ON THE ROAD IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND
The month of August was drawing to a close when I swung my wardrobe of
the city over a shoulder and, wandering down the Boulevard St. Germain,
struck off to the southward. A succession of noisy, squalid villages,
such as surround most cities of the old world, lined the way to Mélun.
Beyond, tramping was more pleasant, for the route swung off across a
rolling country, unadorned with squalling urchins and mongrel curs,
towards Fontainebleau. The foot-traveler in France need have no fear of
losing his way. From Paris to the important cities and frontier towns
radiate “Routes nationales,” each known by a certain number throughout
its length. Signboards point the way at every cross-road; kilometer
posts of white stone keep the wayfarer well informed of the progress he
is making—almost too well, for when he has grown foot-sore and
ill-tempered, each one greets him with a sardonic smile that says as
plainly as words, “Huh! You’re only a kilometer further on, and a
kilometer is not a mile by a long way.”
They are excellently built, these national highways; the heaviest rain
barely forms upon them a perceptible layer of mud. But one could pardon
them a little unevenness of road-bed if only they would strike out for
their goal with the dogged determination of our own axle-cracking
turnpikes. They wind and ramble like mountain streams. They zigzag from
village to village even in a level country. The least knoll seems to
have been sufficient reason in the minds of the constructing engineers
for making wide detours, and where hills abound, there are villages ten
miles apart with twenty miles of tramping between them.
Thus far I had tramped the highways of Europe alone. Beyond Nemours, my
second night’s resting-place, I came upon two wayfarers in the shelter
of a giant oak, enjoying a regal repast of hard bread which they
rendered more palatable by dipping each mouthful in a brook at their
feet. On the plea of an ample breakfast I declined an invitation to
share the feast, but our routes coincided and we passed on in company.
The pair were young miners walking from Normandy to the great
coal-fields of St. Etienne. Thanks to the free-masonry of “the road,”
formalities were quickly forgotten, and before the first kilometer post
rose up to greet us we were exchanging confidences in the familiar “tu”
form. I soon added to my vocabulary the nickname of the French tramp. My
new comrades not only addressed me as _mon vieux_, but greeted by that
title every wayfarer we encountered, until it came to have as familiar a
sound in my ears as the “Jack” of the American hobo. Its analogy to our
“old man” is at once apparent.
There are stern laws in France against wandering from place to place. A
lone traveler may sometimes escape attention, but well I knew that in
trio we should often be called upon to give an account of ourselves. We
were still some distance off from the first village beyond our
meeting-place when an officer appeared at the door of the _gendarmerie_
and, advancing into the highway, awaited our arrival.
“Où allez vous autres?” he demanded, with officious bruskness.
“A St. Etienne.”
“Et vos papiers?”
“Voilà!” cried the miners, each snatching from an inside pocket a small,
flat book showing signs of age and hard usage.
The _gendarme_ stuffed one of the volumes under an arm and fell to
examining the other. Between its greasy covers was a complete biography
of its owner. The first leaf bore his baptismal record, followed by a
page for each of his three years of military service, all much decorated
with official stamps and seals. Then came affidavits of apprenticeship,
variously endorsed and _viséd_, and last a page for every firm that had
employed the miner, giving dates, wages, testimonials, and reasons for
leaving or dismissal. The miner bore the scrutiny with fortitude. With
his official book at hand the French laborer has little dread of the
officers of the law. After each term at his trade he may, if he sees fit
to travel a bit, give variations of the old “looking-for-work” story,
though as the date of his last employment grows more and more remote,
the gendarmerie becomes an increasing obstacle.
Without some such document no one may tramp the highways of France. He
who travels on foot for other reason than poverty, or who, being poor,
will not make his way by begging, is an enigmatical being to any race
but the Anglo-Saxon. To the French gendarme his mode of travel is proof
absolute that he is a _misérable sans-sous_ to whom every law against
vagrancy must be strictly applied.
The officer ended the examination of the books and handed them back with
a gruff bien.
“Maintenant, les vôtres,” he growled.
“Here it is,” I answered, ignoring the plurality of the French pronoun,
and I drew from my pocket a general letter of introduction to our
consular service, signed by the Secretary of State. The gendarme, who
had expected another book, opened the paper with a perplexed air which
increased to blank amazement when, instead of familiar French words, his
eyes fell on a half-dozen lines of incomprehensible hieroglyphics.
