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I notice that he is taking on a certain amount of true culture. He is broadening. Jimmie is beginning to let his emotions out; however, very gradually, with a firm, nervous hand on the throttle-valve, with the sensitive American's fear of ridicule as his steam-gauge. I watched Jimmie as he first saw the Achensee.
Presently came Rosa, the chambermaid, and Hedwig, the waitress, and a dozen young men from the neighbouring hamlet, and began to dance the "schuplattle." I have seen this wonderful dance performed on the stage and in other Tyrolese villages, but never have I seen it danced with the abandonment of those young peasants in that little kitchen on the Achensee. They were all beautiful dancers.
But as Jimmie speaks German-American, we got what we wanted in the way of a boat, and found that the Königsee is quite as green as the Achensee is blue. At least it was the day we were there. The tiny Tyrolese lad who went with us as guide, told us that it was sometimes as blue as the sky.
Yet everything was exquisitely clean, and from the windows of our corner room stretched away the blue Achensee and the mountains of the Tyrol, making a view which made you forget that the sheets were damp, and that the chairs were uncushioned. Physically, I am sure that I was never more uncomfortable than I was at the Hotel Rhiner.
The days moved on in a golden round of riding and driving and shooting: down to Landl and Thiersee for chamois, across the river to the magic Achensee, up the Zillerthal, across the Schmerner Joch, even to the railway station at Steinach.
"In ten minutes," he said with a delighted grin. And in another ten minutes we were off, and Salzburg was removed another twenty-four hours from us. But after the Achensee, the Königsee was something of an anticlimax, although the natives were perfectly satisfactory, and not an English word was spoken outside of our party.
And you? How came you to find your way to this inaccessible spot?" "We are going to the Achensee to the Hotel Rhiner, to hear Fräulein Therese " "You have heard of my little friend Therese, and you have come how many thousand miles? to hear her sing and play on her zither?" "To do all that, but mostly to see if she will tell me her love story."
Hedwig, a waitress, whispered into my ear confidentially that we would find the fish delicious, as they were some of those the priests had not needed. The Tyrol, especially in the vicinity of the Achensee, is absolutely priest-ridden, every one, from the peasants to the gentry, contributing, and the best in the land going into their larders and their coffers.
On the east and west, there the tallest hills fall away from the Achensee and make an undulating line on the horizon. As we reached this break, we stopped rowing, transfixed by the glory of the scene. The sun was just setting, a great molten mass of flame, splashing down in the crimson clouds, which showed in the aperture between the hills.
'Where did you find out this story? I asked. 'I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little bookshop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris.
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