“_Non é Possibile!_”
“_NON é possibile_!” said Boy, turning his flushed face to the pillow,
and away from me.
“But it is arrow-root jelly, dear! Try to eat a little!”
“_Non é possibile!_” murmured the little fellow, dreamily, and fell
into a feverish doze.
We were detained ten days in Milan, waiting for letters and to
collect luggage. Coolness was not to be had in the city except in
the Cathedral, and among the streams, fountains and trees of the
Public Gardens. The older members of the party haunted the former
place, exploring every part from the private crypt where Carlo
Borromeo lies, like a shriveled black walnut, in his casket of
rock crystal, enwrapped in cloth-of-gold; a jeweled mitre upon his
head, a cross of emerald and diamonds over his breast;—four million
francs represented in sarcophagus and ornaments, while beggars swarm
upon the church-steps;—to the ascent “from glory to glory,” of the
hundred-pinnacled roof. Boy and his devoted attendant frequented the
Gardens—“the Publics,” as he called them, as they had what he had named
the “Bobbolos” in Florence. We believed him as safe as happy there.
Yet, when he drooped and sickened within a few days after our arrival
at Cadenabbia on Lake Como, we feared lest malaria, the pest of Milan,
had lurked in the shaded glens, and on the brink of the ponds where he
used to feed the swans. The malady proved to be measles, contracted in
Lombardy or from some Cadenabbian playmate. It was an easy matter to
quarantine our apartments in the quiet hotel we had chosen because we
could be better accommodated, as a family, there, than at the larger
one lower down the lake. Three of our rooms on the second-floor were
_en suite_. We removed the patient into the farthest of these, a cool,
corner bed-room fronting the water, and the Invaluable had entire
charge of it. Happily, the only other children in the house were two
baby-girls whose parents were Americans, but now resident in Florence.
I went immediately to the mother, with the truth, when the eruption
appeared. She was a sensible woman, and a thorough lady.
“My girls must have the disease at some time,” she said. “As well now
as later. Do not distress yourself.”
Her husband, as considerate of us and as philosophical for their little
ones, added some valuable advice to his reassurances,—counsel I am glad
to transmit to others who may require the warning.
“Say nothing to the _Padrone_ of the nature of Boy’s ailment. He
will, probably, demand a large sum for the damage done his hotel by
the rumor of the infectious disease. That is a favorite ‘dodge.’
Travelers must pay for the luxury of illness in a country where there
are fewer appliances for the comfort of invalids than anywhere else in
Christendom.”
We thanked him for his friendly caution, and followed his directions so
faithfully that, to this day, neither landlord nor domestic suspects
the harm they sustained through our residence with them. Boy had the
measles, as he does everything, with all his might. He could neither
taste nor smell, and the sight of food was odious. The room was shaded
to densest twilight while the sun was above the horizon, to spare the
weak eyes. The gentlest talk and softest songs were required to calm
the unrest of fever. When his mind wandered, as it often did, he would
speak nothing but Italian, fancying, generally, that he was talking
with the _padrone_ and his wife who had petted him abundantly before
his illness. Hence, the “_non é possible_” that had refused his supper.
Seeing him sink into more quiet sleep than he had enjoyed for several
days, I set down the rejected cup; stole to the window and unbolted
a shutter. The sunny day was passing away, but the lake was a-glow
with its farewell. In the garden, separating the hotel from the shore,
was a group of American friends who had arrived from Milan two days
before. Three or four girls, looking delightfully cool and home-like in
their muslin dresses, sat upon low chairs with their fancy-work. The
gentlemen wore loose coats and straw hats. The coziness of content,—the
reposefulness expressed in attitude and demeanor, were in just harmony
with hour and scene. One was reading aloud, and while I looked, the
words formed themselves clearly upon my ear. They had talked at dinner,
of “Kismet,” then a new sensation in literary circles. But the tuneful
measures delivered by the fine voice of the reader were from no modern
novel or other ephemeral page:—
“By Sommariva’s garden-gate
I make the marble stairs my seat,
And hear the water, as I wait,
Lapping the steps beneath my feet.
