In London, rain; in Paris, blinding heat. Dizzily we staggered round the
elder Salon, and through its innumerable small square rooms, with their
lining of flagrant canvases; it was like exploring the brain-cells of a
fever patient in delirium. One healing instant was ours, when at the
public baths in the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, the waters of a "_Bain
Complet_" closed over the exhausted person; but that, even, was speedily
poisoned by the discovery that towels and soap, being extras, were not
left in the _Cabinet de Bain_, and the bather, having with dripping
hands explored the pocket for the needed coins, had then to tender them
to the attendant through a difficult slit of doorway, receiving in
exchange a small fragment of slightly scented marble and a gauze veil.
After that, the night journey to Geneva. Heat, sardine-like proximity of
fellow travellers, two dauntless English ladies, who turned the long
night into one unending and clanking tea-party; a nightmare interlude of
_douaniers_, then, when a troubled sleep had at length been bestowed,
Geneva; and all the horrors that attend the finish of a long train
journey.
At breakfast, at our hotel, a survey of what we had hitherto endured in
the pursuit of pleasure stung us to a brief revolt. This was a holiday,
we told ourselves, why hurry? Fortified by a principle, theoretically
unassailable, we strolled about Geneva. It was cold and very wet;
still, in our newly realised leisure, we made a point of strolling. On
our return to our hotel most of the staff were on the pavement,
seemingly very much excited. A _voiture_, laden with our luggage, stood
at the door. It appeared that our steamer left for Villeneuve in eight
minutes. I imagine that the hotel staff's agitation arose from the fear
that we should not have time to tip them all. This was, alas,
unfounded.
The driver took us first to the wrong steamer. He then turned his
machine too short, and locked the fore carriage. Then he shambled
across the long bridge to the other steamboat quai, while we sat
forward, like the coxswains of racing eights, in sweating agony,
watching our boat getting up steam and preparing for instant departure.
We caught the boat by springing, like Spurius Lartius and Herminius,
across the widening chasm between her deck and the shore, and therewith
fell into a species of syncope. Mists shrouded the mountains; a chilled
rain swept the lake. For our parts, slowly recovering, we kept the
cabin, and swept the tea-table. It was almost our first moment of
enjoyment.
The Alpine fastness, already alluded to, was not gained for a further
couple of days, during which an awakening distaste for Switzerland
slowly grew in us, though it did not thoroughly mature till mellowed by
a mule ride up a mountain. Reticence in narration is a quality that I
endeavour to cultivate. It becomes a necessity in treating of the
village and its surrounding slums from and through which our start was
made. Having, in a state nearing starvation, been offered the sole
refreshment available, namely, concentrated essence of typhoid in the
guise of glasses of milk, and having retained sufficient self-control to
refuse them, we started on mule-back for the mountain. Traversing, as I
have every reason to believe, the open main drain of the village, our
animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and precipitous watercourse.
"_La voie la plus directe_," explained the mule-driver, lashing his
ancient cattle in a general way, and without animosity.
The cloud that accompanied our wanderings, as in the case of the
Israelites, did not fail of its usual office. Even through the crown of
a Panama straw hat the rain attained to my skin. Thence it descended,
enveloping me, as it were an inner garment. Twice my mule fell down. I
could not reproach it. Indeed, nothing but the fact that one of its
parents had been an ass explained its readiness to pick itself up and go
on again. It had, however, an incentive, supplied in the rear by its
proprietor; we had naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us onward,
and its potency was beginning to weaken.
One week of the mountain hotel was as much as we were able to endure.
The usual "exceptional" weather prevailed. How familiar is the formula,
and how entirely unworthy of credence!
"For seventeen years"--the Landlord calls heaven to witness--"it has
never been so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time. If Monsieur or
Madame, had come but three weeks ago--or would wait but three days
longer----"
There was a time when the glamour of holiday might have induced belief,
might even have beguiled a further endurance of the age-long
_table-d'hote_ repasts, of the aggressive muscularity of the English
schoolmaster, who, during the progress of the _menu_ from the watery
soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry, faced us, boasting at large and in
detail; of the German bride, who practised the piano for four hours
daily (her head upon her bridegroom's shoulder, his faithful arm round
her waist). These things, though unattractive in themselves, might once
have been submitted to as elements of the theoretical holiday (in
Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in the rose-leaf.
But, on this occasion--it is possibly one of the compensations of
advancing years--we found ourselves endowed with a juster sense of
proportion. The close of the eighth day saw us heading for home with a
speed that almost amounted to rout. The mule-driver's maxim, "_la voie
la plus directe_" seemed good common sense; we drew neither breath nor
bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but names in the night, till we found
ourselves facing America from the front doorstep of a certain remote
hostelry in the far west of Connaught.
[Illustration: FACING AMERICA]
Then, and not till then, did something of the largeness, the leisure,
the absurdity, the unconventionality, that should enter into all true
holiday, begin for us.
I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the words "Seaview Hotel," in
letters large and green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed walls, but
without this clue I do not think the closest observer would be able to
detect its walk in life. It had but one storey; a dark and narrow
passage led from the entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as
subsequent experience showed us) any time of the day or night, the
entire establishment might be found, massed, talking as though they had
not met for years, and were to separate in an hour.
Thus we, led by our carman, an _habitue_ of the house, found them, and
thus, with but brief intervals, they continued during the period we
spent among them.
"What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver from a very stout lady, whom
we rightly assumed to be the proprietress. "Oh--the sitting-room," she
exhibited a natural annoyance, having been interrupted in a
pronouncement on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs. "Here! Mary Kate,
show the sitting-room!" She re-addressed herself to her subject.
Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a profusion of fair hair, "showed"
the sitting-room. It was small, but not unclean, and, in addition to the
normal outfit of table and chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large
double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard was sufficiently indicated
by the fact that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied one seat,
while a piece of cold beef reclined on the other. The bedrooms, if I
may quote a French guide-book's remarks upon the retreat of a hermit,
"excited I know not what emotions of religious terror;" emotions that
were not allayed by the suspicion, that deepened to certainty, that, in
the absence of visitors, they were occupied by the staff.
"Hot wather? O _cerr*tainly!" said Mary Kate, kindly. "Beg your
pardon--" she crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and proceeded to
grope behind photograph frames and a crowded multitude of glass and
china, *objets d'art_. "I left me hat pins--" here she giggled
confidentially, while, so intimate was the arrangement of the _objets
d'art_, that several of them fell off at the farther end of the chimney
piece. "Ah! what matther! Sure they're all a little broke!" said Mary
Kate, wedging them into their places again, and thrusting the recovered
hat pins into her redundant locks. "Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat
now, I daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in to ye."
A brief interval ensued, during which we furtively examined the
bedclothes, and indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the substance
that stuffed the pillows. Their smell, though curious, offered no basis
for theory.
There came a creeping sound without, and low down, a panel of the door
was dealt a single blow.