JUST A COMMON VOYAGE
It was inevitable. I, who had always jestingly compared myself to a
brachypod, fastened by Fate to my native reef, and getting contact
with visitors from abroad only as they were brought by tides and
currents, began to feel the irresistible impulse to grow wings and fly
away. How could I detach my clinging tentacles?
Every letter from Lausanne, where my dear ones had established
themselves, urged me to “run over” and make them a long visit. My room
was waiting for me. They depicted the view from its windows; splendid
sweeps of mountains, snow-clad, tinged rose-flesh tints by the
marvellous, magical kiss of the hidden sun; the lake glittering in the
breeze, or dazzlingly azure in the afternoon calm; the desk; the
comfortable, old, carved bedstead; the quaint, tiled stove which any
museum would be glad to possess. There were excursions on foot or by
automobile; mountains to climb; the Dolomites to visit. Each time
new drawings, new seductions. With each week’s mail I felt the
insidious, impalpable lure.
[Illustration: _In the Engadine Valley_ [_See page 444_]]
[Illustration]
I have many friends who put faith in astrology. One of my
acquaintances is making a large income from constructing horoscopes.
She is sincere; she has a real faith. She acts on the hypothesis that
from even the most distant of the planets radiate baleful or
beneficent influences which move those mortals who are, as it were,
keyed or tuned to them. Saturn, whose density is less than alcohol, a
billion miles away; Neptune, almost three billion miles away,
infinitesimal specks in the ocean of space, make men and women happy
or miserable. How much more then is it possible that the heaped-up
masses of mighty mountains may work their spell on men half-way around
this globe of ours? I began to be conscious of the Spell of
Switzerland.
A half-crazy friend of mine, a painter, who loved mountains and
depicted them on his canvases, once broached a theory of his, as we
stood on top of Mount Adams:--
“The time will come,” he said with the conviction of a prophet, “when
we shall be able to take advantage of the electric current flowing
from this mountain-mass to Mount Washington, yonder, and commit
ourselves safely and boldly to its control. Then we shall be able to
practise levitation. It will be perfectly easy, perfectly feasible to
leap from one peak to another.”
I am sure I felt stirring within me the impulse to leap into the air
with the certainty that I should land on top of the Jungfrau or of
Mont Blanc. It was a cumulative attraction. Every day it grew more
intense. I got from the library every book I could find about
Switzerland. I soaked myself in Swiss history. I began to know
Switzerland as familiarly as if I had already been there.
Then came the decisive letter. My niece absolutely took it for granted
that I was coming. She said: “We will meet you at Cherbourg with the
motor. Cable.”
This time I was obedient. I wound up my affairs for an indefinite
absence.
I took passage on a slow steamer, for I was in no hurry, and I wanted
to have time enough to finish some more reading. I wanted to know
Switzerland before I actually met her. I knew that I was destined to
love her.
[Illustration: THE ALPENGLOW ON THE JUNGFRAU.]
Theoretically one may understand psychology, even the psychology of
woman--_may_, I say, not insisting too categorically upon this
point, especially since the recent discovery that woman has, to her
advantage over man, a superfluous and accessory chromosome to every
cell in her dear body--one may know anatomy and physiology; but, when
one falls in love with her, all this knowledge is as nought; she
becomes, in the words of Heine, _die eine, die feine, die reine_. In
this spirit, I studied the geology of Switzerland, realizing in
advance that, as soon as I saw the Alpenglow on the peak of the
Wetterhorn or of Die Jungfrau, I should not care a snap of my finger
for the scientific constitution of the vast rock-masses, or for the
theories that explain how they are doubled over on themselves and
piled up like the folds of a rubber blanket.
On the first day out, as I sat on the deck as far forward as possible,
I became in imagination the prehistoric ancestor of the frigate-bird,
spreading my broad wings, tireless, above the waste of that Jurassic
Sea which, only a brief geologic age ago, swept above what is now the
highest land of Europe, with its south-most boundary far away in
Africa. By the same power of the imagination I saw mighty islands
emerge from the face of those raging waters. To the imagination a
thousand or a million years is but as a wink; it can see in the
corrugated skin of a parched apple all the vast cataclysms of a
continent. Through the ages these seas deposited their strata to be
pressed into rock; those strata were upheaved and, as they became dry
land, the torrential rains, the mighty rivers, gnawed them away and
spread them out over the central plain of what is now Switzerland, and
filled the valleys of the Rhine and the Rhône and the Reuss, the Po
and the Inn and the Danube, making the plains of Lombardy and Germany,
of Belgium, of Holland and southeastern France. Almost three solid
miles, it is estimated, have been eroded and carried away from the
mountain-tops--sedimentary rocks and crystalline schists and even the
tough granite.
