Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories Part 1

Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories.

by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen.

I.

Mr. Julius Hahn and his son Fritz were on a summer journey in the Tyrol. They had started from Mayrhofen early in the afternoon, on two meek-eyed, spiritless farm horses, and they intended to reach Ginzling before night-fall.

There was a great blaze of splendor hidden somewhere behind the western mountain-tops; broad bars of fiery light were climbing the sky, and the chalets and the Alpine meadows shone in a soft crimson illumination. The Zemmbach, which is of a choleric temperament, was seething and brawling in its rocky bed, and now and then sent up a fierce gust of spray, which blew like an icy shower-bath, into the faces of the travellers.

"_Ach, welch verfluchtes Wetter!_" cried Mr. Hahn fretfully, wiping off the streaming perspiration. "I'll be blasted if you catch me going to the Tyrol again for the sake of being fas.h.i.+onable!"

"But the scenery, father, the scenery!" exclaimed Fritz, pointing toward a great, sun-flushed peak, which rose in majestic isolation toward the north.

"The scenery--bah!" growled the senior Hahn. "For scenery, recommend me to Saxon Switzerland, where you may sit in an easy cus.h.i.+oned carriage without blistering your legs, as I have been doing to-day in this blasted saddle."

"Father, you are too fat," remarked the son, with a mischievous chuckle.

"And you promise fair to tread in my footsteps, son," retorted the elder, relaxing somewhat in his ill-humor.

This allusion to Mr. Fritz's prospective corpulence was not well received by the latter. He gave his horse a smart cut of the whip, which made the jaded animal start off at a sort of pathetic mazurka gait up the side of the mountain.

Mr. Julius Hahn was a person of no small consequence in Berlin. He was the proprietor of the "Haute n.o.blesse" Concert garden, a highly respectable place of amus.e.m.e.nt, which enjoyed the especial patronage of the officers of the Royal Guard. Weissbeer, Bairisch, Seidel, Pilzner, in fact all varieties of beer, and as connoisseurs a.s.serted, of exceptional excellence, could be procured at the "Haute n.o.blesse;"

and the most ingenious novelties in the way of gas illumination, besides two military bands, tended greatly to heighten the flavor of the beer, and to put the guests in a festive humor. Mr. Hahn had begun life in a small way with a swallow-tail coat, a white choker, and a napkin on his arm; his stock in trade, which he utilized to good purpose, was a peculiarly elastic smile and bow, both of which he accommodated with extreme nicety to the social rank of the person to whom they were addressed. He could listen to a conversation in which he was vitally interested, never losing even the shadow of an intonation, with a blank neutrality of countenance which could only be the result of a long transmission of ancestral inanity. He read the depths of your character, divined your little foibles and vanities, and very likely pa.s.sed his supercilious judgment upon you, seeming all the while the personification of uncritical humility.

It is needless to say that Mr. Hahn picked up a good deal of valuable information in the course of his career as a waiter; and to him information meant money, and money meant power and a recognized place in society. The diplomatic shrewdness which enabled him to estimate the moral calibre of a patron served him equally well in estimating the value of an investment. He had a hundred subterranean channels of information, and his judgment as to the soundness or unsoundness of a financial enterprise was almost unerring. His little secret transactions on the Bourse, where he had his _commissionaires_, always yielded him ample returns; and when an opportunity presented itself, which he had long foreseen, of buying a suburban garden at a bankrupt sale, he found himself, at least preliminarily, at the goal of his ambition. From this time forth, Mr. Hahn rose rapidly in wealth and power. He kept his thumb, so to speak, constantly on the public pulse, and prescribed amus.e.m.e.nts as unerringly as a physician prescribes medicine, and usually, it must be admitted, with better results. The "Haute n.o.blesse" became the favorite resort of fas.h.i.+onable idlers, among whom the military element usually pre-ponderated, and the flash of gilt b.u.t.tons and the rattle of swords and scabbards could always be counted on as the unvarying accompaniment to the music.

With all his prosperity, however, Mr. Hahn could not be called a happy man. He had one secret sorrow, which, until within a year of his departure for the Tyrol, had been a source of constant annoyance: Mrs.

