At Last!
"A Jack-o'-lantern, a fairy fire,
A dare, a bliss, and a desire."
--BLISS CARMAN.
"Here a great personal deed has room."
--WALT WHITMAN.
The further I penetrated into the mountains, the more like a vast
engineering workshop did the long Alpine valley become. Yet, curiously
enough, instead of destroying romance, this gave a certain majestic
romance of its own; the romance of man's struggle to conquer the
stupendous forces of Nature with his science. It was as if Vulcan's
stithy had been dropped down into a profound ravine of the Alps, and
the drone of machinery mingled with the music of the fleeting river--a
strange diapason.
On the right of the highroad, the flat mountain face opened a black,
egg-shaped mouth at me. I got out of the carriage to approach it, and
while I stood peering down the dark throat, as if I were a Lilliputian
doctor examining the tongue of Giant Gulliver, I was suddenly clapped
upon the shoulder. It flashed into my mind that perhaps it was
forbidden to stare at the tunnel-in-making; and turning to defend
myself from a lash of red tape, with the adage that "a cat may look at
a king," I saw a man I had known years ago smiling at me.
[Illustration: "I WAS SUDDENLY CLAPPED UPON THE SHOULDER".]
I have a worldly-minded cousin who says that she is always nice to
girls, because "you never know whom they may marry." It might be
equally diplomatic to be nice to foreigners who are at Oxford with
you, because you don't know that they may not become famous engineers,
able to show you interesting things when you visit their country.
Giovanni Bolzano had been at Balliol with me, studying English, and
now it turned out that he was second engineer to the works for the new
tunnel. I recalled with poignant regret that Jack Winston and I had
once made hay of his room; but evidently he bore no malice, for after
saying that he was not surprised to see me, as everybody came this way
sooner or later, he offered to show me his tunnel, of which this was
the Italian mouth. It had another at Brig, twelve miles away, and
boasted the longest throat in the world, but as it was marvellously
ventilated, it would never choke in its own smoke, and Bolzano was
very proud of the engineering achievement. Having discharged my
carriage, I went with him into a workshop, heard the humming of
dynamos, and the buzzing of tremendous turbines, actuated by the fall
of the river Diveria, and gazed with the fascination of a mouse for a
cat at a huge and diabolical fan, driving air into the tunnel. This
fearful beast had a house to itself, with a passage down which you
could venture like Theseus entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur; but
such was the volume of breath which it drew into its mighty lungs that
you must use all your strength not to be sucked in and hurled against
the shafting; all your self-control not to be confused by its loud,
unceasing roar.
Hardly had we come out from this weird place, which would have given
Edgar Allan Poe an inspiration for a creepy tale, when Bolzano showed
me a relief gang of men getting ready to enter the tunnel, in a train
consisting of wooden boxes drawn by a miniature locomotive. This was
my chance. I was hurried off to his quarters, helped into rough,
miner's clothing, with great boots up to my knees, and given a miner's
lamp. Then, joining the eight hundred Italians,--a battalion of the
soldiers of Labour,--we got into a box, and set off to relieve eight
hundred other such soldiers who for eight hours had toiled in the
schisty heart of the mountain.
I felt as if suddenly, between sleeping and waking, I had plunged deep
into the dusk of dreamland. We rumbled through a lofty egg-shaped
vault, lined with masonry, lighted waveringly, with strange play of
shadow, by our many lamps. This phase of the dream seemed to last a
long time; and then the train of boxes slowed down, for we had reached
the danger-point, a part of the tunnel where the hidden Genii of the
Mountain had planned a trap to upset all geological expectations.
Having allowed the engineers to penetrate thus far, they had suddenly
flooded the tunnel with cataracts of water from fissures in the rock,
and had laughed wild, echoing laughter because they had contrived to
delay the work for a year, and cause the spending of much extra money.
The dream showed me now a long iron cage, shoring up the crumbling
walls of the excavation; and through this cage we crept like a
procession of wary mice, suddenly putting on speed at the end, till we
reached the tunnel-head, and found another train preparing to go out.
Here the dream flung me into a teeming Inferno of darkness and lost
spirits who (spent with eight hours' monotonous toil in this Circle)
had dropped asleep, sitting half-naked in the line of boxes which
would bear them away to a spell of rest. They had fallen into pathetic
attitudes of collapse, some lying back with their mouths open, some
resting their heads on folded arms, some drooping on comrades'
shoulders.
