I left
my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I
plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment
for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the
last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to
a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my
fourth day.
The light still fell, and my resolution stood, though my exhaustion
undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher against the sky,
and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the loneliness
and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in East
England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills.
Everywhere I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of
sunset reflected in stagnant waters.
The marshy valley kept its character when I had left the lane and
regained the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last effort with
which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, and as
I blundered on my whole spirit was caught or lifted in the influence
of the waste waters and of the birds of evening.
I wished, as I had often wished in such opportunities of recollection
and of silence, for a complete barrier that might isolate the mind.
With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a
pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved
and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men
have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose
holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are
incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover,
there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with
the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same
thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus.
But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning
of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union
between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms,
revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of
pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know
nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether
they could make the matter clearer in Rome.
But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is
so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a
very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at
whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn
closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as
one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from
without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some
mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more
desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So
also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the
songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in
by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than
these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial
there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that
our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert
and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.
As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely
ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of
evening - (my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling
slowly) - I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my
sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the
miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half
round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open
Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat
down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little
thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had
carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful
march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth
drinking after I had passed the frontier.
I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to
which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on
into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a
wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched
jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the
Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.
So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to
cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point
came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French
town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had
covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis
and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and
said -
'Am I in Switzerland?'
A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial
traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all said together
in varying accents:
