The Path to Rome Part 6

As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth drinking after I had pa.s.sed the frontier.

I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.

So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and said--

'Am I in Switzerland?'

A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial traveller, and a colleague of his from Ma.r.s.eilles, all said together in varying accents: 'Yes.'

'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.'

This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the Commercial Traveller from Ma.r.s.eilles.

He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large, his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar G.o.d. He came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in dates, dimensions, and the points of the compa.s.s in his descriptions); then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the memory of such a revelation.

For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black; slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small, black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.

That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.

It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.

I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.

When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:

'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Ma.s.s in such and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so many years and so many yards,...' &c., and so forth... exactly like a mill.

I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.

He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.

It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when, with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France, and I was fairly in a strange country.

The valley through which I was now pa.s.sing resembled that of the lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there, steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green gra.s.s and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this winding cleft was a natural pa.s.sage through the first ridge of the Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.

I had, as I pa.s.sed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.

Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees.

I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow Water'.

I was wondering what its name might be, and how far I stood from Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods and beneath small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the forest was over, I saw an excellent sight.

There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was the first of the German cities.

LECTOR. How 'German'?

AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that stretches vaguely, without defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high hills of the south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for the Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the high hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great patches of it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying philosophies; I know also that within them are counted long-headed and round-headed men, dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that they have continually fought among themselves and called in Welch allies; still I go somewhat by the language, for I am concerned here with the development of a modern European people, and I say that the Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before me.

LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French!

AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent tongue. Nevertheless, they are Germans. Who but Germans would so preserve--would so rebuild the past? Who but Germans would so feel the mystery of the hills, and so fit their town to the mountains? I was to pa.s.s through but a narrow wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They began at Porrentruy, they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the high pa.s.ses of the Alps; but in that little s.p.a.ce of four days I made acquaintance with their influence, and I owe them a perpetual grat.i.tude for their architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.

The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have wors.h.i.+pped and propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.

As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I pa.s.sed under its deep gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin, when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. G.o.d rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.

I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But, oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous, introspective, self-a.n.a.lysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the G.o.d?

Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little attendant G.o.ds by name that will come to the festival.

What a wine!

I was a.s.sured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a providence for pilgrims.'

So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and went up on my way to Rome.

Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was infinite, I would tell you about the s.h.i.+fty priest whom I met on the platform of the church where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good man, who had committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he wished there were no property, no armies, and no governments.

But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and that there was no fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's own--what else was exile which so many n.o.ble men have thought worse than death, and which all have feared? I also told him that armies fighting in a just cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle for justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for property, a man on his own land was the nearest to G.o.d.

He therefore not convinced, and I loving and pitying him, we separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a deep and misty gla.s.s of cool beer, and pledged him brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying G.o.d that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.

What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by matches.

But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way over so many hills to talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for all poor men when I get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what capital St Peter had in that highly capitalistic first century), and, meanwhile, do you discuss the margin of production while I go on the open way; there are no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one foreign language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you town-talkers, you would find how much landlordism has to do with your 'necessities'

and your 'laws'.

LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to talk economics?

AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a wave... Well, then, I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of that hot afternoon to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the Terrible Hill', or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep, long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of Porrentruy and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a long way westward, seeking for a pa.s.s or neck in the chain, but I determined to find a straight road across, and spoke to some wood-cutters who were felling trees just where the road began to climb. They gave me this curious indication. They said--

'Go you up this muddy track that has been made athwart the woods and over the pastures by our sliding logs' (for they had cut their trunks higher up the mountains), 'and you will come to the summit easily.

From thence you will see the Doubs running below you in a very deep and dark ravine.'

I thanked them, and soon found that they had told me right. There, unmistakable, a gash in the forest and across the intervening fields of gra.s.s, was the run of the timber.

When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked behind me to take my last view of the north. I saw just before me a high isolated rock; between me and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the infinite plain of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone that bounded that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity arrested me, and compelled me to record it.

'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on the north they are these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of what I had seen, I went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there, discovered beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark gulf thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I will describe in a moment. Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man to walk, but steeper than our steep downs and fells in England, where a man hesitates and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, and so long, that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a place where no one would care to ride.

I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of the mountain, and followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched thereon, and men building. Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was not to attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I had first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out, and led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on with her knitting. Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but to follow it. I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home.

This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or village. It was St Ursanne.

The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way, others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say--

LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of a window?

AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town, a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say--

'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and have a _round top to them'?_

Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate pictures the sunlit things outside your home.