They tell me,
also, that while it will be pouring with rain just in the village
the sun will be shining brightly all round about, and that the
villagers, when the water begins to come in through their roofs,
snatch up their children and hurry off to the nearest field, where
they sit and wait until the storm is over."
"Do you believe them - the persons that you say tell you these
tales?" I ask.
"Personally I do not," he replies. "I think people exaggerate to me
because I look young and innocent, but no doubt there is a ground-
work of truth in their statements. I have myself left Ober-Ammergau
under a steady drenching rain, and found a cloudless sky the other
side of the Kofel.
"Then," he continues, "you can comment upon the hardihood of the
Bavarian peasant. How he or she walks about bare-headed and bare-
footed through the fiercest showers, and seems to find the rain only
pleasantly cooling. How, during the performance of the Passion
Play, they act and sing and stand about upon the uncovered stage
without taking the slightest notice of the downpour of water that is
soaking their robes and running from their streaming hair, to make
great pools upon the boards; and how the audience, in the cheaper,
unroofed portion of the theatre, sit with equal stoicism, watching
them, no one ever dreaming even of putting up an umbrella - or, if he
does dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude awakening from the
sticks of those behind."
B. stops to relight his pipe at this point, and I hear the two
ladies in the next room fidgeting about and muttering worse than
ever. It seems to me they are listening at the door (our room and
theirs are connected by a door); I do wish that they would either
get into bed again or else go downstairs. They worry me.
"And what shall I say after I have said all that?" I ask B. when at
last he has started his pipe again.
"Oh! well, after that," he replies, "you can give the history of the
Passion Play; how it came to be played."
"Oh, but so many people have done that already," I say again.
"So much the better for you," is his reply. Having previously heard
precisely the same story from half a dozen other sources, the public
will be tempted to believe you when you repeat the account. Tell
them that during the thirty year's war a terrible plague (as if half
a dozen different armies, marching up and down their country,
fighting each other about the Lord only knows what, and living on
them while doing it, was not plague enough) swept over Bavaria,
devastating each town and hamlet.