As Sir John Lubbock well says, “true mountain ranges, that is to say,
the elevated portions of the earth’s surface, are the continents
themselves, on which most mountain-chains are mere wrinkles.” Under
enormous pressure, and as the interior of the earth gradually cooled
and shrank, the crust remaining at the same temperature, through the
force of gravity great plaques of the crust sank in and perhaps, as in
the case of mesas, left great mountain-masses, which the streams and
rivers immediately began to carve into secondary hills and valleys.
Sometimes these mountain-masses resisted pressure; “these,” says Sir
John, “form buttresses, as it were, against which surrounding areas
have been pressed by later movements. Such areas have been named by
Suess ‘Horsts,’ a term which it may be useful to adopt, as we have no
English equivalent. In some cases where compressed rocks have
encountered the resistance of such a ‘Horst,’ as in the northwest of
Scotland and in Switzerland, they have been thrown into the most
extraordinary folds, and even thrust over one another for several
miles.”
Sir John, whose book, “The Scenery of Switzerland,” I had with me as I
sat in my cozy nook in the bow, asserts boldly that Switzerland was
not formed, as people used to think, by upheaving forces acting
vertically from below. “The Alps,” he says, “have been thrown into
folds by lateral pressure, giving every gradation from the simple
undulations of the Jura to the complicated folds of the Alps.”
Thus the strata between Bâle and Milan, a distance of one hundred and
thirty miles, would, if horizontal, occupy two hundred miles. In some
cases the most ancient portions are thrown up over more recent ones.
The higher the mountain is, however, the more likely it is to be
young; whereas low ranges are like the worn-out teeth of some ancient
dame. “The hills of Wales,” says Sir John, “though comparatively so
small, are venerable from their immense antiquity, being far older,
for instance, than the Vosges themselves, which, however, were in
existence while the strata now forming the Alps were still being
deposited at the bottom of the ocean. But though the Alps are from
this point of view so recent, it is probable that the amount which has
been removed is almost as great as that which still remains. They
will, however, if no fresh elevation takes place, be still further
reduced, until nothing but the mere stumps remain.”
Now I read geology as if I understood all about it; but, five minutes
after I have put the book down, I get the ages inextricably mixed;
Eocene and Pleiocene and pre-Carboniferous and Cambrian and Silurian
are all one to me. Jurassic sounds as if it were an acid and I can not
possibly remember in which era fossils lived and impressed themselves
into the soft clay like seals on wax.
It is tremendously interesting. When I am reading about those old
days, I have no difficulty in picturing before my mental vision a
great jungle filled with eohippuses and megatheriums and
ichthyosauruses and other monstrous creatures. When I get to Oeningen
I mean to make a study of fossils: I am told it has the richest
collection in the world.
That night I dreamed that I stood on the highest peak of the primitive
Alps and a great earthquake shook off colossal blocks of gneiss; vast
rivers went rushing down the valleys. I awoke suddenly with a sort of
involuntary terror. It was nothing but the tail-end of a gale which
tossed the ship like a cockle-shell. The rivers were the streams of
water rushing down the deck as the ship plunged her nose into the
smothering spume of the angry sea. I slipped on my storm-coat and,
clinging to the jamb of my stateroom, gazed out on the wild scene. The
sky was clearing, and a moon, which must have been in its second
childhood--it looked so slim and young--was riding low in what I
supposed was the east; the morning star was darting among scurrying
clouds; great phosphorescent splashes of foam were flying high; the
ship was staggering like the conventional, or perhaps I should say
unconventional, drunken man. A splash of spray in my face counselled
me to retire behind my door, and I made a frantic dash for my berth,
and slept the sleep of the just the rest of the night.
To a man free of care, without any reason for worry, in excellent
health, capable of long hours of invigorating sleep, an ocean voyage
is an excellent preparation for a season of sightseeing, of
mountain-climbing, of new experiences.
