Italian Hours

The Old Saint-Gothard

LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK

Berne, September, 1873.--In Berne again, some eleven

weeks after having left it in July. I have never been in

Switzerland so late, and I came hither innocently supposing the

last Cook's tourist to have paid out his last coupon and

departed. But I was lucky, it seems, to discover an empty cot in

an attic and a very tight place at a table d'hte. People are all

flocking out of Switzerland, as in July they were flocking in,

and the main channels of egress are terribly choked. I have been

here several days, watching them come and go; it is like the

march-past of an army. It gives one, for an occasional change

from darker thoughts, a lively impression of the numbers of

people now living, and above all now moving, at extreme ease in

the world. Here is little Switzerland disgorging its tens of

thousands of honest folk, chiefly English, and rarely, to judge

by their faces and talk, children of light in any eminent degree;

for whom snow-peaks and glaciers and passes and lakes and chalets

and sunsets and a caf complet, "including honey," as the

coupon says, have become prime necessities for six weeks every

year. It's not so long ago that lords and nabobs monopolised

these pleasures; but nowadays i a month's tour in Switzerland is

no more a jeu de prince than a Sunday excursion. To watch

this huge Anglo-Saxon wave ebbing through Berne suggests, no

doubt most fallaciously, that the common lot of mankind isn't

after all so very hard and that the masses have reached a high

standard of comfort. The view of the Oberland chain, as you see

it from the garden of the hotel, really butters one's bread most

handsomely; and here are I don't know how many hundred Cook's

tourists a day looking at it through the smoke of their pipes. Is

it really the "masses," however, that I see every day at the

table d'hte? They have rather too few h's to the dozen, but

their good-nature is great. Some people complain that they

"vulgarise" Switzerland; but as far as I am concerned I freely

give it up to them and offer them a personal welcome and take a

peculiar satisfaction in seeing them here. Switzerland is a "show

country"--I am more and more struck with the bearings of that

truth; and its use in the world is to reassure persons of a

benevolent imagination when they begin to wish for the drudging

millions a greater supply of elevating amusement. Here is

amusement for a thousand years, and as elevating certainly as

mountains three miles high can make it. I expect to live to see

the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a

hotel setting three tables d'hte a day.

[Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER, BERNE]

I have been walking about the arcades, which used to bestow a

grateful shade in July, but which seem rather dusky and chilly in

these shortening autumn days. I am struck with the way the

English always speak of them--with a shudder, as gloomy, as

dirty, as evil-smelling, as suffocating, as freezing, as anything

and everything but admirably picturesque. I take us Americans for

the only people who, in travelling, judge things on the first

impulse--when we do judge them at all--not from the standpoint of

simple comfort. Most of us, strolling forth into these bustling

basements, are, I imagine, too much amused, too much diverted

from the sense of an alienable right to public ease, to be

conscious of heat or cold, of thick air, or even of the universal

smell of strong charcuterie. If the visible romantic were

banished from the face of the earth I am sure the idea of it

would still survive in some typical American heart....

Lucerne, September. --Berne, I find, has been filling with

tourists at the expense of Lucerne, which I have been having

almost to myself. There are six people at the table d'hte; the

excellent dinner denotes on the part of the chef the easy

leisure in which true artists love to work. The waiters have

nothing to do but lounge about the hall and c***k in their

pockets the fees of the past season. The day has been lovely in

itself, and pervaded, to my sense, by the gentle glow of a

natural satisfaction at my finding myself again on the threshold

of Italy. I am lodged en prince, in a room with a balcony

hanging over the lake--a balcony on which I spent a long time

this morning at dawn, thanking the mountain-tops, from the depths

of a landscape-lover's heart, for their promise of superbly fair

weather. There were a great many mountain-tops to thank, for the

crags and peaks and pinnacles tumbled away through the morning

mist in an endless confusion of grandeur. I have been all day in

better humour with Lucerne than ever before--a forecast

reflection of Italian moods. If Switzerland, as I wrote the other

day, is so furiously a show-place, Lucerne is certainly one of

the biggest booths at the fair. The little quay, under the trees,

squeezed in between the decks of the steamboats and the doors of

the hotels, is a terrible medley of Saxon dialects--a jumble of

pilgrims in all the phases of devotion, equipped with book and

staff, alpenstock and Baedeker. There are so many hotels and

trinket-shops, so many omnibuses and steamers, so many Saint-

Gothard vetturini, so many ragged urchins poking

photographs, minerals and Lucernese English at you, that you feel

as if lake and mountains themselves, in all their loveliness,

were but a part of the "enterprise" of landlords and pedlars, and

half expect to see the Righi and Pilatus and the fine weather

figure as items on your hotel-bill between the bougie and

the siphon. Nature herself assists you to this conceit;