As our train-load of Activity came to a stand, this other train-load
of Exhaustion rumbled slowly away, the smoky lamps glinting on
polished, olive-coloured flesh, on hairy arms, and swarthy faces shut
to consciousness.
Close to the tunnel-head we alighted, and went on into the dream on
foot, the gallery contracting to a few feet in height, where a group
of black figures bent over rock-drills which creaked and groaned. I
saw the drill-holes filled with dynamite, and retired with the others
while the fuse was lighted. I heard from afar off the thunderous
detonations as the rock-face was shattered. I saw the débris being
cleared away, before the drills should begin to grind again; and the
remembrance that, in another rathole on the Swiss side, another party
of workers was patiently advancing towards us, in precisely the same
way, sent a mysterious thrill through my blood.
"Suppose the two galleries don't meet end to end?" I spoke out my
thought.
"But they will," said Bolzano. "Our calculations are precise, and we
have allowed for an error of two inches: I do not think there will be
more. There is a great system of triangulation across the mountains,
and every few months our reckonings are verified. By-and-bye, we shall
hear the sound of each other's drills; then, down will come the last
dividing wall of rock, and Swiss and Italians will be shaking hands."
I think, in coming out of the dark tunnels and windy galleries, I felt
somewhat as Jonah must have felt after he had been discarded in
distaste by the whale. The light dazzled my eyes. I could have shouted
aloud with joy at sight of the sun. I made Bolzano breakfast with me
in the little inn at Iselle, and got upon my way again, at something
past noon. The vast turmoil of the growing railway was left behind. It
was like putting down a volume of Walt Whitman, and taking up
Tennyson.
The Pass had the extraordinary individuality of one face as compared
with another. It had not even a family resemblance to the St. Gothard.
The air was sweet with the good smell of newly cut wood and resinous
pines. There were sudden glimpses of icy peaks, cut diamonds in the
sun, seen for a moment, then swallowed up by stealthily creeping white
clouds, or caressed by them with a benediction in passing. Thin
streaks of cascades on precipitous rocks made silver veinings in
ebony. Side valleys opened unexpectedly, and one knew from hearsay
that gold mines were hidden there. Treading the road built by
Napoleon, I was enveloped in the gloom of the wondrous Gondo Schlucht,
to come out into a broad valley,--a green amphitheatre, above which a
company of white, mountain gods sat grouped to watch a cloud-fight.
If I had not been heart-broken by the cruelty of Helen Blantock, I
should have been almost minded to thank her for sending me here. But
then,--I reminded myself hastily when this thought winked at me over
my shoulder,--I was stunned still, by my heavy disappointment. I was
not conscious to the full of my suffering now, but I should wake up to
it by-and-bye, and then it would be awful--as awful as the desolation
left by a recent great avalanche whose appalling traces I had just
seen.
[Illustration: "TREADING THE ROAD BUILT BY NAPOLÉON".]
I refused to be interested in the old Hospice of St. Bernard, or the
newer Hospice, built by order of Napoleon, because neither seemed to
me the real thing. If I could not see the Hospice of St. Bernard on
the Pass of Great St. Bernard, I would not see any other hospices
called by his name. If possible, I would have gone by them with my
eyes shut; but at the new Hospice the yapping of a dozen adorable
puppies in a kennel opposite lured me, and I paused to talk to them.
They did not understand my language, and this was disappointing; but
if I had not stopped I should have missed a short cut which I half
saw, half suspected, dimly zigzagging down the mountain into an
extraordinarily deep valley, and tending in the direction of Brig. It
would have been a pity to pass it by, for though I often thought
myself lost, I eventually caught sight of a town, lying far below,
which could be no other than the one for which I was bound. After
three hours of fast walking down from the Hospice, I plunged through
an old archway into the main street of Brig.
Coming into it, I stopped to gaze up in astonishment at an enormous
house which looked to me as big as Windsor Castle. Indeed, to call it
a house does not express its personality at all; yet it was hardly
magnificent enough for a castle. At each corner was an immense tower,
ornamented with a big bulb of copper, like a gigantic and glorified
Spanish onion. A beautiful Renaissance gallery, flung across from one
tall building to another, lent grace to the otherwise too solid pile,
and I guessed that I must have come upon the ancient stronghold and
mansion of the famous Stockalper family, still existing and still one
of the most important in Switzerland. In the Pass I had seen the
towers built by the first Stockalper--that Gaspar who in mediæval days
was called "King of the Simplon"; who protected travellers and
controlled the caravan traffic between Italy and Switzerland; now, to
see the house which he had founded still occupied by his descendants,
fixed more pictorially in my mind the stirring legends connected with
the man.