“Hein! Que diable!” he gasped. “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?”
“My passport,” I explained. “Je suis américain.”
“Ha! Américain! Diable! And that is really a passport? Never before have
I seen one.”
It was not really a passport by any means. I had none. But monsieur le
gendarme was in no position to dispute my word had I told him it was a
patent of nobility.
“Very good,” he went on, “but you must have another paper. Foreign
vagabonds cannot journey in France without a document to prove that they
have worked.”
Here was a poser. It would have been easy to assert that I was a
traveler and no workman, but it would have been still easier to guess
where such an assertion would land me. I rubbed my unshaven chin in
perplexity, then struck by a sudden inspiration, snatched from my bundle
the cattle-boat discharge.
“Bah!” grumbled the officer, “more foreign gibberish! What is that
vilaine langue the devil himself couldn’t read?”
“English,” I replied.
“Tiens, que c’est drôle que cette machine-là,” he mused, holding the
paper out at arm’s length and scratching his head.
However, with some assistance he made out one date on the document, and,
handing it back with a sigh of resignation, gave us leave to pass on.
“A propos!” he cried, before we had taken three steps, “what country did
you say you come from?”
“America,” I answered.
“L’Amérique! And being in America you come to France? Oh, mon Dieu, what
idiocy!” and waving his arms above his head he fled for the shade of his
office.
The ways of my companions would have made them the laughing-stock of
American roadsters. They looked forward to no three meals a day. The
hope of a “set-down” never intruded upon their field of vision. In fact,
they considered that the world was going very well with them if they
collected sous enough for one or two lunches of bread and wine daily.
Yet wine they would have, except for breakfast, or they refused to eat
even bread. Like almost all who tramp any distance in France, they
“played the merchant” and were surprised to find that I ventured along
the highways of their country without doing likewise. That is, they
carried over one shoulder a bundle containing shoe-strings, thread,
needles, thimbles, and other articles in demand among rural housewives.
The demand was really very light. They _did_ make a two or three-sous
sale here and there, but the market value of their wares was of least
importance. By carrying them, the miners evaded the strict laws against
vagrancy. Without the bundles they were beggars, with them they ranked
as peddlers. The ruse deceived no one, not even the gendarme. But it
satisfied the letter of the law.
Still engrossed in discussing the character of the officer who had
delayed us, we reached a large farmhouse. With one of the miners I
lingered at the roadside. The other entered the dwelling, ostensibly to
display his wares. A moment later he emerged with a half-loaf of coarse
peasant’s bread. Madame had needed nothing from his pack, but “she made
me a present of this lump.”
It was while they were canvassing a village in quest of sales, or
crusts, in the dusk of evening that I lost sight of the miners. I had
passed the village inn, and, being always averse to retracing my steps,
continued my way alone. Had I suspected the distance to the next hamlet,
I might have been less eager to press on. Fully three hours later I
stumbled into Les Bussières and, having walked sixty-nine kilometers, it
was not strange that I slept late next morning. Besides, the day was
Sunday, and what with satisfying the curiosity of a company of peasants
in the wine-room and drinking the health of several of them, I did not
set out until the day was well advanced. Beyond the village stretched
the broad, white route, endless and deserted. The long journey before me
would have been less lonely in the company of the miners; but we had
parted and I plodded on in solitude, wondering when I should again fall
in with so cheery a pair.
In passing a clump of trees at the roadside, I was suddenly roused from
my revery by a shout of “Holà! L’américain!” What could have betrayed my
nationality? I halted and stared about me. My eyes fell on the grove and
I beheld my companions of the day before hastily gathering their
possessions together.
We journeyed along as before, producing our papers at each village and
being once stopped in the open country by a mounted gendarme. The miners
played in poor luck all through the morning. A single sou and an aged
quarter-loaf constituted their gleanings. Gaunt hunger was depicted on
their countenances before we reached Briare in the early afternoon and,
breaking the silence of an hour, I offered to stand the _compte_ of a
meal for three.
There was in Briare, as in every town in France larger than a hamlet, an
inn the proprietor of which catered to the vagabond class. None but a
native tramp could have found the establishment without repeated
inquiries; but the miners, needing no second invitation and guided by
some peculiar instinct, led the way down a side street and into a
squalid cul de sac. The most acute foreign eye would have seen only
frowning back walls, but my companions pushed open the door of what
looked like a deserted warehouse and we entered a low room, gloomy and
unswept. Around the table, to which we made our way through a very
forest of huge wine-barrels, were gathered a dozen peasants and a less
solemn pair who turned out to be of “the profession.”
