'Pray excuse this appearance of mine. I have had a most unfortunate
adventure in the hills, losing my way and being compelled to sleep out
all night, nor can I remain to get tidy, as it is essential that I
should reach my luggage (which is at Remiremont) before midnight.'
I took great care to pay for my glass of white wine before dinner with
a bank-note, and I showed my sketches to my neighbour to make an
impression. I also talked of foreign politics, of the countries I had
seen, of England especially, with such minute exactitude that their
disgust was soon turned to admiration.
The hostess of this inn was delicate and courteous to a degree, and at
every point attempting to overreach her guests, who, as regularly as
she attacked, countered with astonishing dexterity.
Thus she would say: 'Perhaps the joint would taste better if it were
carved on the table; or do the gentlemen prefer it carved aside?'
To which a banker opposite me said in a deep voice: 'We prefer, madam,
to have it carved aside.'
Or she would put her head in and say: 'I can recommend our excellent
beer. It is really preferable to this local wine.'
And my neighbour, a tourist, answered with decision: 'Madame, we find
your wine excellent. It could not be bettered.'
Nor could she get round them on a single point, and I pitied her so
much that I bought bread and wine off her to console her, and I let
her overcharge me, and went out into the afterglow with her
benediction, followed also by the farewells of the middle-class, who
were now taking their coffee at little tables outside the house.
I went hard up the road to Remiremont. The night darkened. I reached
Remiremont at midnight, and feeling very wakeful I pushed on up the
valley under great woods of pines; and at last, diverging up a little
path, I settled on a clump of trees sheltered and, as I thought, warm,
and lay down there to sleep till morning; but, on the contrary, I lay
awake a full hour in the fragrance and on the level carpet of the pine
needles looking up through the dark branches at the waning moon, which
had just risen, and thinking of how suitable were pine-trees for a man
to sleep under.
'The beech,' I thought, 'is a good tree to sleep under, for nothing
will grow there, and there is always dry beech-mast; the yew would be
good if it did not grow so low, but, all in all, pine-trees are the
best.' I also considered that the worst tree to sleep under would be
the upas tree. These thoughts so nearly bordered on nothing that,
though I was not sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the moon
being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained a few faint
stars, I awoke shivering with cold.
In sleep there is something diminishes us. This every one has noticed;
for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in full consciousness
those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? When
we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force of nature,
to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the strange
frailties of sleep I have noticed cold.
Here was a warm place under the pines where I could rest in great
comfort on pine needles still full of the day; a covering for the
beasts underground that love an even heat--the best of floors for a
tired man. Even the slight wind that blew under the waning moon was
warm, and the stars were languid and not brilliant, as though
everything were full of summer, and I knew that the night would be
short; a midsummer night; and I had lived half of it before attempting
repose. Yet, I say, I woke shivering and also disconsolate, needing
companionship. I pushed down through tall, rank grass, drenched with
dew, and made my way across the road to the bank of the river. By the
time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.
For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just above a bank of
trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of the day,
because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.
The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so much to shine through
the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of the woods and
fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey and
deeper grey. The woods near me were a silhouette, black and
motionless, emphasizing the east beyond. The river was white and
dead, not even a steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a
gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the
hills, so that they rose out of it, indistinct at their bases,
clear-cut above against the brightening sky; and the farther they were
the more their mouldings showed in the early light, and the most
distant edges of all caught the morning.
At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an-hour without moving,
and took in vigour from it as a man takes in food and wine. When I
stirred and looked about me it had become easy to see the separate
grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted chirrups in the
bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the silence,
the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared. In a
solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the
neighbouring sources of the river.
I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I was approaching the
end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had become part of my
adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small stream,
mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.
There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible
accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers
(however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain
roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their
stone cottages and their lonely paths off the road.
So it was here. The hills had grown much higher and come closer to the
river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and then an aged and
uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring stone: part of
the hills. Then again there were present here and there on the spurs
lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the
mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be
so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but
especially in the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said,
here in the upper parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines
Mass is to be said but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special
commemoration. The rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the
older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some
strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor
these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what
they lack in multitudinous life.
I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where the road crosses
the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee as well, and
seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means 'the cleft'
(for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it and
had my coffee. Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of
the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar
baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have
noticed wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and
have little to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great
crop of peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock,
glen, copse, and gully for miles around; and often when I have lost my
way and asked it of a peasant in some lonely part I have grown
impatient as he wandered on about 'leaving on your left the stone we
call the Nuggin, and bearing round what some call Holy Dyke till you
come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and so forth. Long-shoremen
and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely rivers near the
sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's eye now a short
stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, yet they
all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot,
Mall, and the Patch.'
But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment, there was no such
universal and human instinct. For I said to the old man who poured me
out my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, the sun was well
up, and the clouds were all dappled high above the tops of the
mountains): 'Father, what do you call this hill?' And with that I
pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit that lie sheer above the
village.