Hahn, whom he had had the indiscretion to marry before he had arrived at a proper recognition of his own worth, was not his equal in intellect; in fact, she was conspicuously his inferior. She had been chamber-maid in a n.o.ble family, and had succeeded in marrying Mr. Hahn simply by the fact that she had made up her mind not to marry him. Mr.

Hahn, however, was not a man to be baffled by opposition. When the pert Mariana had cut him three times at a dancing-hall, he became convinced that she was the one thing in the world which he needed to make his existence complete. After presenting him with a son, Fritz, and three rather unlovely daughters, she had gradually lost all her pertness (which had been her great charm) and had developed into a stout, dropsical matron, with an abundance of domestic virtues. Her princ.i.p.al trait of character had been a dogged, desperate loyalty. She was loyal to her king, and wore golden imitations of his favorite flowers as jewelry. She was loyal to Mr. Hahn, too; and no amount of maltreatment could convince her that he was not the best of husbands.

She adored her former mistress and would insist upon paying respectful little visits to her kitchen, taking her children with her. This latter habit nearly drove her husband to distraction. He stamped his feet, he tore his hair, he swore at her, and I believe, he even struck her; but when the next child was born,--a particularly wonderful one,--Mrs. Hahn had not the strength to resist the temptation of knowing how the new-born wonder would impress the Countess von Markenstein. Another terrible scene followed. The poor woman could never understand that she was no longer the wife of a waiter, and that she must not be paying visits to the great folks in their kitchens.

Another source of disturbance in Mr. Hahn's matrimonial relations was his wife's absolute refusal to appear in the parquet or the proscenium boxes in the theatre. In this matter her resistance bordered on the heroic; neither threats nor entreaties could move her.

"Law, Julius," she would say, while the tears streamed down over her plump cheeks, "the parquet and the big boxes are for the gentlefolks, and not for humble people like you and me. I know my place, Julius, and I don't want to be the laughing-stock of the town, as I should be, if I went to the opera and sat where my lady the Countess, and the other fine ladies sit. I should feel like a fool, too, Julius, and I should cry my eyes out when I got home."

It may easily be conjectured that Mr. Hahn's mourning covered a very light heart when the dropsy finally carried off this loving but troublesome spouse. Nor did he make any secret of the fact that her death was rather a relief to him, while on the other hand he gave her full credit for all her excellent qualities. Fritz, who was in cordial sympathy with his father's ambition for social eminence, had also learned from him to be ashamed of his mother, and was rather inclined to make light of the sorrow which he actually felt, when he saw the cold earth closing over her.

At the time when he made his summer excursion in the Tyrol, Fritz was a stout blond youth of two and twenty. His round, sleek face was not badly modelled, but it had neither the rough openness, characteristic of a peasant, nor yet that indefinable finish which only culture can give. In spite of his jaunty, fas.h.i.+onable attire, you would have put him down at once as belonging to what in the Old World is called "the middle cla.s.s." His blue eyes indicated shrewdness, and his red cheeks habitual devotion to the national beverage. He was apparently a youth of the sort that Nature is constantly turning out by the thousand--mere weaker copies of progenitors, who by an unpropitious marriage have enfeebled instead of strengthening the type.

Circ.u.mstances might have made anything of him in a small way; for, as his countenance indicated, he had no very p.r.o.nounced proclivities, either good or bad. He had spent his boyhood in a gymnasium, where he had had greater success in trading jack-knives than in grappling with Cicero. He had made two futile attempts to enter the Berlin University, and had settled down to the conviction that he had mistaken his calling, as his tastes were military rather than scholarly; but, as he was too old to rectify this mistake, he had chosen to go to the Tyrol in search of pleasure rather than to the Military Academy in search of distinction.

At the mouth of the great ravine of Dornauberg the travellers paused and dismounted. Mr. Hahn called the guide, who was following behind with a horse laden with baggage, and with his a.s.sistance a choice repast, consisting of all manner of cold curiosities, was served on a large flat rock. The senior Hahn fell to work with a will and made no pretence of being interested in the sombre magnificence of the Dornauberg, while Fritz found time for an occasional exclamation of rapture, flavored with caviar, Rhine wine, and _pate de foie gras_.

"_Ach, Gott_, Fritz, what stuff you can talk!" grumbled his father, sipping his Johannisberger with the air of a connoisseur. "When I was of your age, Fritz, I had--hush, what is that?"

