Come with me and you shall see the
never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my
illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very
quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as
to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this
vulgarity and beastliness.
If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be
good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I
drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean
Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on
banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.'
Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their
recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters
and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it
goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches
that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even
by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag.
All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me
leave to keep off them.
Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La Delivrande (next time I
should be passing there) because I was delivered from being a tourist,
and because all this horrible noise was not being dinned at me (who
was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no kind of prey for these cabmen,
and busmen, and guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad,
jaded tourists that had come in by a train.
Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed the first step upwards
in the valley, going round a rock on the other side of which the Aar
had cut itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. Then the road
went on and on weary mile after weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it
rose slowly all the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing by,
roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes.
I got beyond the villages. The light shining suffused through the
upper mist began to be the light of evening. Rain, very fine and
slight, began to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, going
down the road, a carriage with a hood up, driving at full speed. It
could not be from over the pass, for I knew that it was not yet open
for carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel somewhere, and
if there was a hotel I should find it. I looked back to ask the
distance, but they were beyond earshot, and so I went on.
My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome were ruinous. Already
since the Weissenstein they had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had
made the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It flapped as I
walked. Very soon I should be walking on my uppers. I limped also, and
I hated the wet cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourishing
my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully and thought of duty, and
death, and dereliction, and every other horrible thing that begins
with a D. I had to go on. If I had gone back there was nothing for
miles.
Before it was dark - indeed one could still read - I saw a group of
houses beyond the Aar, and soon after I saw that my road would pass
them, going over a bridge. When I reached them I went into the first,
saying to myself, 'I will eat, and if I can go no farther I will sleep
here.'
There were in the house two women, one old, the other young; and they
were French-speaking, from the Vaud country. They had faces like
Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, being Calvinist. I said,
'Have you any beans?' They said, 'Yes.' I suggested they should make
me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle of wine, while I
dried myself at their great stove. All this they readily did for me,
and I ate heartily and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards to
stop the night and pay them for it; but I was so set up by my food and
wine that I excused myself and went out again and took the road. It
was not yet dark.
By some reflection from the fields of snow, which were now quite near
at hand through the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late.
The cold grew bitter as I went on through the gloaming. There were no
trees save rare and stunted pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling
torrent, thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse grass grew on
the rocks sparsely; there were no flowers. The mist overhead was now
quite near, and I still went on and steadily up through the
half-light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for the noise of
the river. I had overworn myself, and that sustaining surface which
hides from us in our health the abysses below the mind - I felt it
growing weak and thin.