The little town of Brig seemed noisy and gay after the great silence
of the Pass. Church bells were ringing, whips were cracking; in the
central place there were crowding shops, bright with colour, and
lights were beginning to shine out from the windows of the hotels.
I was to meet the Winstons at the Hôtel Couronne; and as I ventured to
show my travel-stained person in the hall, I was greeted by a vision:
Molly in white muslin, dressed for dinner.
"What, you already!" she exclaimed. "You must have come over the Pass
by steam or electricity. We didn't expect you for an hour. We've lots
to tell you, and oh, I've bought you a sweet revolver, which you are
always to have about you, on your walking trip, though Jack laughed at
me for doing it. But now, for your adventures."
In a few words I sketched them, and learned that the motor had again
pulled wool over the eyes of the law; then Molly must have seen in
mine that there was a question which I wished, but hesitated, to ask.
If a man may have a beam in his eye, why not a mule?
"We've been interviewing animals of various sorts for you all day,"
she said. "I've had a kind of employment agency for mules, and have
taken their characters and capacities. But----"
"There's a 'but,' is there?" I cut into her ominous pause.
"Well, the nicest beasts are all engaged for days ahead, or else their
owners can't spare them for a long trip; or else they're too young; or
else they're too old; or else they're _hideous_. At least, there's one
who's hideous, and I'm sorry to say he's the only one you can have."
"'Twas ever thus, from childhood's hour.'"
"But the landlord says there are dozens of mules at Martigny."
"A mere mirage."
"No, he has telephoned. But you'll look at the one here, I suppose, if
only as a matter of form? I think he's outside now."
"Let him be brought before me," I said, with the air of a tyrant in a
melodrama; and, by the way, I have always thought it would be very
pleasant being a tyrant by profession, like Him of Syracuse, for
instance. You could do all the things you wanted to do, without
consulting the convenience of anybody else, or having it on your
conscience that you hadn't.
At this moment Jack appeared. It seemed that he had been putting the
mule (the one available mule) through his paces, and the wretched
fellow was laughing. "It's not funny, at all," said I, thinking it was
the situation which amused him. But Jack explained that it wasn't
that. "It's the brute's tail," said he. "When you see it, you'll know
what I mean."
I did know, at sight. The organ--if a mule's tail can be called an
organ--had mean proportions and a hideous activity which expressed to
my mind a base and depraved nature. Had there been no other of his
kind on earth, I would still have refused to take this beast as my
companion; and after a few moments' feverish discussion, it was
arranged that after all we must go through the Rhone Valley to-morrow
to Martigny.
But the Rhone Valley, radiant in morning light, heaped coals of fire
upon my head. I had maligned perfection. There was all the difference
between the country between Brig and Martigny seen from a
railway-carriage window, and seen from a motor car, that there is
between the back of a woman's head when she is giving you the cut
direct, and her face when she is smiling on you.
The Rhone Valley tame! The Rhone Valley monotonous! It was poetry
ready for the pen of Shelley, and a scene for the brush of Turner. The
little towns sleeping on the shoulders of the mountains, or rising
turreted from hardy rocks bathed by the golden river; the peeps up
cool lateral valleys to blue glaciers; the near green slopes and
distant, waving seas of snowy splendour left a series of pictures in
the mind; and best of all was Martigny's tower pointing a slender
finger skyward from its high hill.
Late in the afternoon, as the car whirled us into the garden of the
Hôtel Mont Blanc, we came face to face with two mules. They had
brought back a man and a girl from some excursion. The landlord was at
the door to receive his guests. Jack, Molly, and I flung the same
question at his head, at the same moment. Was the situation as it had
been when he telephoned? Could I hire a mule and a man, not for a day
or two, but for a long journey--a journey half across the world if I
liked?
The answer was that I might have five mules and five men for a
journey all across the world if it were my pleasure.
It sounded like a problem in mental arithmetic, but I thanked my stars
that there seemed no further need for me to struggle over its
solution.
[Illustration]