The undulation sinks and swells
Along the stony parapets;
And, far away the floating bells
Tinkle upon the fisher’s nets.
Silent and slow, by tower and town,
The freighted barges come and go,
Their pendent shadows gliding down
By town and tower submerged below.
The hills sweep upward from the shore,
With villas, scattered, one by one,
Upon their wooded spurs, and lower,
Bellaggio, blazing in the sun.
And, dimly seen, a tangled mass
Of walls and woods, of light and shade,
Stands, beckoning up the Stetvio Pass,
Varenna, with its white cascade.
I ask myself—Is this a dream?
Will it all vanish into air?
Is there a land of such supreme
And perfect beauty anywhere?
Sweet vision! do not fade away;
Linger until my heart shall take
Into itself the summer day
And all the beauty of the lake!”
I do not apologize for the long quotation. I offer it as a pendant to
Buchanan Read’s “Drifting,” that brings before our closed eyes the
unrivaled loveliness of the “Vesuvian Bay.” Both are inspired—I use the
term reverently—word-paintings. Both excite within the soul of him who
has seen Naples from Posilipo and Como from Cadenabbia, something of
the sweet madness of poetic dreaming. It is all before us again with
the melodious movement of the verse—even to such realistic touches as
the trailing hand—
“Over the rail,
Within the shadow of the sail”—
and the tinkle of the floating bells that guide the fisherman by night
to his spread net.
I believe Como disappoints nobody. Claude Melnotte’s description of
his ideal castle upon its banks reads like a fairy-story. Recalled at
Cadenabbia or Bellaggio, it may be aptly likened to a cleverly-painted
drop-curtain.
I had been shut up in the darkened room all day; was weary of body,
and if not actually anxious, sympathized so earnestly with the little
sufferer that my heart was as sore as my nerves were worn. The view—the
perfumed air; the on-coming of an evening fairer than the day; the
home-comfortableness of the garden-party; the feeling and music of the
voice rendering the poem,—perhaps, most of all the poem itself, loved
and familiar as it was—were soothing and cordial for sleeplessness,
fatigue and _the mother’s heart pain_. I know no other ache that so
surely and soon drains dry the fountain of life and strength as the
nameless, terrible “goneness” and sinking I have thus characterized.
The moon arose before the Iris hues faded out from the water. The
young people filled two boats and floated away upon the silvery track
laid smoothly and broadly from shore to shore. A band was playing
at the Hotel Bellevue, half-a-mile away, and the lake lay still, as
listening. In the pauses of the music the tinkling of the tiny bells
on the nets; the far-off murmur of happy voices, and the yet fainter
song of nightingales in the chestnut-grove behind the house filled up
the silence. From the richly-wooded hills and clustering villas at
the lower end of the lake, my eyes roved along the loftier crests of
the opposite heights to the snow-line of the Bernese Alps filling the
horizon to my left. We had meant to give but one week to Como, tempting
as it was. These seven days were to have been a breathing space after
Milanese heats before we essayed the St. Gothard Pass—the gate of
Switzerland. A mighty gate and a magnificent, and, up to June 10th,
locked fast against us. The band of white radiance, gleaming in the
moonlight, like the highway of the blessed ones from earth to heaven,
had been a stern “_non é possibile!_” to our progress before Boy fell
ill. A party had passed the barrier on the 7th, but at the cost of
great suffering and peril to the invalid of their company,—a report
duly conveyed to us, coupled with a warning against similar temerity.
_Now_—upon the 20th—we were a fixed fact, for three weeks, at the
least, and had taken our measures accordingly. Matters might have been
far worse. For instance, had the civil _padrone_ surmised the character
of Boy’s “feverish attack,” or the dear babies B—— caught it from him.