I considered myself quite fortunate to discover on board two Swiss
gentlemen. One was a professor from the University of Zürich; the
other was an electrical engineer from Geneva. I had many interesting
talks with them about Helvetic politics and history.
Professor Heinrich Landoldt was a tall, blond-haired, middle-aged man,
with bright blue eyes and a vivid eloquence of gesticulation. He was
greatly interested in archaeology and had been down to Venezuela to
study the lake dwellings, still inhabited, on the shores of Lake
Maracaibo. Here, in our own day, are primitive tribes living exactly
as lived the unknown inhabitants of the Swiss lakes, whose remains
still pique the curiosity of students. Painters, like M. H. Coutau,
have drawn upon their imagination to depict the kind of huts once
occupied on the innumerable piles found, for instance, at Auvergnier.
But Dr. Landoldt had actually seen half-naked savages conducting all
the affairs of life on platforms built out over the shallow waters of
their lake. Their pottery, their ornaments, their weapons, their
weavings of coarse cloth, belong to the same relative age, which, in
Switzerland, antedated history. Probably Venice began in the same way;
not without reason did the discoverer, Alonzo de Ojeda, in 1499, call
the region of Lake Maracaibo Venezuela--Little Venice.
The same conditions bring about the same results since human nature is
everywhere the same. One need not follow the worthy Brasseur de
Bourbourg and try to make out that the Aztecs of Mexico were the same
as the ancient Egyptians simply because they built pyramids and laid
out their towns in the same hieroglyphic way.
The presence of enemies, and the abundance of growing timber along the
shores, sufficed to suggest the plan of sinking piles into the mud and
covering them over with a flooring on which to construct the thatched
hovels. The danger of fire must have been a perpetual nightmare to
these primitive peoples, the abundance of water right at hand only
being a mockery to them. The unremitting, patient energy of those
savages, whether then or now, in working with stone implements, fills
one with admiration. Professor Landoldt had many specimens which he
intended to compare with the workmanship of the lacustrians of
Neuchâtel, Bienne and Pfäffikersee, antedating his by thousands of
years.
He has invited me to make him a visit in Zürich and I mean to do so.
He tells me that the museum there is exceedingly rich in relics of
prehistoric peoples. Perhaps we can go together and pay our respects
to the shades of the lake-dwellers. I always like to pay these
delicate attentions to the departed. So I would gladly burn some
incense to Etruscan or Kelt, whoever first ventured out into the
placid waters of the lake--any lake, it matters not which--there are
dozens of them--and pray for the repose of their souls; they must have
had souls and who knows, possibly some such pious act might give
pleasure to them, if perchance they are cognizant of things
terrestrial.
My electrical friend, M. Pierre Criant, was also very polite and, when
he learned that I was bound for Switzerland to spend some
months--Heaven alone knows how many--he urged me to look him up,
whenever I should reach Geneva. He would be glad to show me the great
plans that were formulating for utilizing the tremendous energy of
the Rhône. This was particularly alluring to my imagination for I have
a high respect for electrical energy. M. Criant seemed to carry it
around with him in his compact, muscular form.
We three happened to be together one morning and I had the curiosity
to ask them, as intelligent men, what they thought of the “initiative
and referendum,” which I understood was a characteristic Swiss
institution, and which a good many Americans believed ought to be
introduced into our American system of conducting affairs, as being
more truly democratic than entrusting the settlement of great
questions to our Representatives in Congress or in Legislature
assembled. I remarked that some good Americans looked to it as a cure
for all existing political evils. We adopted the Australian ballot and
it immediately worked like a charm; undoubtedly its success prepared
the way for receiving with greater alacrity a novelty which promised
to be a universal panacea. “How does it really work in Switzerland?” I
demanded.
“In our country,” replied M. Criant, “a certain number of persons have
the right to require the legislature to consider any given question
and to formulate a bill concerning it; this must be submitted to the
whole people; it is called the indirect initiative. They may also
draft their own bill and have this submitted to the whole people. This
is of course the direct initiative. Some laws cannot become
enforceable without receiving the popular sanction. This is called the
compulsory referendum. Other bills are submitted to the people only
when the petition of a certain number of citizens demand it. This is
the optional referendum. This right may apply to the whole country, or
to a Canton, or only to a municipality: the principle is everywhere
the same. Suppose an amendment to the Federal Constitution is desired.