there is something so operatic and suggestive of footlights and

scene-shifters in the view on which Lucerne looks out. You are

one of five thousand--fifty thousand--"accommodated" spectators;

you have taken your season-ticket and there is a responsible

impresario somewhere behind the scenes. There is such a luxury of

beauty in the prospect--such a redundancy of composition and

effect--so many more peaks and pinnacles than are needed to make

one heart happy or regale the vision of one quiet observer, that

you finally accept the little Babel on the quay and the looming

masses in the clouds as equal parts of a perfect system, and feel

as if the mountains had been waiting so many ages for the hotels

to come and balance the colossal group, that they show a right,

after all, to have them big and numerous. The scene-shifters have

been at work all day long, composing and discomposing the

beautiful background of the prospect--massing the clouds and

scattering the light, effacing and reviving, making play with

their wonderful machinery of mist and haze. The mountains rise,

one behind the other, in an enchanting gradation of distances and

of melting blues and greys; you think each successive tone the

loveliest and haziest possible till you see another loom dimly

behind it. I couldn't enjoy even The Swiss Times, over my

breakfast, till I had marched forth to the office of the Saint-

Gothard service of coaches and demanded the banquette for to-

morrow. The one place at the disposal of the office was taken,

but I might possibly m'entendre with the conductor for his

own seat--the conductor being generally visible, in the intervals

of business, at the post-office. To the post-office, after

breakfast, I repaired, over the fine new bridge which now spans

the green Reuss and gives such a woeful air of country-cousinship

to the crooked old wooden structure which did sole service when I

was here four years ago. The old bridge is covered with a running

hood of shingles and adorned with a series of very quaint and

vivid little paintings of the "Dance of Death," quite in the

Holbein manner; the new sends up a painful glare from its white

limestone, and is ornamented with candelabra in a meretricious

imitation of platinum. As an almost professional cherisher of

the quaint I ought to have chosen to return at least by the dark

and narrow way; but mark how luxury unmans us. I was already

demoralised. I crossed the threshold of the timbered portal, took

a few steps, and retreated. It smelt badly! So I marched

back, counting the lamps in their fine falsity. But the other,

the crooked and covered way, smelt very badly indeed; and no good

American is without a fund of accumulated sensibility to the

odour of stale timber.

Meanwhile I had spent an hour in the great yard of the

postoffice, waiting for my conductor to turn up and seeing the

yellow malles-postes pushed to and fro. At last, being told my

man was at my service, I was brought to speech of a huge, jovial,

bearded, delightful Italian, clad in the blue coat and waistcoat,

with close, round silver buttons, which are a heritage of the old

postilions. No, it was not he; it was a friend of his; and

finally the friend was produced, en costume de ville, but

equally jovial,and Italian enough--a brave Lucernese, who had

spent half of his life between Bellinzona and Camerlata. For ten

francs this worthy man's perch behind the luggage was made mine

as far as Bellinzona, and we separated with reciprocal wishes for

good weather on the morrow. To-morrow is so manifestly determined

to be as fine as any other 30th of September since the weather

became on this planet a topic of conversation that I have had

nothing to do but stroll about Lucerne, staring, loafing and

vaguely intent on regarding the fact that, whatever happens, my

place is paid to Milan. I loafed into the immense new Hotel

National and read the New York Tribune on a blue satin

divan; after which I was rather surprised, on coming out, to find

myself staring at a green Swiss lake and not at the Broadway

omnibuses. The Hotel National is adorned with a perfectly

appointed Broadway bar--one of the "prohibited" ones seeking

hospitality in foreign lands after the manner of an old-fashioned

French or Italian refugee.

