The Path to Rome Part 5

But before I call up the recollection of that hidden valley, I must describe with a map the curious features of the road that lay before me into Switzerland. I was standing on the summit of that knot of hills which rise up from every side to form the Ballon d'Alsace, and make an abrupt ending to the Vosges. Before me, southward and eastward, was a great plain with the fortress of Belfort in the midst of it. This plain is called by soldiers 'the Gap of Belfort', and is the only break in the hill frontier that covers France all the way from the Mediterranean to Flanders. On the farther side of this plain ran the Jura mountains, which are like a northern wall to Switzerland, and just before you reach them is the Frontier. The Jura are fold on fold of high limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel, with deep valleys, thousands of feet deep, between them; and beyond their last abrupt escarpment is the wide plain of the river Aar.

Now the straight line to Rome ran from where I stood, right across that plain of Belfort, right across the ridges of the Jura, and cut the plain of the Aar a few miles to the west of a town called Solothurn or Soleure, which stands upon that river.

It was impossible to follow that line exactly, but one could average it closely enough by following the high road down the mountain through Belfort to a Swiss town called Porrentruy or Portrut--so far one was a little to the west of the direct line.

From Portrut, by picking one's way through forests, up steep banks, over open downs, along mule paths, and so forth, one could cross the first ridge called the 'Terrible Hill', and so reach the profound gorge of the river Doubs, and a town called St Ursanne. From St Ursanne, by following a mountain road and then climbing some rocks and tracking through a wood, one could get straight over the second ridge to Glovelier. From Glovelier a highroad took one through a gap to Undervelier and on to a town called Moutier or Munster. Then from Munster, the road, still following more or less the line to Rome but now somewhat to the east of it, went on southward till an abrupt turn in it forced one to leave it. Then there was another rough climb by a difficult path up over the last ridge, called the Weissenstein, and from its high edge and summit it was but a straight fall of a mile or two on to Soleure.

So much my map told me, and this mixture of roads and paths and rock climbs that I had planned out, I exactly followed, so as to march on as directly as possible towards Rome, which was my goal. For if I had not so planned it, but had followed the highroads, I should have been compelled to zig-zag enormously for days, since these ridges of the Jura are but little broken, and the roads do not rise above the crests, but follow the parallel valleys, taking advantage only here and there of the rare gaps to pa.s.s from one to another.

Here is a sketch of the way I went, where my track is a white line, and the round spots in it are the towns and villages whose names are written at the side. In this sketch the plains and low valleys are marked dark, and the crests of the mountains left white. The shading is lighter according to the height, and the contour lines (which are very far from accurate) represent, I suppose, about a thousand feet between each, or perhaps a little more; and as for the distance, from the Ballon d'Alsace to Soleure might be two long days' march on a flat road, but over mountains and up rocks it was all but three, and even that was very good going. My first stage was across the plain of Belfort, and I had determined to sleep that night in Switzerland.

I wandered down the mountain. A little secret path, one of many, saved me the long windings of the road. It followed down the central hollow of the great cleft and accompanied the stream. All the way for miles the water tumbled in fall after fall over a hundred steps of rock, and its noise mixed with the freshness of the air, and its splas.h.i.+ng weighted the overhanging branches of the trees. A little rain that fell from time to time through the clear morning seemed like a sister to the spray of the waterfalls; and what with all this moisture and greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley was inspired with content. It was a repose to descend through its leaves and gra.s.ses, and find the lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a narrow floor between the hills. Here there were the first houses of men; and, from one, smoke was already going up thinly into the morning. The air was very pure and cold; it was made more nouris.h.i.+ng and human by the presence and noise of the waters, by the s.h.i.+ning wet gra.s.ses and the beaded leaves all through that umbrageous valley. The shreds of clouds which, high above the calm, ran swiftly in the upper air, fed it also with soft rains from time to time as fine as dew; and through those clear and momentary showers one could see the sunlight.

When I had enjoyed the descent through this place for but a few miles, everything changed. The road in front ran straight and bordered--it led out and onwards over a great flat, set here and there with hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. Houses came more thickly, and by the ceaseless culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the white-washed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I knew myself to be once more in France of the plains; and the first town I came to was Giromagny.

Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up and hear Ma.s.s; and I did so, but my attention at the holy office was distracted by the enormous number of priests that I found in the church, and I have wondered painfully ever since how so many came to be in a little place like Giromagny. There were three priests at the high altar, and nearly one for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Ma.s.ses going on, beginning and ending, that I am sure I need not have gone without my breakfast in my hurry to get one. With all this there were few people at Ma.s.s so early; nothing but these priests going in and out, and continual little bells. I am still wondering. Giromagny is no place for relics or for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing of a holy look about it, and all these priests--

LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and--

AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel.

For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these priests---

LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming.

AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me, I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you, and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road, and then--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.

It is a thought-provoking thing, this pa.s.sing from one great garrison to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy order of Toul; I had pa.s.sed through the silence and peace of all that Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the guns and the tramp of epinal. I had left epinal and counted the miles and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an army, the ungarnished gaps between.

As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the French line. The sun here and there glinted on the ends of rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song.

I had already pa.s.sed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written up the words,

Wine; shut or open.

As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, and to suck honey out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the phrase odd and pa.s.s on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagining a hundred explanations. I had never in my life heard wine divided into shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with wine. I spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said--

'Is this what you call open wine?'

'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself that it is open?'

That was true enough, and it explained a great deal. But it did not explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in a great wide can, for all the world like so much milk, milked from the Panthers of the G.o.d. I determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said--

'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.'

This the woman at once did, and when I came to drink it, it was delicious. Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart, satisfying, and full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet, and body, and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine.

I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, but accepted it as one of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was already giving me examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you hear about the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself--

'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away from the strong and excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.'

So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very tight, put it in my sack, and held it in store against the wineless places on the flanks of the hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where Swiss is the current language. Then I went on into the centre of the town.

As I pa.s.sed over the old bridge into the market-place, where I proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was close upon eleven), I saw them building parallel with that old bridge a new one to replace it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so wonderfully simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling.

In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water has run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry bed of the river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin building the piers in great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the piers are already above it, and the rest of the work is done from boats. This is absolutely true. Not only did I see the men in the bed of the river, but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed to him the most natural way to build bridges, and doubted if they were ever made in any other fas.h.i.+on.

There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in rock to commemorate the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice under the castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but I saw that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was carved into and out of it in high relief by Bartholdi, the same man that made the statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.

The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in yet another way, and one that shows you how the Church works on from one stem continually.

For there is a little church somewhere near or in Belfort (I do not know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and painter being told to decorate for so much, he amused himself by painting all round it little pictures of the siege--of the cold, and the wounds, and the heroism. This is indeed the way such things should be done, I mean by men doing them for pleasure and of their own thought. And I have a number of friends who agree with me in thinking this, that art should not be compet.i.tive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very strange conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's beehive, nor one's great n.o.ble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's railway shares, nor the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such nonsense. Then they say to me, what about the concentration of the means of production? And I say to them, what about the distribution of the owners.h.i.+p of the concentrated means of production? And they shake their heads sadly, and say it would never endure; and I say, try it first and see. Then they fly into a rage.

When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the way, a poor man asked me to use _all my influence_ for his son, who was an engineer in the navy, and this he did because I had been boasting of my travels, experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the world)--when, I say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out again on my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still kept on falling.

In the early morning, under such delightful trees, up in the mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild surroundings made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to marry itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry, therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two things came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed me from a little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the Vosges all in line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine.

To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides and covered with gra.s.s, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with two very good feelings--- laughter and companions.h.i.+p. For it was my good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders to challenge once and then to fire.

Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a conscript, f.a.gged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of a growing tree.

This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt, and of how I was of the 'cla.s.s of ninety, rifled and mounted on its carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.

Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I went down the road.

Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain, and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles, because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a wide turnpike.

Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses--

_Ave Crux Spes Unica._

I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I looked backward along the road I had come.

There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even the high hills.

Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to the influences that had followed me for so many miles--the solemn quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.

The afternoon and the evening followed as I put one mile after another behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I would not rest. I left my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my fourth day.

The light still fell, and my resolution stood, though my exhaustion undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher against the sky, and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the loneliness and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in East England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills.

Everywhere I pa.s.sed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of sunset reflected in stagnant waters.

The marshy valley kept its character when I had left the lane and regained the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last effort with which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, and as I blundered on my whole spirit was caught or lifted in the influence of the waste waters and of the birds of evening.

I wished, as I had often wished in such opportunities of recollection and of silence, for a complete barrier that might isolate the mind.

With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover, there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus.

But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer in Rome.

But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people a.s.sure us that our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.