_The Return Journey_
When one walks, one must travel west or south. If one turns northward or
eastward it is like walking down a cul-de-sac, to the blind end.
So it has been since the Crusaders came home satiated, and the
Renaissance saw the western sky as an archway into the future. So it is
still. We must go westwards and southwards.
It is a sad and gloomy thing to travel even from Italy into France. But
it is a joyful thing to walk south to Italy, south and west. It is so.
And there is a certain exaltation in the thought of going west, even to
Cornwall, to Ireland. It is as if the magnetic poles were south-west and
north-east, for our spirits, with the south-west, under the sunset, as
the positive pole. So whilst I walk through Switzerland, though it is a
valley of gloom and depression, a light seems to flash out under every
footstep, with the joy of progression.
It was Sunday morning when I left the valley where the Italians lived. I
went quickly over the stream, heading for Lucerne. It was a good thing
to be out of doors, with one's pack on one's back, climbing uphill. But
the trees were thick by the roadside; I was not yet free. It was Sunday
morning, very still.
In two hours I was at the top of the hill, looking out over the
intervening valley at the long lake of Zurich, spread there beyond with
its girdle of low hills, like a relief-map. I could not bear to look at
it, it was so small and unreal. I had a feeling as if it were false, a
large relief-map that I was looking down upon, and which I wanted to
smash. It seemed to intervene between me and some reality. I could not
believe that that was the real world. It was a figment, a fabrication,
like a dull landscape painted on a wall, to hide the real landscape.
So I went on, over to the other side of the hill, and I looked out
again. Again there were the smoky-looking hills and the lake like a
piece of looking-glass. But the hills were higher: that big one was the
Rigi. I set off down the hill.
There was fat agricultural land and several villages. And church was
over. The churchgoers were all coming home: men in black broadcloth and
old chimney-pot silk hats, carrying their umbrellas; women in ugly
dresses, carrying books and umbrellas. The streets were dotted with
these black-clothed men and stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday
nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood,
that stiff, null 'propriety' which used to come over us, like a sort of
deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in
black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their
Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable,
well-to-do, clean, and proper.
And my boot was chafing two of my toes. That always happens. I had come
down to a wide, shallow valley-bed, marshy. So about a mile out of the
village I sat down by a stone bridge, by a stream, and tore up my
handkerchief, and bound up the toes. And as I sat binding my toes, two
of the elders in black, with umbrellas under their arms, approached from
the direction of the village.
They made me so furious, I had to hasten to fasten my boot, to hurry on
again, before they should come near me. I could not bear the way they
walked and talked, so crambling and material and mealy-mouthed.
Then it did actually begin to rain. I was just going down a short hill.
So I sat under a bush and watched the trees drip. I was so glad to be
there, homeless, without place or belonging, crouching under the leaves
in the copse by the road, that I felt I had, like the meek, inherited
the earth. Some men went by, with their coat-collars turned up, and the
rain making still blacker their black broadcloth shoulders. They did not
see me. I was as safe and separate as a ghost. So I ate the remains of
my food that I had bought in Zurich, and waited for the rain.
Later, in the wet Sunday afternoon, I went on to the little lake, past
many inert, neutral, material people, down an ugly road where trams ran.
The blight of Sunday was almost intolerable near the town.
So on I went, by the side of the steamy, reedy lake, walking the length
of it. Then suddenly I went in to a little villa by the water for tea.
In Switzerland every house is a villa.
But this villa, was kept by two old ladies and a delicate dog, who must
not get his feet wet. I was very happy there. I had good jam and strange
honey-cakes for tea, that I liked, and the little old ladies pattered
round in a great stir, always whirling like two dry leaves after the
restless dog.
'Why must he not go out?' I said.
'Because it is wet,' they answered, 'and he coughs and sneezes.'
'Without a handkerchief, that is not _angenehm_' I said.
So we became bosom friends.
'You are Austrian?' they said to me.
I said I was from Graz; that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I
was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe.
I said this because I knew a doctor from Graz who was always wandering
about, and because I did not want to be myself, an Englishman, to these
two old ladies. I wanted to be something else. So we exchanged
confidences.
They told me, in their queer, old, toothless fashion, about their
visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks,
fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing--nothing
at all--still he fished from the boat; and so on, such trivialities.
Then they told me of a third sister who had died, a third little old
lady. One could feel the gap in the house. They cried; and I, being an
Austrian from Graz, to my astonishment felt my tears slip over on to the
table. I also _was_ sorry, and I would have kissed the little old ladies
to comfort them.
'Only in heaven it is warm, and it doesn't rain, and no one dies,' I
said, looking at the wet leaves.
Then I went away. I would have stayed the night at this house: I wanted
to. But I had developed my Austrian character too far.
