You Have Had Your
Moment; But You Have Not Changed The Scene.
The mountains are
about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
change only one for another.
CHAPTER X - HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the
wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
unchanging surf - idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were certainly
beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a
lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
fled from, but bearded in his den.
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