The first greetings over, the keeper set out before us a loaf of coarse
bread and a bottle of wine, demanded immediate payment, and having
received it, resumed his seat on a barrel. His shop was, in reality, the
wine cellar of a café the gilded façade of which faced the main street.
In it the liquor that sold here for four sous the litre would have cost
us a half-franc. One of the miners, having gained my consent to the
extravagance, invested two sous in raw, salt pork which he and his
companion ate with great relish. I was content to do without such
delicacies, for the wine and bread made a very appetizing feast after
hours of trudging under a broiling sun.
[Illustration: Canal-boats laden with lumber from Nièvre entering Paris]
[Illustration: “They are excellently built, the Routes Nationales of
France”]
In the course of the afternoon I photographed the miners, a proceeding
which caused them infantine delight, both declaring that this was the
first time in their begrimed existence that they had ever been _tirés_.
We found lodging in a peasant’s wheat stack. I was a bit chary of
spending the night in so deserted a spot with two such vagabonds, for
the kodak and the handful of coins from which I had paid for our dinner
was a plunder worth a roadster’s conspiracy. My anxiety was really
ungrounded. Morning broke with my possessions intact and, after an
hour’s work in picking straw and chaff from our hair and clothing, we
set off at sunrise.
I left my companions behind soon after, for their mode of travel
resulted in far less than the thirty miles a day I had cut out for
myself, and passed on into the vineyard and forest country of Nièvre.
Harvest was over in the few fertile farms that were not given up to the
culture of the grape; the day of the gleaners had come. In the fields
left bare by the reapers, peasant women gathered with infinite care the
stray wheat stalks and, their aprons full, plodded homeward. To the
thrifty French mind there is nothing so iniquitous as to waste the
smallest thing of value. Before this army of bowed backs one could not
but wonder whether it had ever occurred to them that labor also may be
wasted.
The most extravagant of its inhabitants were already lighting their
lamps when I entered the village of La Charité. To whatever benevolence
the quiet hamlet owes its name, it was typical of those rural
communities that line the highways of France. A decrepit grey church
raised a time-mellowed voice in the song of the evening angelus. Squat
housewives gossiped at the doors of the drab stone cottages lining the
route. From the neighboring fields heavy ox-carts, the yokes fastened
across the horns of the animals, lumbered homeward. In the dwindling
light a blacksmith before his open shop was fitting with flat, iron
shoes a piebald ox triced up on his back in a frame.
In lieu of the familiar sign, _Ici on loge à pied et à cheval_, the
village inn was distinguished from the private dwellings by a bundle of
dried fagots over the door. I entered, to find myself in a room
well-stocked with wooden tables, with here and there a trio of
villagers, over their wine and cards, blowing smoke at the unhewn beams
of the ceiling. In answer to the customary signal, the tapping of pipes
on the tables, an elderly woman appeared and inquired bruskly wherein
she could serve me.
“You have lodgings, n’est-ce pas?”
A sudden, startling silence greeted the first suggestion of foreign
accent. Cards paused in mid-air, pipes ceased to draw, tipplers craned
their necks to listen, and madame surveyed me deliberately, even a bit
disdainfully, from crown to toe. Satisfied evidently, with her
inspection, she admitted that she had been known to house travelers and
hurried away to bring the register, while the smoking and the drinking
and the playing were slowly and half-heartedly resumed. Madame
scrutinized intently each stroke of the coarse pen as I filled in the
various blanks, puzzled several moments over my “passport,” and dropping
all her stiff dignity, became suddenly garrulous:
“What! You are an American? Why, another American has lodged here. It
was in 1882. He was making the tour of the world on a bicycle. He came
from Boston”—she pronounced it with a distressing nasal—“but I could not
understand his French. He did not pronounce the R. He said ‘foncé’ when
he meant ‘français.’ for ‘terre’ he said ‘tèah.’ I will give you his
bed. He had not many hairs on his head. Do you eat ragoût also in
America? He wore such funny pince-nez. Fine wine, n’est-ce pas? He had
hurt his foot—” and thus she chattered on, through my supper and up the
stairs to my chamber.