So I went on to a detestable brutal inn in the town. And the next day I
climbed over the back of the detestable Rigi, with its vile hotel, to
come to Lucerne. There, on the Rigi, I met a lost young Frenchman who
could speak no German, and who said he could not find people to speak
French. So we sat on a stone and became close friends, and I promised
faithfully to go and visit him in his barracks in Algiers: I was to sail
from Naples to Algiers. He wrote me the address on his card, and told me
he had friends in the regiment, to whom I should be introduced, and we
could have a good time, if I would stay a week or two, down there
in Algiers.
How much more real Algiers was than the rock on the Rigi where we sat,
or the lake beneath, or the mountains beyond. Algiers is very real,
though I have never seen it, and my friend is my friend for ever, though
I have lost his card and forgotten his name. He was a Government clerk
from Lyons, making this his first foreign tour before he began his
military service. He showed me his 'circular excursion ticket'. Then at
last we parted, for he must get to the top of the Rigi, and I must get
to the bottom.
Lucerne and its lake were as irritating as ever--like the wrapper round
milk chocolate. I could not sleep even one night there: I took the
steamer down the lake, to the very last station. There I found a good
German inn, and was happy.
There was a tall thin young man, whose face was red and inflamed from
the sun. I thought he was a German tourist. He had just come in; and he
was eating bread and milk. He and I were alone in the eating-room. He
was looking at an illustrated paper.
'Does the steamer stop here all night?' I asked him in German, hearing
the boat bustling and blowing her steam on the water outside, and
glancing round at her lights, red and white, in the pitch darkness.
He only shook his head over his bread and milk, and did not lift his
face.
'Are you English, then?' I said.
No one but an Englishman would have hidden his face in a bowl of milk,
and have shaken his red ears in such painful confusion.
'Yes,' he said, 'I am.'
And I started almost out of my skin at the unexpected London accent. It
was as if one suddenly found oneself in the Tube.
'So am I,' I said. 'Where have you come from?'
Then he began, like a general explaining his plans, to tell me. He had
walked round over the Furka Pass, had been on foot four or five days. He
had walked tremendously. Knowing no German, and nothing of the
mountains, he had set off alone on this tour: he had a fortnight's
holiday. So he had come over the Rhône Glacier across the Furka and down
from Andermatt to the Lake. On this last day he had walked about thirty
mountain miles.
'But weren't you tired?' I said, aghast.
He was. Under the inflamed redness of his sun- and wind- and snow-burned
face he was sick with fatigue. He had done over a hundred miles in the
last four days.
'Did you enjoy it?' I asked.
'Oh yes. I wanted to do it all.' He wanted to do it, and he _had_ done
it. But God knows what he wanted to do it for. He had now one day at
Lucerne, one day at Interlaken and Berne, then London.
I was sorry for him in my soul, he was so cruelly tired, so perishingly
victorious.
'Why did you do so much?' I said. 'Why did you come on foot all down the
valley when you could have taken the train? Was it worth it?'
'I think so,' he said.
Yet he was sick with fatigue and over-exhaustion. His eyes were quite
dark, sightless: he seemed to have lost the power of seeing, to be
virtually blind. He hung his head forward when he had to write a post
card, as if he felt his way. But he turned his post card so that I
should not see to whom it was addressed; not that I was interested; only
I noticed his little, cautious, English movement of privacy.
'What time will you be going on?' I asked.
'When is the first steamer?' he said, and he turned out a guide-book
with a time-table. He would leave at about seven.
'But why so early?' I said to him.
He must be in Lucerne at a certain hour, and at Interlaken in the
evening.
'I suppose you will rest when you get to London?' I said.
He looked at me quickly, reservedly.
I was drinking beer: I asked him wouldn't he have something. He thought
a moment, then said he would have another glass of hot milk. The
landlord came--'And bread?' he asked.
The Englishman refused. He could not eat, really. Also he was poor; he
had to husband his money. The landlord brought the milk and asked me,
when would the gentleman want to go away. So I made arrangements between
the landlord and the stranger. But the Englishman was slightly
uncomfortable at my intervention. He did not like me to know what he
would have for breakfast.
I could feel so well the machine that had him in its grip. He slaved for
a year, mechanically, in London, riding in the Tube, working in the
office. Then for a fortnight he was let free. So he rushed to
Switzerland, with a tour planned out, and with just enough money to see
him through, and to buy presents at Interlaken: bits of the edelweiss
pottery: I could see him going home with them.
So he arrived, and with amazing, pathetic courage set forth on foot in a
strange land, to face strange landlords, with no language but English at
his command, and his purse definitely limited. Yet he wanted to go among
the mountains, to cross a glacier. So he had walked on and on, like one
possessed, ever forward. His name might have been Excelsior, indeed.