Mr. Hahn put down his gla.s.s with such an energy that half of the precious contents was spilled.

"_Ach, du lieber Gott_," he cried a moment later. "_Wie wunderschon_!"

From a mighty cliff overhanging the road, about a hundred feet distant, came a long yodling call, peculiar to the Tyrol, sung in a superb ringing baritone. It soared over the mountain peaks and died away somewhere among the Ingent glaciers. And just as the last faint note was expiring, a girl's voice, fresh and clear as a dew-drop, took it up and swelled it and carolled it until, from sheer excess of delight, it broke into a hundred leaping, rolling, and warbling tones, which floated and gambolled away over the highlands, while soft-winged echoes bore them away into the wide distance.

"Father," said Fritz, who was now lying outstretched on a soft Scotch plaid smoking the most fragrant of weeds; "if you can get those two voices to the 'Haute n.o.blesse,' for the next season it is ten thousand thalers in your pocket; and I shall only charge you ten per cent. for the suggestion."

"Suggestion, you blockhead! Why, the thought flashed through my head the very moment I heard the first note. But hush--there they are again."

From the cliff, sung to the air of a Tyrolese folk-song, came this stanza:

Tell me, Ilka on the hill-top, While the Alpine breezes blow, Are thy golden locks as golden As they were a year ago?

(Yodle) Hohli-ohli-ohli-ho!

Hohli-ohli-ohli-ho! Hohlio-oh!

The effect of the yodle, in which both the baritone of the cliff and the Alpine soprano united, was so melodious that Mr. Hahn sprang to his feet and swore an ecstatic oath, while Fritz, from sheer admiring abstraction, almost stuck the lighted end of his cigar into his mouth.

The soprano answered:

Tell me, Hansel in the valley, While the merry cuckoos crow, Is thy bristly beard as bristly As it was a year ago?

Hohli-ohli-ohli-ho!

Hohli-ohli-ohli-ho! Hohli-oh!

The yodling refrain this time was arch, gay--full of mocking laughter and mirth. Then the responsive singing continued:

_Hansel_: Tell me, Ilka on the hill-top, While the crimson glaciers glow, Are thine eyes as blue and beaming As they were a year ago?

_Both_: Hohli-ohli, etc.

_Ilka_: Hansel, Hansel in the valley I will tell you true; If mine eyes are blue and beaming, What is that, I pray, to you?

_Both_: Hohli-ohli, etc.

_Hansel_: Tell me, Ilka on the hill-top, While the blus.h.i.+ng roses blow, Are thy lips as sweet for kissing As they were a year ago?

_Both_: Hohli-ohli, etc.

_Ilka_: Naughty Hansel in the valley, Naughty Hansel, tell me true, If my lips are sweet for kissing, What is that, I pray, to you?

_Both_: Hohli-ohli, etc.

_Hansel_: Tell me, Ilka on the hill-top, While the rivers seaward flow, Is thy heart as true and loving As it was a year ago?

_Both_: Hohli-ohli, etc.

_Ilka_: Dearest Hansel in the valley, I will tell you, tell you true.

Yes, my heart is ever loving, True and loving unto you!

_Both_: Hohli-ohli-ohli-ho!

Hohli-ohli-ohli-ho! Hohli-oh!

For a few moments their united voices seemed still to be quivering in the air, then to be borne softly away by the echoes into the cool distance of the glaciers. A solitary thrush began to warble on a low branch of a stunted fir-tree, and a gra.s.shopper raised its shrill voice in emulation. The sun was near its setting; the bluish evening shadows crept up the sides of the ice-peaks, whose summits were still flushed with expiring tints of purple and red.

Mr. Hahn rose, yawned and stretched his limbs. Fritz threw the burning stump of his cigar into the depths of the ravine, and stood watching it with lazy interest while it fell. The guide cleared away the remnants of the repast and began to resaddle the horses.

"Who was that girl we heard singing up on the Alp?" said Mr. Hahn, with well-feigned indifference, as he put his foot in the stirrup and made a futile effort to mount. "Curse the mare, why don't you make her stand still?"

"Pardon, your honor," answered the guide stolidly; "but she isn't used to the saddle. The girl's name is Ilka on the Hill-top. She is the best singer in all the valley."