The room once graced by the man from Boston was stone-floored, with
whitewashed walls, and large enough to have housed a squad of infantry.
Of its two beds, hung with snow-white curtains, I preferred the one
nearer the window. Unfortunately, my compatriot of the pince-nez had
chosen the other and madame would not hear of my violating the precedent
thus established. The price of this lodging, and the usual one in the
rural inns of France, was fifteen cents.
There were times when my zealous efforts to spend for lodging as few
sous as possible brought me to temporary grief. The night following my
sojourn in La Charité is a case in point. I reached St. Pierre le
Moutier some time after dark, and, upon inquiry for the cheapest
auberge, was directed up a dismal alleyway. On the fringe of the open
country I stumbled upon a ramshackle stone building, one end of which
was a dwelling for man, while the other housed his domestic animals.
Inside, under a sputtering excuse for a lamp, huddled two men, a woman
and a girl, around a table that canted up against the wall as if it had
borne too much wine in its long existence and become chronically
unsteady on its legs thereby. So preoccupied was the quartet in
devouring slabs of dull-brown bread and a watery soup from a common bowl
in which floated a few stray cabbage-leaves that my entrance passed
unnoticed.
Advancing to attract attention I brought disaster. For in the
semi-darkness I stepped on the end of a board that supported two legs of
the tipsy table, causing the bowl of soup to slide into the woman’s
arms, and the loaf to roll about on the earth floor. The mishap,
evidently no new experience, aroused no comment, but it gained me a
hearing and brought me into the conversation. Of the two men, one was
the proprietor and the second a traveler of the tramp variety who,
though posing as a Parisian, spoke a decidedly mongrel language. With
the fluency of a stranded tragedian he launched forth in a raging
narration of his misfortunes. French at all resembling the educated
tongue had become as familiar to me as English, but the patois and slang
in which the fellow unfolded the story of a persecuted life would have
daunted an international interpreter. I caught the drift of his remarks
by making him repeat each sentence twice or thrice, but he ended with a:
“Heing! Tu comprinds ma’reux le frinçais;” and I was forced to admit
that if the jargon he got off were “frinçais,” I certainly did.
The younger, and consequently less begrimed of the females, led the way
to my “room,” which turned out to be a hole over the stable, some four
feet high, approached by an outside stairway, and containing two of the
filthiest cots a vivid imagination could have pictured. To my disgust I
found that one of the beds was reserved for my friend of the uncouth
tongue. A half-hour later, unstable after a final bottle of wine with
the _aubergiste_, he stumbled into the den and proceeded to make night
hideous—awake, by his multiloquence, asleep, by a rasping snore. A dozen
times I awoke from a half-conscious nap to find him sitting cross-legged
in his cot, puffing furiously at a cigarette, above the feeble glow of
which glistened his cat-like eyes as he stared at me across the
intervening darkness. At daybreak he was gone and I departed soon after.
There is really no reason why the French roadster should go hungry in
autumn. That he does, is due to a strange national prejudice unknown in
America; for at that season half the highways of France are lined with
hedges heavy with blackberries. At first I looked with suspicion on a
fruit left ungathered by the thrifty peasantry, but, coming one morning
upon a hedge unusually burdened with berries, I satisfied myself as to
their identity and fell to picking a capful. A band of peasants, on the
way to the fields, halted to gaze at me in astonishment and burst into
uproarious laughter.
“Mais, mon vieux,” cried a plowman. “Que diable vas tu faire de ces
choses-là?”
“Eat them, of course,” I answered.
“Eat them!” roared the peasants, “but those things are not good to eat,”
and the notion struck them as so droll that their guffaws still came
back to me long after they had turned a bend in the highway. Every
Frenchman I approached on the subject held the same view. The two miners
traveled for hours with a gnawing hunger, or invaded lonely vineyards at
imminent risk of capture by the rural gendarmerie, to eat their fill of
half-ripe grapes, sour and acrid. But when I, from my safe position
outside the hedge, held up a heavily-laden bush, their answer was always
the same: “Ah, non, mon vieux. Not any for me.” Obviously I could not
regret the bad repute in which the fruit was held, for when hunger
overtook me I had but to stop and pick my dinner, and except for the few
sous spent for bread and wine, my rations from Fontainebleau to the
Swiss frontier cost me nothing.