Milan, October.--My journey hither was such a pleasant

piece of traveller's luck that I feel a delicacy for taking it to

pieces to see what it was made of. Do what we will, however,

there remains in all deeply agreeable impressions a charming

something we can't analyse. I found it agreeable even, given the

rest of my case, to turn out of bed, at Lucerne, by four o'clock,

into the chilly autumn darkness. The thick-starred sky was

cloudless, and there was as yet no flush of dawn; but the lake

was wrapped in a ghostly white mist which crept halfway up the

mountains and made them look as if they too had been lying down

for the night and were casting away the vaporous tissues of their

bedclothes. Into this fantastic fog the little steamer went

creaking away, and I hung about the deck with the two or three

travellers who had known better than to believe it would save

them francs or midnight sighs--over those debts you "pay with

your person"--to go and wait for the diligence at the Poste at

Fliielen, or yet at the Guillaume Tell. The dawn came sailing up

over the mountain-tops, flushed but unperturbed, and blew out

the little stars and then the big ones, as a thrifty matron after

a party blows out her candles and lamps; the mist went melting

and wandering away into the duskier hollows and recesses of the

mountains, and the summits defined their profiles against the

cool soft light.

At Flelen, before the landing, the big yellow coaches were

actively making themselves bigger, and piling up boxes and bags

on their roofs in a way to turn nervous people's thoughts to the

sharp corners of the downward twists of the great road. I climbed

into my own banquette, and stood eating peaches--half-a-dozen

women were hawking them about under the horses' legs--with an air

of security that might have been offensive to the people

scrambling and protesting below between coup and intrieur. They

were all English and all had false alarms about the claim of

somebody else to their place, the place for which they produced

their ticket, with a declaration in three or four different

tongues of the inalienable right to it given them by the

expenditure of British gold. They were all serenely confuted by

the stout, purple-faced, many-buttoned conductors, patted on the

backs, assured that their bath-tubs had every advantage of

position on the top, and stowed away according to their dues.

When once one has fairly started on a journey and has but to go

and go by the impetus received, it is surprising what

entertainment one finds in very small things. We surrender to the

gaping traveller's mood, which surely isn't the unwisest the

heart knows. I don't envy people, at any rate, who have outlived

or outworn the simple sweetness of feeling settled to go

somewhere with bag and umbrella. If we are settled on the top of

a coach, and the "somewhere" contains an element of the new and

strange, the case is at its best. In this matter wise people are

content to become children again. We don't turn about on our

knees to look out of the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very

much the same round-eyed contemplation of accessible objects.

Responsibility is left at home or at the worst packed away in the

valise, relegated to quite another part of the diligence with the

clean shirts and the writing-case. I sucked in the gladness of

gaping, for this occasion, with the somewhat acrid juice of my

indifferent peaches; it made me think them very good. This was

the first of a series of kindly services it rendered me. It made

me agree next, as we started, that the gentleman at the booking-

office at Lucerne had but played a harmless joke when he told me

the regular seat in the banquette was taken. No one appeared to

claim it; so the conductor and I reversed positions, and I found

him quite as conversible as the usual Anglo-Saxon.

He was trolling snatches of melody and showing his great yellow

teeth in a jovial grin all the way to Bellinzona--and this in

face of the sombre fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping

away into the mountain, all the while, under his nose, and

numbering the days of the many-buttoned brotherhood. But he

hopes, for long service's sake, to be taken into the employ of

the railway; he at least is no cherisher of quaintness and

has no romantic perversity. I found the railway coming on,

however, in a manner very shocking to mine. About an hour short

of Andermatt they have pierced a huge black cavity in the

mountain, around which has grown up a swarming, digging,

hammering, smoke-compelling colony. There are great barracks,

with tall chimneys, down in the gorge that bristled the other day

but with natural graces, and a wonderful increase of wine-shops

in the little village of Gschenen above. Along the breast of the

mountain, beside the road, come wandering several miles of very

handsome iron pipes, of a stupendous girth--a conduit for the

water-power with which some of the machinery is worked. It lies

at its mighty length among the rocks like an immense black

serpent, and serves, as a mere detail, to give one the measure

of the central enterprise. When at the end of our long day's

journey, well down in warm Italy, we came upon the other aperture

of the tunnel, I could but uncap with a grim reverence. Truly

Nature is great, but she seems to me to stand in very much the

shoes of my poor friend the conductor. She is being superseded at

her strongest points, successively, and nothing remains but for

her to take humble service with her master. If she can hear

herself think amid that din of blasting and hammering she must be

reckoning up the years to elapse before the cleverest of Ober-

Ingnieurs decides that mountains are mere obstructive matter

and has the Jungfrau melted down and the residuum carried away in

balloons and dumped upon another planet.

