An Alpine Idyll by Ernest Hemingway

First published: 1927

Type of plot: Realism

Time of work: The early 1920's

Locale: The Austrian Tyrol

Principal Characters:

• Nick Adams, a young American man
• John, his friend
• Austrian innkeeper
• Sexton
• Olz, an Austrian peasant

The Story

"An Alpine Idyll" belongs at the end of the Nick Adams cycle of stories. A now mature Nick has come down from a month's skiing in the mountains with a friend, John. They witness a peasant burying his wife and the reader experiences an epiphanic moment of recognition shared with Nick, though not with his friend.

The story opens in the early morning with two young men carrying their skis as they are climbing down from the mountains into the valley. They pass a churchyard just as a burial is ending. The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story but who is clearly Nick Adams, greets the priest but does not receive a greeting in return. The young men stop to watch the sexton shoveling earth into the new grave. When the sexton rests, a peasant standing at the grave takes over, spreading the soil as evenly as he would manure in a garden.

The grave filling looks unreal to the young men, and they cannot imagine being dead on such a beautiful May morning. They walk up the road to the town of Galtur; the narrator explains that they were skiing in Silvretta for a month but that with the coming of the warmer weather the skiing was spoiled. It was too late in the spring to be up in the Silvretta; they stayed too long, and the May morning in the valley seemed more natural than the spring in the high mountains.

They arrive at an inn, and, after greeting the owner, who gives them their mail, they go inside to drink beer while they read the accumulated post. During an exchange of conversation, John notes that it is no good doing a thing too long, such as skiing in the mountains in the spring. The open window draws Nick's attention to the white road and dusty trees and the green field and stream beyond. Inside, the sunlight filters through the empty glasses. John is asleep with his head on the table. Two men come into the inn: the sexton and the bearded peasant from the burial. Both order drinks, for which, after a brief argument, the peasant insists on paying, and he abruptly leaves to drink at a gasthaus up the road. The innkeeper, after a brief exchange in a local dialect with the sexton, asks when the young men want to eat. John is still asleep on the table, but he awakens when the menu is brought by the waitress. Nick asks the innkeeper to join them for a drink.

As the innkeeper is taking a seat, he calls peasants beasts. Nick confesses that he and John saw the funeral as they were coming into town; he is informed that it was for the peasant's wife. Again, the innkeeper calls the peasant a beast. "How do you mean?" asks Nick. The innkeeper calls over the sexton to meet Nick and John, and the sexton accepts a drink and agrees to tell the two gentlemen about the peasant; he must do so, however, in a dialect unintelligible to John. The peasant, the innkeeper begins, brought his wife in for burial that day. She died the previous November. No, it was in December, the sexton corrects him, but the peasant was not able to bring her to be buried until the snow was gone from the pass over the Paznaun, for although the peasant lives over the mountain, he belongs to their parish. The sexton explains that some difficulty arose when the priest saw the condition of the dead woman's face. The priest asked her husband if she had suffered much (because she was known to have had a heart condition, nobody was surprised by her death); no, she had not suffered, the priest was told. Then the priest asked how her face had got into such a condition.

The peasant responded that, after his wife died and he realized that he could not move her body across the pass until spring, he placed her body in the woodshed on top of the big logs. Later that winter, when it came time to use the big logs, he stood his wife's body against the wall. Her mouth was open and, when he came in to cut wood at night, he started hanging his lantern from her frozen mouth. He did this every time he went to the woodshed to work. On hearing this, the priest was furious and told the man that he had done wrong. The peasant, however, claimed that he loved his wife and apparently felt little remorse.

John interrupts the story to ask when they are going to eat. Nick tells him to order and asks the innkeeper whether the story is true. Certainly, he is told; the peasants are beasts. Again, John says that they should eat, and Nick agrees.

Bibliography

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