The last time I saw him was in St.
Thomas's Hospital, into which he had got himself owing to his fatal
passion for walking along outside the stone coping of Westminster
Bridge. He thought it was "prime," being in the hospital, and told
me that he was living like a fighting-cock, and that he did not mean
to go out sooner than he could help. I asked him if he were not in
pain, and he said "Yes," when he "thought about it."
Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a "fighting-cock" for
three days more. Then he died, cheerful up to the last, so they
told me, like the plucky little English game-cock he was. He could
not have been more than twelve years old when he crowed his last.
It had been a short life for him, but a very merry one.
Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have gone
into partnership, and so have shared between them the shoeblack's
power of enjoying and the king's stock of enjoyments, what a good
thing it would have been for both of them - especially for King
Ludwig. He would never have thought of drowning himself then - life
would have been too delightful.
But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh at men, and
to make of life a paradox. To the one, she played ravishing
strains, having first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf.
To the other, she piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle,
and he thought it was music, and danced!
A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw
back to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish
young lovers ended their disappointments, and, finding they could
not be wedded together in life, wedded themselves together in death.
The story, duly reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign
intelligence, read more like some old Rhine-legend than the record
of a real occurrence in this prosaic nineteenth century.
He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German
Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when
proposed to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law, refused his
consent. The Count then went abroad to try and make, or at all
events improve, his fortune. He went to America, and there he
prospered. In a year or two he came back, tolerably rich - to find,
however, that he was too late. His lady, persuaded of his death,
had been urged into a marriage with a rich somebody else. In
ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented himself with
continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich somebody else
to pay for her keep. This young couple, however, a little lighter
headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever it
may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which the air
around them seemed filled, went down one stormy night together to
the lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by turning her grim
comedy into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.
Soon after losing sight of Starnberg's placid waters, we plunged
into the gloom of the mountains, and began a long, winding climb
among their hidden recesses. At times, shrieking as if in terror,
we passed some ghostly hamlet, standing out white and silent in the
moonlight against the shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark,
still lake, or mountain torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long
white streak across the blackness of the night.
We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town which
possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and which,
until a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed forward to
Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to Ober-Ammergau. It was a
tolerably steep climb up the road from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to
Ammergau - so steep, indeed, that one stout pilgrim not many years
ago, died from the exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged
mountaineer and pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side,
for no horses could do more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.
Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more
pampered, and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and interest
of his journey more and more curtailed and spoilt. In a few years'
time, he will be packed in cotton-wool in his own back-parlour,
labelled for the place he wants to go to, and unpacked and taken out
when he gets there. The railway now carries him round Mount Ettal
to Oberau, from which little village a tolerably easy road, as
mountain roadways go, of about four or five English miles takes him
up to the valley of the Ammer.
It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the
place was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it
is at mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims thronged the little
hotel, wondering, as also did the landlord, where they were all
going to sleep; and wondering still more, though this latter
consideration evidently did not trouble their host, how they were
going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in the morning in time for the
play, which always begins at 8 a.m.
Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for them at
five; and others, who could not secure carriages, and who had
determined to walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake them at
2.30, and ordering breakfast for a quarter-past three sharp.