The Devil's Bridge, with the same failing apparently as the good

Homer, was decidedly nodding. The volume of water in the torrent

was shrunken, and I missed the thunderous uproar and far-leaping

spray that have kept up a miniature tempest in the neighbourhood

on my other passages. It suddenly occurs to me that the fault is

not in the good Homer's inspiration, but simply in the big black

pipes above-mentioned. They dip into the rushing stream higher

up, presumably, and pervert its fine frenzy to their prosaic

uses. There could hardly be a more vivid reminder of the standing

quarrel between use and beauty, and of the hard time poor beauty

is having. I looked wistfully, as we rattled into dreary

Andermatt, at the great white zigzags of the Oberalp road which

climbed away to the left. Even on one's way to Italy one may

spare a throb of desire for the beautiful vision of the castled

Grisons. Dear to me the memory of my day's drive last summer

through that long blue avenue of mountains, to queer little

mouldering Ilanz, visited before supper in the ghostly dusk. At

Andermatt a sign over a little black doorway flanked by two dung-

hills seemed to me tolerably comical: Mineraux,

Quadrupedes, Oiseaux, OEufs, Tableaux

Antiques. We bundled in to dinner and the American gentleman

in the banquette made the acquaintance of the Irish lady in the

coup, who talked of the weather as foine and wore a

Persian scarf twisted about her head. At the other end of the

table sat an Englishman, out of the intrieur, who bore an

extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Edward VI's and

Mary's reigns. He walking, a convincing Holbein. The impression

was of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he must have

wondered--not knowing me for such a character--why I stared at

him. It wasn't him I was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or

Dudley or Digby with a ruff and a round cap and plume.

From Andermatt, through its high, cold, sunny valley, we passed

into rugged little Hospenthal, and then up the last stages of the

ascent. From here the road was all new to me. Among the summits

of the various Alpine passes there is little to choose. You wind

and double slowly into keener cold and deeper stillness; you put

on your overcoat and turn up the collar; you count the nestling

snow-patches and then you cease to count them; you pause, as you

trudge before the lumbering coach, and listen to the last-heard

cow-bell tinkling away below you in kindlier herbage. The sky was

tremendously blue, and the little stunted bushes on the snow-

streaked slopes were all dyed with autumnal purples and crimsons.

It was a great display of colour. Purple and crimson too, though

not so fine, were the faces thrust out at us from the greasy

little double casements of a barrack beside the road, where the

horses paused before the last pull. There was one little girl in

particular, beginning to lisser her hair, as civilisation

approached, in a manner not to be described, with her poor little

blue-black hands. At the summit are the two usual grim little

stone taverns, the steel-blue tarn, the snow-white peaks, the

pause in the cold sunshine. Then we begin to rattle down with two

horses. In five minutes we are swinging along the famous zigzags.

Engineer, driver, horses--it's very handsomely done by all of

them. The road curves and curls and twists and plunges like the

tail of a kite; sitting perched in the banquette, you see it

making below you and in mid-air certain bold gyrations which

bring you as near as possible, short of the actual experience, to

the philosophy of that immortal Irishman who wished that his fall

from the house-top would only last. But the zigzags last no more

than Paddy's fall, and in due time we were all coming to our

senses over cafe au lait in the little inn at Faido. After

Faido the valley, plunging deeper, began to take thick afternoon

shadows from the hills, and at Airolo we were fairly in the

twilight. But the pink and yellow houses shimmered through the

gentle gloom, and Italy began in broken syllables to whisper that

she was at hand. For the rest of the way to Bellinzona her voice

was muffled in the grey of evening, and I was half vexed to lose

the charming sight of the changing vegetation. But only half

vexed, for the moon was climbing all the while nearer the edge of

the crags that overshadowed us, and a thin magical light came

trickling down into the winding, murmuring gorges. It was a most

enchanting business. The chestnut-trees loomed up with double

their daylight stature; the vines began to swing their low

festoons like nets to trip up the fairies. At last the ruined

towers of Bellinzona stood gleaming in the moonshine, and we

rattled into the great post-yard. It was eleven o'clock and I had

risen at four; moonshine apart I wasn't sorry.