My tramp continued past Nevers and Moulin, down through the department
of Allier to the city of Roanne, stretching along both banks of the
upper Loire. A few kilometers beyond, the highway began a winding ascent
of the first foothills of the Alps. Even here the cultivation bespoke
the thrift of the French peasant. Far up the rugged hillside stretched
terraced farms, each stone-faced step of the broad stairways thickly set
with grapevines. Higher still a few wrinkled patches in sheltered
ravines gave sustenance to the most sturdy toilers. Here it is that may
be seen the nearest prototype of that painful figure known far and wide,
that stolid being who leans on his mattock, gazing helplessly away into
meaningless space; nearest, because his exact original no longer dwells
in the fields of France: he has moved southward. Down a glen below the
highway the trunk of a tree, broken off some six feet above the ground
and with a huge knot on one side, stood out in silhouette against the
distant horizon. But for a crudeness of outline one might have imagined
the stump a clumsy, ragged peasant, with a child astride his shoulders.
I stood surveying this figure, wondering what forces of the elements
could have given a mere tree so strange a likeness to a human form, when
it suddenly started, moved, and strode away across the gully.
The highway continued to climb. The patches of tilled ground gave way to
waving forests where sounded the twittering of birds, and here and there
the cheery song of the woodsman or shepherd boy. Some magic there is
inherent in the clear air of mountain heights that calls forth song from
those that dwell among them.
[Illustration: A typical French roadster who has tramped the highways of
Europe for thirty years]
[Illustration: The two French miners with whom I tramped in France.
Notice shoe laces carried for sale]
With sunset came the summit. The road began to descend, the forests fell
away, the tiny fields appeared once more, and the ballad of the
mountaineer was silent. A colony of laborers, engaged in the
construction of a reservoir, gave me greeting from the doors of their
temporary shacks, and lower still I turned in at an auberge half-filled
with a squad of soldiers.
He is an interesting figure, the French conscript. In his make-up is
none of the boisterous braggadocio of the American trooper and of Tommy
Atkins, never that scorn for civilians so often characteristic of the
voluntary, the mercenary soldier. He feels small inclination to boast of
his wisdom even in military matters, for well he knows that the jolly
innkeeper may be able to tell a tale of his own days _sous le drapeau_
that makes the conscript’s favorite story weak and insipid by
comparison. Then, too, it is hard to be boastful when one is sad at
heart; and the French conscript is not happy. To him conscription is a
yoke, akin to disease and death, which fate has fastened upon the
children of men. He dreads its coming, serves under unexpressed protest,
and sets it down in his book of life as three years utterly lost.
There is, indeed, a note of pessimism everywhere prevalent among the
masses of France. It is not a universal note, not even a constant one:
loud-voiced “calamity-howlers” are less in evidence than in our own
optimistic land. But even amid the merry chatter there hovers over every
gathering of French workmen a gloominess, an infestivity that speaks of
lost hope, of fatalistic despair. Briefly and unconsciously, a craftsman
of chance acquaintance summed up this inner feeling of his class: “Ah,
mon pauvre pays,” he sighed, “elle n’est plus ce qu’elle était.”
Chattering groups of Lyonese, mounting to the freer air of the hills in
Sunday attire, enlivened my morning tramp down the descending highway.
By early afternoon I came in sight of the second city of France and the
confluence of the Soâne and Rhône. The vineyards ceased, to give place
to mulberry trees. Even on this day of merry-making the whir of
silk-looms sounded from the wayside cottages, well into the suburbs of
the city. The humble dwellings were succeeded by mansions; the national
highway, by a broad boulevard that led down to the meeting-place of the
two rivers, and the first stage of my journey to southern Europe was
ended.
From Lyon I turned northeastward towards Geneva and the Alps. A
serpentine route climbed upward. Often I tramped for hours around the
edge of a yawning chasm, having always in view a rugged village and its
vineyards far below, only to find myself at the end of that time within
stone’s throw of a long-forgotten kilometer-post. Near the frontier
hovered a general air of suspicion. The aubergiste of the mountain
hamlet of Moulin Chabaud hesitated long and studied every dot and letter
of my papers before offering me a chair under the big fire-place; he
remained surly and distraught all through the evening, as if convinced
in spite of himself that he was harboring one whose career had not been
unsullied. When I awoke, a mountain rain was falling, cold and
ceaseless; but preferring always a certain amount of physical discomfort
to sour looks, I pushed on, splashing into Geneva long after nightfall.