We were granted time to write up note-books, arrange photographs and
herbarium-albums, and bring up long arrears of correspondence. Had we
pressed on over the mountain-wall at the appointed date we should have
missed the reunion with the party of eight from lower Italy from whose
companionship we were drawing refreshment and sincerest pleasure.
In the center of one leaf of my floral album—right opposite a view
of Bellagio and Villa Serbelloni, with the rampart of snow-capped
hills rising back of it into the clouds, the shining mirror before
it repeating white walls and dark woods, olive-terraces and
rose-gardens,—is a single pressed blossom. It is five-petaled,
gold-colored; the pistil of deepest orange protected by a thicket
of amber floss. The leaves are long, stiff, and were glossy, set in
pairs, the one against the other on a brown, woody stem. It grew in
the grounds of the Villa Carlotta. The spray of many fountains kept
the foliage green, when Bellaggio blazed most fiercely in the June
suns, and the lime-walks on the Cadenabbia side were deserted. Boscages
of myrtle, of lemon-trees and citron-aloe, honeysuckles, jasmine and
magnolias shadowed the alleys. Calla lilies, tall and pure, gave back
the moonlight from the fountain-rims, and musk-roses were wooed by the
nightingales from moonrise to day-dawn.
This is what my yellow-haired princess says to me, as I unclose the
book, and a waft of the perfume she brought from the enchanted regions
steals forth. She was bright as the sun, clear as the day, sweeter than
the magnolias, when Caput came with her, into Boy’s room the day after
my moonlight reverie at the window, and gave her into my hand:
“Mr. R—— S——’s compliments and regrets that you could not join the
walking-party.”
She has a page to herself,—the peerless beauty! as the episode of
the four days’ visit of our transatlantic friends glows out from the
pale level of our social life during our as many weeks’ lingering at
Cadenabbia.
We made excursions when Boy was well enough to leave his bed, by
boat, by carriage and on foot. We bought in Bellaggio more olive-wood
thimble-cases, ink-stands, silk-winders, darning-eggs and paper-cutters
than we shall ever get rid of on Christmases and birth-days. We visited
silk-factories; penetrated the malodorous recesses of stone cottages
to see the loathsome worms gorging themselves with mulberry-leaves;
going into silken retirement and enforced fasting after their gluttony,
and boiling by the million in a big pot, dirty peasant women catching
at the loosened threads and winding them on bobbins until the dead
nakedness of the spinner was exposed. We read, studied and wrote in
the scorching noons and passed the evenings in walking and sailing. We
did not tire of lake or country, but July was late for Italy, and my
system may have absorbed poison from the Lombardy marshes. When, on the
morning of July 4th, the diligence we had engaged for the journey to
Porlezza drove to the door, I was supported down the stairs after a
week of pain and debility, and lifted into my place in the _coupé_, or
deep front seat, facing the horses.
Wedged in and stayed by cushions, I soon tested and approved the
sagacity of an eminent physician’s advice to invalids—chronic and
occasional. “Change air and place, instead of drugging yourself. Move
as long as you can stir. When you cannot,—be _carried_! But, go!”
The air was fresh and invigorating, blowing straight from the
mountains. The road wound up and over terraced hills, cultivated to the
topmost ridges; through fertile valleys and delicious forest glades,
gemmed with wood blossoms. It was haying time. Purple clover and
meadow-grasses were swathed, drying, and stacked in a hundred fields,
the succulent stems yielding under the tropical sun the balm of a
thousand—ten thousand flowers. I have talked of the wild Flora of Italy
until the reader may sicken at the hint of further mention of such
tapestry as Nature rolled down to our wheel-tracks. Cyclamen, violets,
wild peas,—daisies, always and everywhere,—edged and pearled the green
carpet. The scenery changed gradually, without loss of beauty, in
nearing the Lake of Lugano. Lying among pillows on the deck of the
steamer we had taken at Porlezza, I noted that the very mountain shapes
were unlike those environing Como, and their coloring darker. There
were no more straight brows and abrupt precipices, but one conical
height was linked to another, furrowed by foaming cascades, springing
from crest and sides, until S. Salvador loomed up before us at the
terminus of our twelve-mile sail, majestic and symmetrical, wearing a
gray old convent as a bride her nuptial crown.