All that was very well; but the drive next day from Bellinzona to

Como is to my mind what gives its supreme beauty to this great

pass. One can't describe the beauty of the Italian lakes, nor

would one try if one could; the floweriest rhetoric can recall it

only as a picture on a fireboard recalls a Claude. But it lay

spread before me for a whole perfect day: in the long gleam of

the Major, from whose head the diligence swerves away and begins

to climb the bosky hills that divide it from Lugano; in the

shimmering, melting azure of the southern slopes and masses; in

the luxurious tangle of nature and the familiar amenity of man;

in the lawn-like inclinations, where the great grouped chestnuts

make so cool a shadow in so warm a light; in the rusty vineyards,

the littered cornfields and the tawdry wayside shrines. But most

of all it's the deep yellow light that enchants you and tells you

where you are. See it come filtering down through a vine-covered

trellis on the red handkerchief with which a ragged contadina has

bound her hair, and all the magic of Italy, to the eye, makes an

aureole about the poor girl's head. Look at a brown-breasted

reaper eating his chunk of black bread under a spreading

chestnut; nowhere is shadow so charming, nowhere is colour so

charged, nowhere has accident such grace. The whole drive to

Lugano was one long loveliness, and the town itself is admirably

Italian. There was a great unlading of the coach, during which I

wandered under certain brown old arcades and bought for six sous,

from a young woman in a gold necklace, a hatful of peaches and

figs. When I came back I found the young man holding open the

door of the second diligence, which had lately come up, and

beckoning to me with a despairing smile. The young man, I must

note, was the most amiable of Ticinese; though he wore no buttons

he was attached to the diligence in some amateurish capacity, and

had an eye to the mail-bags and other valuables in the boot. I

grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves in the Swiss

temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are cast in

the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a

Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts,

while the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never

stopped singing till we reached a little wine-house where he got

his mouth full of bread and cheese. I looked into his open door,

a la Sterne, and saw the young woman sitting rigid and grim,

staring over his head and with a great pile of bread and butter

in her lap. He had only informed her most politely that she was

to be transferred to another diligence and must do him the favour

to descend; but she evidently knew of but one way for a

respectable young insulary of her s*x to receive the politeness

of a foreign adventurer guilty of an eye betraying latent

pleasantry. Heaven only knew what he was saying! I told her, and

she gathered up her parcels and emerged. A part of the day's

great pleasure perhaps was my grave sense of being an instrument

in the hands of the powers toward the safe consignment of this

young woman and her boxes. When once you have really bent to the

helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap, and it

holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in foreign

travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I

inferred to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn

mainly by English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over

the mountains to Cadenabbia, and she herself was coming up with

the wardrobe, two big boxes and a bath-tub. I had played my part,

under the powers, at Bellinzona, and had interposed between the

poor girl's frightened English and the dreadful Ticinese French

of the functionaries in the post-yard. At the custom-house on the

Italian frontier I was of peculiar service; there was a kind of

fateful fascination in it. The wardrobe was voluminous; I

exchanged a paternal glance with my charge as the douanier

plunged his brown fists into it. Who was the lady at Cadenabbia?

What was she to me or I to her? She wouldn't know, when she

rustled down to dinner next day, that it was I who had guided the

frail skiff of her public basis of vanity to port. So unseen but

not unfelt do we cross each other's orbits. The skiff however may

have foundered that evening in sight of land. I disengaged the

young woman from among her fellow-travellers and placed her boxes

on a hand-cart in the picturesque streets of Como, within a

stone's throw of that lovely striped and toned cathedral which

has the facade of cameo medallions. I could only make the

facchino swear to take her to the steamboat. He too was a

jovial dog, but I hope he was polite with precautions.

1873.