It would doubtless require a frequent repetition of such experiences to
stifle that indefinable dread, akin to fear, which oppresses the weary
pedestrian who, entirely unbefriended, enters an unknown city in the
darkness of night. Limping aimlessly through the streets of Geneva in my
water-soaked garments, I felt particularly dismal and forlorn. Genevese,
huddled under their umbrellas, pushed me aside when I attempted to speak
to them or snapped a few incoherent words over their shoulders. In vain
I attempted to escape from the district of jewellers’ shops and
watch-makers’ show-windows, little suspecting that I was virtually on an
island given over almost entirely to business houses and rich dwellings.
A slippery street led to a bridge across the Rhône, and a policeman
beyond pointed out the district gendarmerie as the proper place to
prosecute my inquiries. From a window of the building shown a dim light,
and within sounded a brisk “entrez” in answer to my knock. Two police
sergeants, engrossed in a game of cards, turned to scowl at me across
the room.
“Eh bien, toi! Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
“I am looking for a lodging house and the policeman—”
“Lodging! At this time of night? Do you think the city provides a hotel
de luxe for vagabonds, that they may come and go at any hour—?”
“But I intend to pay my own lodging.”
“Pay! Quoi! Tu as de l’argent?”
“Certainly I have money!” I cried indignantly, though to tell the truth
the weight of it was not making me stoop-shouldered.
“Ah!” gasped the senior officer, speaking the word high up in his mouth
after the fashion of Frenchmen expressing supreme astonishment. “Que je
vous aie mal jugé! I thought you were asking admittance to the night
shelter.”
The shock of hearing one he had taken for a vagabond admit that he had
money was clearly a unique experience in the sergeant’s constabulary
career. He had by no means recovered when I turned away to the inn he
had pointed out.
Three days later I boarded a steamer that zigzagged between the cities
flanking blue Lac Léman, and descending at Villeneuve, set out along the
valley of the upper Rhône. Here all was free and open as the mountains
bordering the fertile strip, for the close-hedged fields of France are
not to the taste of the Swiss peasant. No gendarme waylaid me at each
hamlet; I had but to step off the highway to gather apples under the
trees or to escape from the glaring sun.
Night overtook me at St. Maurice, a sure-footed mountain village,
straddling the Rhône where it roars through a narrow gorge on its way to
the lake beyond. Even within doors the villagers speak a high-pitched
treble, so fixed has become the habit of raising their voices above the
constant boom of the cataract. In my lodging directly above, the roaring
intruded on my dreams, and in fancy I struggled against the rushing
current that carried me down a sheer mountainside.
Church-bound peasants fell in with me along the route next morning,
peasants lacking both the noisy gaiety of the French and the gloominess
of the Sunday-clad German. Wayside wine-shops, or a pace too rapid for a
day of rest cut short my acquaintance with each group, but I had not far
to plod alone before the curiosity of a new band gave me companionship
for another space.
At Martigny the highway bent with the river to the eastward; the
mountain wall crowded more closely the narrow valley, pushing the road
to the edge of the stream that mirrored the rugged peaks. Here and there
a foot-hill boldly detached itself from the range, and taking its stand
in the valley, drove off the route on a winding detour.
Two such hills gave Sion a form all its own. An ample Paradplatz in the
foreground held back the jumble of houses tossed upon an undulating
hillside. Back of the village, like gaunt sentinels guarding the valley
of the upper Rhône, stood two towering rocks, the one crowned by the
ruins of an ancient castle, the other by a crumbling church that gazed
scornfully down on the jostling buildings of modern times. A Sunday
festival was raging on the parade-ground. Around the booths and
puppet-shows surged merry countrymen in gay attire; from the flanking
shops hung streamers and the flags of many nations.
I had barely reached the town when a rumble of thunder sounded. Dense,
black clouds, flying before a wind that did not reach us in the valley,
appeared from the north, tearing themselves on the jagged peaks above.
Close on the heels of the warning a storm broke in true Alpine fury. The
festooned multitude broke madly for the shelter of the shops, the gaudy
streamers and booths turned to drooping rags, the puppets humped their
shoulders appealingly, and the parade-ground became a shallow lake that
reflected a bright sun ten minutes after the first growl of thunder.