But then, when he reached his Furka, only to walk along the ridge and to
descend on the same side! My God, it was killing to the soul. And here
he was, down again from the mountains, beginning his journey home again:
steamer and train and steamer and train and Tube, till he was back in
the machine.
It hadn't let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of
fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk
in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he
not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, alone,
on foot!
His eyes were dark and deep with unfathomable courage. Yet he was going
back in the morning. He was going back. All he had courage for was to go
back. He would go back, though he died by inches. Why not? It was
killing him, it was like living loaded with irons. But he had the
courage to submit, to die that way, since it was the way allotted
to him.
The way he sank on the table in exhaustion, drinking his milk, his will,
nevertheless, so perfect and unblemished, triumphant, though his body
was broken and in anguish, was almost too much to bear. My heart was
wrung for my countryman, wrung till it bled.
I could not bear to understand my countryman, a man who worked for his
living, as I had worked, as nearly all my countrymen work. He would not
give in. On his holiday he would walk, to fulfil his purpose, walk on;
no matter how cruel the effort were, he would not rest, he would not
relinquish his purpose nor abate his will, not by one jot or tittle. His
body must pay whatever his will demanded, though it were torture.
It all seemed to me so foolish. I was almost in tears. He went to bed. I
walked by the dark lake, and talked to the girl in the inn. She was a
pleasant girl: it was a pleasant inn, a homely place. One could be
happy there.
In the morning it was sunny, the lake was blue. By night I should be
nearly at the crest of my journey. I was glad.
The Englishman had gone. I looked for his name in the book. It was
written in a fair, clerkly hand. He lived at Streatham. Suddenly I hated
him. The dogged fool, to keep his nose on the grindstone like that. What
was all his courage but the very tip-top of cowardice? What a vile
nature--almost Sadish, proud, like the infamous Red Indians, of being
able to stand torture.
The landlord came to talk to me. He was fat and comfortable and too
respectful. But I had to tell him all the Englishman had done, in the
way of a holiday, just to shame his own fat, ponderous, inn-keeper's
luxuriousness that was too gross. Then all I got out of his enormous
comfortableness was:
'Yes, that's a _very_ long step to take.'
So I set off myself, up the valley between the close, snow-topped
mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an
insect, along the dark, cold valley below.
There had been a cattle fair earlier in the morning, so troops of cattle
were roving down the road, some with bells tang-tanging, all with soft
faces and startled eyes and a sudden swerving of horns. The grass was
very green by the roads and by the streams; the shadows of the mountain
slopes were very dark on either hand overhead, and the sky with snowy
flanks and tips was high up.
Here, away from the world, the villages were quiet and obscure--left
behind. They had the same fascinating atmosphere of being forgotten,
left out of the world, that old English villages have. And buying apples
and cheese and bread in a little shop that sold everything and smelled
of everything, I felt at home again.
But climbing gradually higher, mile after mile, always between the
shadows of the high mountains, I was glad I did not live in the Alps.
The villages on the slopes, the people there, seemed, as if they _must_
gradually, bit by bit, slide down and tumble to the water-course, and be
rolled on away, away to the sea. Straggling, haphazard little villages
ledged on the slope, high up, beside their wet, green, hanging meadows,
with pine trees behind and the valley bottom far below, and rocks right
above, on both sides, seemed like little temporary squattings of outcast
people. It seemed impossible that they should persist there, with great
shadows wielded over them, like a menace, and gleams of brief sunshine,
like a window. There was a sense of momentariness and expectation. It
seemed as though some dramatic upheaval must take place, the mountains
fall down into their own shadows. The valley beds were like deep graves,
the sides of the mountains like the collapsing walls of a grave. The
very mountain-tops above, bright with transcendent snow, seemed like
death, eternal death.
There, it seemed, in the glamorous snow, was the source of death, which
fell down in great waves of shadow and rock, rushing to the level earth.
And all the people of the mountains, on the slopes, in the valleys,
seemed to live upon this great, rushing wave of death, of breaking-down,
of destruction.
The very pure source of breaking-down, decomposition, the very quick of
cold death, is the snowy mountain-peak above. There, eternally, goes on
the white foregathering of the crystals, out of the deathly cold of the
heavens; this is the static nucleus where death meets life in its
elementality. And thence, from their white, radiant nucleus of death in
life, flows the great flux downwards, towards life and warmth. And we
below, we cannot think of the flux upwards, that flows from the
needle-point of snow to the unutterable cold and death.
The people under the mountains, they seem to live in the flux of death,
the last, strange, overshadowed units of life. Big shadows wave over
them, there is the eternal noise of water falling icily downwards from
the source of death overhead.
And the people under the shadows, dwelling in the tang of snow and the
noise of icy water, seem dark, almost sordid, brutal. There is no
flowering or coming to flower, only this persistence, in the ice-touched
air, of reproductive life.