At least fifty thousand voters must express their desire; then the
question is submitted to all the people. Again, if thirty thousand
voters, or eight of the Cantons, consider it advisable to support any
federal law or federal resolution, they must be submitted to the
popular vote; but this demand must be made within three months after
the Federal Assembly has passed upon them. Of course this does not
apply to special legislation or to acts which are urgent.”
“Has the initiative proved a working success?” I asked.
“Well,” replied Professor Landoldt, “in 1908, more than two hundred
and forty-one thousand voters carried the initiative, proposed by
almost one hundred and sixty-eight thousand signatures, against the
sale of absinthe. In the same way, locally, vivisection was partially
prohibited in my Canton in 1895. In Zürich there was a strong feeling
in the community that the public service corporations and the large
moneyed interests had altogether too much influence in the government;
even the justice of the courts was called in question, and, under the
leadership of Karl Bürkli, who was a follower of Fourier, the
initiative and referendum were adopted especially as a protest against
the high-handed autocracy of such men as Alfred Escher. It has been
principally used as a weapon against the party in power; but not
always successfully. Sometimes it has worked disastrously, as for
instance when, in November, the unjust prejudice against the Jews was
sufficiently strong to introduce into the Constitution an amendment
prohibiting the butchering of cattle according to the old Bible rite.
They professed to believe in the Bible, but not in what it says! In
this case the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals
combined with the Jew-baiters.”
“A measure which affects me personally,” said M. Criant, taking up
the theme, “but which is really in the line of progress, was passed in
1908, when by an overwhelming majority--some three hundred and five
thousand against about fifty-six thousand--the Federal Government took
over from the individual cantons the right to legislate concerning the
water resources when any national interest might be at stake. There
are such tremendous hydraulic possibilities in Switzerland that it
would be a national misfortune to have them controlled by local or by
private corporations.”
“We have the same problem in America,” I remarked. “One of the
greatest and most insidious dangers threatening our people is the
Water Trust, which is already strongly intrenched behind special
privileges and protected by enormous moneyed interests. I believe the
people ought to control the natural monopolies.”
“So do I,” exclaimed Professor Landoldt fervently. And he went on: “We
have recently stood fast by those principles by taking over the
railways, the last item in this tremendous business being the
acquisition, a few months ago, of the St. Gothard line which, with its
debt, has cost, or will cost, some fifty millions. It took us about
seven years to get worked up to the pitch of government ownership.
The price seemed extravagant in 1891, and the measure was defeated
more than two to one; in 1898 there was a majority of more than two
hundred thousand in favour of it; the vote brought out almost the
whole voting strength of the country.
“The citizens of Zürich, a few years ago, refused to spend their money
in building an art-museum; but thought better of it in 1906. The truth
of the matter is, the people like to show their power; they like to
discipline their representatives, often at the expense of their own
best interests. In 1900 they turned down by a majority of nearly two
hundred thousand a Workmen’s Compulsory Insurance bill which both
houses had carried with only one opposing vote.
“The interference of the people with the finances of the cantons, or
of the cities, often works mischief. How, indeed, could they be
expected to show much wisdom in deciding on questions which even an
expert would find difficult? They are willing to reduce water-rates,
but they object to increase taxes, except on large fortunes. They will
readily authorize incurring a good big debt, but they do not like to
face the necessity of paying it, or providing for the payment of it.
As a people we are a little near-sighted; we are not gifted with
imagination.”
“I should think this popular interest in government would tend to
educate the masses,” I suggested.
“It certainly does,” replied M. Criant. “Questions are discussed on
their merits and though, of course, a tricky orator may mislead, it
will not be for long.”
At this point we were interrupted, so that nothing more was said at
the time about Swiss politics. Both my friends, however, renewed their
invitations for me to be sure to look them up. It is one of the great
pleasures and advantages of travelling that one may make delightful
acquaintances. I had no intention of letting slip the opportunity of
further intercourse with men so genial and well informed as Professor
Landoldt and M. Criant.
The voyage came to an end, as do all things earthly. Nothing untoward
happened; and we reached Cherbourg on schedule time.