The oppressive heat tempered by the shower, I rounded the greater of the
sentinel rocks and continued up the valley. Rolling vineyards stretched
away on either hand to the brink of the river or the base of the
enclosing mountains. A burning thirst assailed me. Almost unconsciously
I paused and picked two clusters of plump grapes that hung over the
stone coping of a field above the highway.
A stone’s throw ahead, two men stepped suddenly from behind a clump of
bushes and strolled towards me.
“Do you know what that is?” demanded one of them, in French, as he waved
a small badge before my eyes.
I certainly did. It was the official shield of the rural gendarmerie.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Back you go with us to Sion!” roared the officer. He was a lean, lank
giant who, evidently in virtue of his length, assumed the position of
spokesman. His companion, almost a dwarf, nodded his head vigorously in
approval.
“Eh bien?” I answered, too weary to argue the matter.
“Yes,” blustered the spokesman, “back to Sion and the magistrate—” he
paused, squinted at the dwarf, and went on in dulcet tones, “unless you
pay thirty francs.”
“Thirty francs! Where on earth should I get thirty francs?”
In my excitement I somewhat bungled my French.
“Where go you?” asked the pocket edition of the law. His voice was
soothing and he spoke in German.
“To Italy. I am a workman.”
“Ja! Und in deinem Lande—in your land you may pick grapes when you like,
_was_?” shouted the long one.
“A couple of bunches? Of course!”
“_Was!_ In Italien?” In his voice was all the sarcasm he could call up
from a tolerably caustic nature.
“I am no Italian. I come from the United States.”
“United States!” bellowed the gendarme, looking around at his companion.
“What is this United States?”
“Ah-er-well, there _is_ such a country,” suggested the midget, “but—”
“And in this country of yours you do not speak French, nor German, nor
yet Italian?” snapped the officer, relapsing unconsciously into French.
“No, we speak English.”
“Mille diables! English! What then is that?”
“Ja. Es gibt so eine Sprache,” ventured the dwarf.
The spokesman ignored him.
“Well, pay fifteen francs and we have seen nothing.”
“Impossible.”
“Then back to Sion and the gendarmerie.”
“Very well, en route.”
The pair scowled and turned aside to whisper together. The tall one
continued, “My comrade says, as you are a pauvre diable on foot—five
francs.”
“Five francs for two bunches of grapes, comme ça?” I gasped holding them
out.
“Ach! Ein, unglücklicher Kerl,” urged the dwarf. “Say three francs.”
“No!” I cried, “C’en est trop. Two bunches, like that? I have here two
francs—”
The leader shook his head, glanced at his mate, and took several steps
in the direction of Sion.
“Ah! A poor devil on the road,” breathed the other.
“Well, two it is,” growled the moving spirit.
I took two francs from my pocket and dropped them into the outstretched
palm. The officer jingled the coins a moment, handed one to his
companion, and pocketed the other with the air of a man who had well
performed an unpleasant duty. His threatening scowl had vanished and a
smile played on his lean face.
“Merci,” he said, dropping his shield into a side pocket and turning
back to his hiding-place, “au revoir, monsieur!” And the small man,
following close on his heels, turned to add, “Bon voyage, monsieur
l’américain.”
I plodded on into the dusk, eating the high-priced grapes, and wondering
just where the owner of the vineyard entered into the transaction.
Somewhere near the treacherous clump of bushes I passed the unmarked
boundary between French and German Switzerland. Thus far the former
tongue had reigned supreme, though pedestrians often greeted me with
“Bon jour,” “Guten Tag.” But the voice of the street in Sierre, where I
halted for the night, was overwhelmingly Teutonic, and the signs over
hospitable doors no longer read “auberge,” but “Wirtschaft” and
“Bierhalle.” There I lay late abed next morning, and once off, strolled
leisurely along the fertile valley, for a bare twenty miles separated
the town from Brieg, at the foot of the Simplon pass.
You who turn in each evening at the selfsame threshold, you who huddle
in your niche among the cave-dwellers of great cities, you who race
through foreign lands in car and carriage as if fearful of setting foot
on an alien soil, can know nothing of the exhilaration that comes in
tramping mile after mile of open country when life blooms forth in its
prime on every hand. A single day afoot brings delight. Yet only he who
looks day after day on an ever-changing scene, who passes on and ever on
into the great Weltraum that stretches unendingly before him, can feel
the full strength of the Wanderlust within. To stop seems an
irreverence, to turn back a sacrilege. In these days of splendid
transportation we lose much that our forefathers enjoyed. There is a
sense of satisfaction akin to self-pride, a sense of real accomplishment
that thrills the pedestrian who has attained a distant goal through his
own unaided efforts, a satisfaction which the traveler by steam cannot
experience.
