Kind
of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a horse
for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc
for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,
purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher said
when he published the popular edition of _Pamela,_ I held the horse
for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit understanding
that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink, which I, of
course, expected him to bring in his own hands.
Far from it. I can understand the anger which some people feel against
the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I will always hold
that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your own accord,
and especially into a country so free and so well governed as is
Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen
that you find there.
Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the peasant sat in
there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters of an hour.
Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and cough and
spit and turn round again and say something to the people within in
German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I
held this horse.
I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, for the horse was
restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away from me. And
all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if this man
were coming to relieve me; but I saw him laughing and joking with the
people inside; and they were all looking my way out of their window as
they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I thought they were laughing
at me. A man who knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written a
book upon 'The Drink Traffic: The Example of Switzerland', tells me
they certainly were not laughing at me; at any rate, I thought they
were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the reins, gave the horse a
great clout, and set him off careering and galloping like a whirlwind
down the road from which he had come, with the bit in his teeth and
all the storms of heaven in his four feet. Instantly, as you may
imagine, all the scoffers came tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling,
gesticulating, and running like madmen after the horse, and one old
man even turned to protest to me. But I, setting my teeth, grasping my
staff, and remembering the purpose of my great journey, set on up the
road again with my face towards Rome.
I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will
not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to
me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot
seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all
the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going
to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end.
Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living!
For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be
skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and
eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of
his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing -
Can fix the high elusive hour
And stand in things divine.
And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of one was there all the
way from Burgdorf to the Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash
of joy when I sent that horse careering down the road with his bad
master after him and all his gang shouting among the hollow hills.
So. It was already evening. I was coming, more tired than ever, to a
kind of little pass by which my road would bring me back again to the
Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope down the other side of
the little pass (three or four hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a
village, called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was a large
school on my right and a great number of children there dancing round
in a ring and singing songs. The sight so cheered me that I
determined to press on up the valley, though with no definite goal for
the night. It was a foolish decision, for I was really in the heart of
an unknown country, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers,
beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not five miles away, was
the Brienzer Grat, the huge high wall which it was my duty to cross
right over from side to side. I did not know whether or not there was
an inn between me and that vast barrier.
The light was failing. I had perhaps some vague idea of sleeping out,
but that would have killed me, for a heavy mist that covered all the
tops of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, began to drop
down a fine rain; and, as they sing in church on Christmas Eve, 'the
heavens sent down their dews upon a just man'.