At the Hotel Belle Vue, on the border of the lake, we tarried two
days, to rally strength for the continuous effort of the next week,
more than to inspect Lugano and its suburbs. We hired here a carriage,
in size and general features resembling a Concord stage. A written
contract was signed by both parties. The driver, vehicle and four
horses were ours until we should be delivered, baggage and bodies,
upon the steamboat plying between Fluelen, at the upper end of the
Lake of the Four Cantons, and the town of Lucerne. The _diligence_
was well-hung, fitted up with red velvet seats, soft and elastic; the
horses were strong and true,—the driver spoke Italian—not German,
which we were beginning to dread. For almost a week we were to be only
passengers, free to eat, sleep and see at our will, without the fear
of altered prices, extras and other sharp impositions, incessantly
weighing upon our foreign-born souls.
How we climbed the Alps is too long a story to relate in detail.
Maggiore, the Ticino, Bellinzona, the quiet Sabbath at Faido near the
mouth of the St. Gothard tunnel, then building,—I catch the names in
fluttering the leaves of our note-books, and each has its story.
Julius Cæsar fought his way from Rome to Gaul through the valley of
the Ticino. The plains on each side of the classic river, as level as
an Illinois prairie, are a narrow strip between the mighty ranges of
snow-mountains. The meadow-farms are divided by hedge-rows and flecked
with grazing flocks. Other herds are pastured high up the hill-sides in
the summer, the huts of their keepers black or tawny dots, when seen
from below. Every few furlongs, cataracts flash into sight, hasting
by impetuous leaps, down the rocks to the river, not infrequently
dispersing themselves in spray and naught, in the length and number of
their bounds.
We crossed the Pass, July 9th—a cloudless day. Since early morning we
had been climbing. The road is built and cut into the solid mountain,
and barely wide enough to permit the skillfully-conducted passage of
two diligences. It winds up and around spurs and shoulders, and is
protected at the more dangerous curves and steeper cliffs by stout
stone posts. The traveler eyes the thickness and obstinate expression
of these with growing satisfaction as the villages below dwindle into
toy-hamlets and the fields into dolls’ patchwork-quilts of divers
shades of green and yellow; while he makes rapid silent calculations
of the distance between them, and their relation to the length and
breadth of the stage. _Could_ we go down backward, sideways, anyway,
were a horse to balk, or a trace to break, or a wheel come off? Looking
directly upward, we saw a tedious succession of terraces, similarly
guarded; dizzy inclines that were surely inaccessible to hoof or wheel.
The next hour showed us from the most incredible of these, the road
from which we had surveyed it.
“I begin to comprehend ‘Excelsior,’” said Secunda, solemnly. “No wonder
he died when he got to the top!”