'That,' he said, 'is called the hill over above Rupt.'
'Yes, of course,' I said, 'but what is its name?'
'That is its name,' he answered.
And he was quite right, for when I looked at my map, there it was
printed, 'Hill above Rupt'. I thought how wearisome it would be if
this became a common way of doing things, and if one should call the
Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side', and Kent
'the South side'; but considering that this fantastic method was only
indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear,
relegated such horrors to the colonies, and took the road again.
All this upper corner of the valley is a garden. It is bound in on
every side from the winds, it is closed at the end by the great mass
of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness is
used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow about it as
though they had been planted to please the eye.
Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their character of
isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the
influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an
orchard, and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal
towns is determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or
spoliation. They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the
waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy
commerce with neighbours. Throughout the world I have found the heads
of rivers to be secure places of silence and content. And as they are
themselves a kind of youth, the early home of all that rivers must at
last become--I mean special ways of building and a separate state of
living, a local air and a tradition of history, for rivers are always
the makers of provinces--so they bring extreme youth back to one, and
these upper glens of the world steep one in simplicity and childhood.
It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road and to draw what I
saw before me, which was the tender stream of the Moselle slipping
through fields quite flat and even and undivided by fences; its banks
had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art: they seemed a
park, and the river wound through it full of the positive innocence
that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees.
There was about that scene something of creation and of a beginning,
and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness of the first
experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs. I mused
upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a
name--were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how
at last they reached the sea.
But while I was thinking of these things, and seeing in my mind a kind
of picture of The River Valley, and of men clustering around their
home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either side, and of
the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed me. She was very
ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, and,
as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to the
French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair
was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes
on the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I
cried out profanely, 'Devil take me! It is Corpus Christi, and my
third day out. It would be a wicked pilgrimage if I did not get Mass
at last.' For my first day (if you remember) I had slept in a wood
beyond Mass-time, and my second (if you remember) I had slept in a
bed. But this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I was bound
to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying along to the next village proved
that I was not too late.
So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, and went into the
church, which was very full, and came down out of it (the Mass was low
and short--they are a Christian people) through an avenue of small
trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to welcome the
procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the street
was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man--I
take him to have been a shopkeeper--I determined to talk politics, and
began as follows:
'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?'
'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is anti-Semitism. It
flourishes.'
'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in your town?'
He said there were seven.
'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews--'
'There are not seven families,' he interrupted; 'there are seven Jews
all told. There are but two families, and I am reckoning in the
children. The servants are Christians.'
'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families
from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on
them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so
very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the
anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'
'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men
for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus
brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the
ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed
their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'
When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the
politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the
following remarkable phrase--
'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the
Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'
I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley
road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this
remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it
was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.
I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of
the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon
d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For
some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either
side, the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now
stood up before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine
that forbid a passage south. Up through these the main road has been
pierced, tortuous and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very
top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped that it is
impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with the Gap of
Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a mountain
with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block the end
of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and out
of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road
over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the
country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the dark
stands for the valley and the light for the high places, will show
better than a long description. Not that this map is of the Ballon
d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I mean.
Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to find a low point
suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are rare, but when one
does get them they are the finest travel in the world, for they
furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads
going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From
their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey
to be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite
step from one province and people to another.
I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags of the road, which
had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy slope. I went along
the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a little path
that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was marked
by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I saw
the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from
the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in their sway, the trees
took on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank that faced
me--for here the woods come to an even line and stand like an army
arrested upon a downward march -- seemed something unusual and
gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe than the extreme
darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in the sky that
introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple.
Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought them
lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering
me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day
waned suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was
over or as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their
own, and shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little
wind ran along the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of
the first trees, rain was falling.
The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a bare drip of water
from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I know not how far
above me. Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the half-light
and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches concealed.
Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories of
the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high columns
of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight
forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these
bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and
fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light
disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded
me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my
feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making
distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and
more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by
their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward
through their immovable host in some such catching of the breath as
men have when they walk at night straining for a sound, and I felt
myself to be continually in a hidden companionship.
When I came to the edge of this haunted forest it ceased as suddenly
as it had begun. I left behind me such a rank of trees aligned as I
had entered thousands of feet below, and I saw before me, stretching
shapely up to the sky, the round dome-like summit of the mountain--a
great field of grass. It was already evening; and, as though the tall
trees had withdrawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly came
upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last
hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from
beneath by the level light of evening, to the three countries that met
at my feet.
For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering
up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men.
To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of
Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls,
who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They
stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saone and are
vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they
go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the
peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide
homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.
Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused
and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen
for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again
and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from
visions.
Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
lit from beneath with evening.
I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I
addressed myself.
It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant
woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of
great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of
Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was
a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner,
until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great
placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little
hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters
were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'.
Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to
be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous
italics--
Quand ce coq chantera
Ici credit l'on fera.