is to put on a pair of stout boots with wooden soles, and take a constitutional round the house. Until he has been three times up and down the stairs, he does not feel he is up. Once fully awake himself, the next thing he does is to go upstairs to the stables, and wake up a horse. (The Black Forest house being built generally on the side of a steep hill, the ground floor is at the top, and the hay-loft at the bottom.) Then the horse, it would seem, must also have its constitutional round the house; and this seen to, the man goes downstairs into the kitchen and begins to chop wood, and when he has chopped sufficient wood he feels pleased with himself and begins to sing. All things considered, we came to the conclusion we could not do better than follow the excellent example set us.
Even George was quite eager to get up that morning.
We had a frugal breakfast at half-past four, and started away at five. Our road lay over a mountain, and from enquiries made in the village it appeared to be one of those roads you cannot possibly miss. I suppose everybody knows this sort of road. Generally, it leads you back to where you started from; and when it doesn't, you wish it did, so that at all events you might know where you were.
I foresaw evil from the very first, and before we had accomplished a couple of miles we came up with it. The road divided into three.
A worm-eaten sign-post indicated that the path to the left led to a place that we had never heard of--that was on no map. Its other arm, pointing out the direction of the middle road, had disappeared. The road to the right, so we all agreed, clearly led back again to the village.
"The old man said distinctly," so Harris reminded us, "keep straight on round the hill."
"Which hill?" George asked, pertinently.
We were confronted by half a dozen, some of them big, some of them little.
"He told us," continued Harris, "that we should come to a wood."
"I see no reason to doubt him," commented George, "whichever road we take."
As a matter of fact, a dense wood covered every hill.
"And he said," murmured Harris, "that we should reach the top in about an hour and a half."
"There it is," said George, "that I begin to disbelieve him."