But it is difficult to get a sense of a native population. Everywhere
are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen,
this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the
slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense
of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their
contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but
tradespeople.
So I climbed slowly up, for a whole day, first along the highroad,
sometimes above and sometimes below the twisting, serpentine railway,
then afterwards along a path on the side of the hill--a path that went
through the crew-yards of isolated farms and even through the garden of
a village priest. The priest was decorating an archway. He stood on a
chair in the sunshine, reaching up with a garland, whilst the
serving-woman stood below, talking loudly.
The valley here seemed wider, the great flanks of the mountains gave
place, the peaks above were further back. So one was happier. I was
pleased as I sat by the thin track of single flat stones that dropped
swiftly downhill.
At the bottom was a little town with a factory or quarry, or a foundry,
some place with long, smoking chimneys; which made me feel quite at home
among the mountains.
It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating
harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of
nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of
mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a
process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought
for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it.
I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high
valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous
advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the
pass to where the tunnel begins. Göschenen, the village at the mouth of
the tunnel, is all railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists,
post cards, and touts and weedy carriages; disorder and sterile chaos,
high up. How should any one stay there!
I went on up the pass itself. There were various parties of visitors on
the roads and tracks, people from towns incongruously walking and
driving. It was drawing on to evening. I climbed slowly, between the
great cleft in the rock where are the big iron gates, through which the
road winds, winds half-way down the narrow gulley of solid, living rock,
the very throat of the path, where hangs a tablet in memory of many
Russians killed.
Emerging through the dark rocky throat of the pass I came to the upper
world, the level upper world. It was evening, livid, cold. On either
side spread the sort of moorland of the wide pass-head. I drew near
along the high-road, to Andermatt.
Everywhere were soldiers moving about the livid, desolate waste of this
upper world. I passed the barracks and the first villas for visitors.
Darkness was coming on; the straggling, inconclusive street of Andermatt
looked as if it were some accident--houses, hotels, barracks,
lodging-places tumbled at random as the caravan of civilization crossed
this high, cold, arid bridge of the European world.
I bought two post cards and wrote them out of doors in the cold, livid
twilight. Then I asked a soldier where was the post-office. He directed
me. It was something like sending post cards from Skegness or Bognor,
there in the post-office.
I was trying to make myself agree to stay in Andermatt for the night.
But I could not. The whole place was so terribly raw and flat and
accidental, as if great pieces of furniture had tumbled out of a
pantechnicon and lay discarded by the road. I hovered in the street, in
the twilight, trying to make myself stay. I looked at the announcements
of lodgings and boarding for visitors. It was no good. I could not go
into one of these houses.
So I passed on, through the old, low, broad-eaved houses that cringe
down to the very street, out into the open again. The air was fierce and
savage. On one side was a moorland, level; on the other a sweep of naked
hill, curved concave, and sprinkled with snow. I could see how wonderful
it would all be, under five or six feet of winter snow, skiing and
tobogganing at Christmas. But it needed the snow. In the summer there is
to be seen nothing but the winter's broken detritus.
The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy
translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A
carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of
water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the
sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a
second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity,
this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that
mocks and destroys our warm being.
So I came, in the early darkness, to the little village with the broken
castle that stands for ever frozen at the point where the track parts,
one way continuing along the ridge, to the Furka Pass, the other
swerving over the hill to the left, over the Gotthardt.
In this village I must stay. I saw a woman looking hastily, furtively
from a doorway. I knew she was looking for visitors. I went on up the
hilly street. There were only a few wooden houses and a gaily lighted
wooden inn, where men were laughing, and strangers, men, standing
talking loudly in the doorway.
It was very difficult to go to a house this night. I did not want to
approach any of them. I turned back to the house of the peering woman.
She had looked hen-like and anxious. She would be glad of a visitor to
help her pay her rent.
It was a clean, pleasant wooden house, made to keep out the cold. That
seemed its one function: to defend the inmates from the cold. It was
furnished like a hut, just tables and chairs and bare wooden walls. One
felt very close and secure in the room, as in a hut, shut away from the
outer world.
The hen-like woman came.
'Can I have a bed,' I said, 'for the night?'
'_Abendessen, ja!_' she replied. 'Will you have soup and boiled beef and
vegetables?'
I said I would, so I sat down to wait, in the utter silence. I could
scarcely hear the ice-stream, the silence seemed frozen, the house
empty. The woman seemed to be flitting aimlessly, scurriedly, in reflex
against the silence. One could almost touch the stillness as one could
touch the walls, or the stove, or the table with white American
oil-cloth.
Suddenly she appeared again.
'What will you drink?'
She watched my face anxiously, and her voice was pathetic, slightly
pleading in its quickness.
'Wine or beer?' she said.