We were nearing the snow-line. We were warmly wrapped, but the
increasing frostiness of the air warned us to unfasten shawl-straps
and pull from beneath the seats the carriage-rugs we had stowed
away at Faido. Caput had spent as much time out of the _diligence_
as in it, in the ascent. A bed of scarlet pinks or blue gentian; a
blanket of hoary moss capped with red; a clump of yellow pansies—the
tiny “Marguerites” of the Alps,—branchy shrubs of rose-colored
rhododendrons;—were continually-recurring temptations to leap over the
wheel from his place in the _coupé_. Once out, it was hardly worth
his while to get in again when, for a mile or two ahead, the like
attractions, and many others, cushioned the rocks, nodded from their
brows and smiled from every crevice. Now, as he came up to the side of
the carriage to toss in upon us his burden of beauty, his face was
reddened by cold,—not sunburned;—he struck his emptied hands smartly
together to quicken the circulation, and the rime began to form upon
his moustache. Scanty patches of snow no longer leaked from sheltered
nooks across the road. Brown earth and barren rocks were hidden
partially, then, entirely,—then, heaped over by the gray drifts. They
_were_ gray,—positively grimy. Not quite as dirty as city-snow, but of
a genuine pepper-and-salt that was a surprise and a disgust. From below
they were as dazzlingly pure as the clouds that caught against them,
with the same cold azure shadows in their clefts. We were driving now
between cloven banks of packed snow,—six, twelve, twenty feet high, on
which the heavens might have showered ashes for as many days and nights
as darkness had brooded over Pompeii, so befouled were they. The July
sun shone full upon the glistering surface, with no more perceptible
effect than if the month had been December. The ingrained dust had been
swept from the iron crags jutting into the snow-cutting at the next
turn of the pass, and frowning upon us from yet loftier terraces. It
was granitic powder, disintegrated and beaten fine by frost and blast.
Once in a while, we passed a low house with deep eaves and great stones
laid upon the roof. These supplied refuge at night and in storm, to the
goats browsing on Alpine moss and grasses. The herdsmen wore jackets,
coats and caps of goat and sheepskin. Wiry dogs, not at all like the
pictorial St. Bernard, slunk at their heels, or barked crossly at a
straying kid. A clatter of hoofs and rattle of trace-chains upon the
upper road prepared us for the appearance of a single horse, trotting
steadily by us in the direction from which we had come.
“Has there been an accident?” we inquired.
We might see a coach rolling back upon us next. The driver explained
that the summit of the Pass was but a mile or two ahead; that the
fourth horse was not needed in the descent and was accordingly released
from each _diligence_ at the post-house at the top, and sent home by
himself.
He was a saturnine “whip,”—for one who spoke Italian—but he smiled
grimly at the next question; “Will he certainly find his way home? Will
nobody try to stop, or steal him?”
“It is an everyday affair, Signorina. His supper is at the foot of the
hill. Who should stop him, since everybody knows to whom he belongs and
whither he goes?”
Peering over the edge of the precipice from my window, I saw the
trained creature, already two hundred feet below our level, trotting
at the same even gait, down the zigzag highway. Before we had gone
half-a-mile further, a second met and passed us, harness on, the traces
hooked up out of the way of his heels, going downward at the regulation
rate of speed, neither faster nor slower than his predecessor. It was
at this point that a volley of soft snow-balls flew against and into
the carriage, and from their ambush, behind a drifted heap, emerged
Caput and Prima, rosy with laughter and the sharp air. They had left
the carriage an hour ago to walk directly across the ice-fields to this
height, a straight track of two miles, while we had toiled and doubled
over more than six to the rendezvous.
Snow-balling in July! The story of the “three little boys who went out
to slide, All on a summer’s day,” need not have been fictitious if they
were St. Gothardites. In a trice, Secunda had torn off entangling rugs
and was upon the ground, and Boy halloaing vociferously to be allowed a
share in the sport. The driver sat upon the box, gazing at his horses’
ears, unmoved by the whizzing missiles, merry shrieks and deafening
detonations from the frozen rocks. I was cramped by long sitting, even
in my luxurious nest upon the back seat. I would get out. The snow was
not white, but it was snow. I longed to feel it crisp and crunch under
my feet.
“Is it quite prudent?” remonstrated Miss M——, gently.
“Come on!” encouraged the revelers.
After a dozen trial-steps, I boldly avowed my intention to walk to the
nearest curve in the road. Caput gave me his arm and we sent the coach
on with the others. The ground was smooth as a skating-pond, but not
so slippery. A mountain-wall, five hundred feet high, arose in sheer
perpendicular at our left.
“Take it slowly!” cautioned my escort. “You are weak, and the air
highly rarefied.”