The highway over the Simplon, constructed by Napoleon in 1805, is still,
in spite of the encroachment of railways, a well-traveled route, though
not by pedestrians. The good people of Brieg burst forth in wailing
sympathy when I divulged my plan of crossing on foot. Traffic between
the village and Domo d’Ossola in Piedmont has for generations been
monopolized by a line of stage-coaches. There was more than the
exhilaration of such a tramp, however, to awaken my revolt against this
time-honored means of transportation, for the fare on one of these
primitive bone-shakers ranged from forty to fifty francs.
With a vagrant’s lunch in my knapsack I left Brieg at dawn, for the
first tramontane hamlet was thirty miles distant. Before the sun rose,
the morning stage rattled by and the jeering of its drivers cheered me
on. The highway showed nowhere a really steep grade, though it mounted
seven thousand feet in twenty-three kilometers. With every turn of the
route the panorama grew. Three hours up, Brieg still peeped out through
the slender _Tannenbäume_, far below, yet almost directly beneath; and
the vista extended far down the winding valley of the Rhône, back to the
sentinel rocks of Sion and beyond. Across the chasm sturdy mountaineers
scrambled from rock to boulder with their sheep and goats, as high as
grew the hardiest sprig of vegetation. Far above the last shrub, ragged,
barren peaks cut from the blue sky beyond figures of fantastic shape;
peaks aglow with nature’s most lavish coloring, here one deep purple in
the morning shade, there another, with basic tone of ruddy pink changed
like watered silk under the reflection of the rays that gilded its
summit.
Beyond the spot where Brieg was lost to view began the _réfuges_,
roadside cottages in which the traveler, overcome by fatigue or the
raging storms of winter, may seek shelter. In this summer season,
however, they had degenerated one and all into dirty wine-shops where
squalling children and stray goats wandered about among the tables. I
peered in at one and inquired the price of a bottle of wine. A spidery
female rose up to fleece me of my slender hoard and I beat a hasty
retreat, thankful to have come prepared against the call of hunger, and
content to drink the crystalline water of wayside streams.
The roadway found scant footing in the upper ranges, and burrowed its
way through several tunnels. High above one of them a glacier sent down
a roaring torrent sheer over the route, and through an opening in the
outer wall of the sub-torrential gallery one could reach out and touch
the foaming stream as it plunged into the abyss far below.
Light clouds, that had obscured the sterile peaks during the last hours
of the ascent, all but caused me to pass unnoticed the hospice of St.
Bernard that marks the summit. I stepped inside to write a postal to the
world below, and turned out again into a drizzling rain that soon became
a steady downpour. But the kilometers that had been so long in the
morning fairly raced by on the downward journey, and a few hours brought
me to the frontier.
As if fearful of losing sovereignty over a foot of her territory, Italy
has set a guard-house exactly over the boundary line, amid wild rocks
and gorges. A watchful soldier stepped out into the storm and hailed me
while several yards of Switzerland still lay between us:
“Any tobacco or cigars?”
I fished out a half-used package of Swiss tobacco, wet and mushy. The
officer waved a deprecatory hand.
“What’s this?” he demanded, tapping the pocket that held my kodak.
“A picture machine,” I explained, showing an edge of the apparatus.
“Bene, buona sera,” cried the officer, as he ran for his shelter.
At nightfall I splashed into the scraggy village of Iselle. From a
yawning hole in the mountainside poured forth a regiment of laborers who
scurried towards a long row of improvised shanties, hanging, on the edge
of nothing, over a rushing mountain river. Having once been a
“mud-mucker” in my own land, I followed after, and struck up several
acquaintanceships over the evening macaroni. The band was engaged in
boring a tunnel, thirteen miles in length, from Brieg to Iselle. With
its completion the Simplon tourist will avoid the splendid scenery of
the pass; the stage-coaches will be consigned to the scrap-heaps they
should long since have adorned; and an hour, robbed of sunshine and pure
air, will separate Italy from the valley of the Rhône. Then will the
transalpine voyager degenerate into the subalpine passenger.