_That_, then, was the reason why respiration passed rapidly from
difficulty to pain. I should get used to it soon, and to the horrible
aching in my right lung. But, when, having walked beyond the lee of the
rocky rampart, the breeze from a neighboring glacier struck us in the
face, I thought breath was gone forever. In vain Caput, turning my back
to the wind, sheltered me with his broad shoulders and assured me the
pain would be short-lived. The agony of suffocation went on. I had but
one distinct recollection in the half-death:
“A traveler died, last year, near the top of the Pass from _collapse of
the lungs_!” a gentleman had said to another one evening at the hotel
as I passed through the hall.
I had scarcely thought of it again until now, when I was dying in the
same way. I heard Caput’s shout to the driver; saw mistily the entire
party tumble out into the snow, and Prima, plunging down a steep bank
to reach us the sooner,—brandy-bottle in hand. As if swallowing were
easier than breathing! They got me into my nest again; wound me up in
shawls and rugs; poured some wine down my throat; chafed my hands, and,
after an age of misery, the tiniest whiff of breath found entrance to
the laboring lungs, as when a closed bellows is slowly opened.
The driver, during all this commotion, sat, rigid as the nearest Alp,
without abating his scrutiny of his leaders’ ears. Collapsing lungs
were no novelty and no terror to him, and none of his business. He had
contracted to deliver us, alive or dead—(and our luggage,) upon the
deck of the Fluelen steamer within a week, for and in consideration
of the sum of so many hundred francs. That was all he knew or cared
about the matter. He loosened one of our horses at the post-house on
the summit, and the patient beast trotted off down the mountain in
the convoy of a dog chained to his collar. The cold was now piercing;
the never-thawed ice of the lake before the Hospice, blue and hard as
steel. Caput added to his adjurations to haste, a gratuity that touched
a chord of natural feeling in the wooden man. He fairly raced down the
other side of the mountain, spinning around curves and grating upon the
wheel-brakes while our hair stood on end and our teeth were on edge.
Down defiles between heights that held up the heavens on each side; on
the verge of precipices with the wheels almost scraping upright rocks
on the left and grazing the outermost edge on the right; thundering
over bridges and flying through the spray of waterfalls, we plunged,
ever downward—until, at sunset, we whirled out into the open plain and
into the yard of the Hotel Belle Vue at Andermatt.
In ten minutes more, I lay, smothering in the well of one feather-bed,
another upon me, and was cold withal. A Swiss maid was building a fire
in the stove, within four feet of the bolster. The Invaluable and the
spirit-lamp were brewing a comforting cup of tea upon the round stand
at my side.
The hotel was excellent, being clean, commodious, well-provisioned and
handsomely-appointed as to furniture and service. The rest of the party
used it as a center for all-day excursions to the Furca Pass and the
Rhone Glacier, while I lay in bed, too worn and miserable to be more
than feebly diverted by scraps of conversation that arose to my windows
from the piazza and lawn. Such, for example as this:
_English Voice_—feminine and fat. “I _guess_ you are an American boy,
stranger!”
_Boy._ “What makes you think so?”
_E. V._ “Oh! I judge—I mean, I guess—by the cut of you.”
_Boy_ (who never “guesses”—) “And I judge you are English. I can tell
them wherever I see them.”
_E. V._ “How—I should like to know?”
_Boy_ (knowing and sententious). “Americans are white and thin. English
are fat and red.”
_E. V._ “Upon me word! _You_ are not very white, I am sure!”
_Boy._ “Ah! but if you had seen me when I had the measles at
Cadenabbia! _Misericordia!_ I was as red as you!”
This chapter has two morals for those whom they may concern.
To Traveling Americans and those who hope to become such: Heed wisely
Nature’s emphatic or hinted “_Non é possible!_” Do not attempt the St.
Gothard or Simplon Pass if you have unsound lungs or heart.
To the Average Briton: A monkey is better at cutting capers than an
elephant.