Here I Foresee That You May Pass Much Happy
Time; Against A Good Adversary A Game May Well Continue For A
Month; For With Armies So Considerable Three Moves Will Occupy An
Hour.
It will be found to set an excellent edge on this diversion
if one of the players shall, every day or so, write a report of the
operations in the character of army correspondent.
I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings. This
should be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor
thick with rich furs. The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic
quality on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the
seats deep and easy; a single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust
or so upon a bracket; a rack for the journals of the week; a table
for the books of the year; and close in a corner the three shelves
full of eternal books that never weary: Shakespeare, Moliere,
Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the one volume open
at Carmosine and the other at Fantasio); the Arabian Nights, and
kindred stories, in Weber's solemn volumes; Borrow's Bible in
Spain, the Pilgrim's Progress, Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, Monte
Cristo and the Vicomte de Bragelonne, immortal Boswell sole among
biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials.
The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of
varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf
of books of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, the
Paston Letters, Burt's Letters from the Highlands, or the Newgate
Calendar. . . .
CHAPTER IX - DAVOS IN WINTER
A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on
the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an
invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most
effective kind. The roads indeed are cleared, and at least one
footpath dodging up the hill; but to these the health-seeker is
rigidly confined. There are for him no cross-cuts over the field,
no following of streams, no unguided rambles in the wood. His
walks are cut and dry. In five or six different directions he can
push as far, and no farther, than his strength permits; never
deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding at each
repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of
the road. This, of itself, would be a little trying to the
patience in the course of months; but to this is added, by the
heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an
almost unbroken identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not
merely white. The sun touches it with roseate and golden lights.
Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny
sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful
depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is
still water, and has watery tones of blue. But, when all is said,
these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a
trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and
pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is
too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon
it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost
painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights
of more Arcadian days - the path across the meadow, the hazel dell,
the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the
whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare as colours.
Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall
smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of
frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough
waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the
sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to
no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
frozen snow.
It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from
one end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in
sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as
high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
nested in the wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort
the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to
learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture
to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream. You may
perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks
about. Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption -
and at the second stampede of jodellers you find your modest
inspiration fled. Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it
may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are
visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you
in an opposite direction. It may annoy you to take your walks and
seats in public view. Alas! there is no help for it among the
Alps. There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill;
no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook
upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and
fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-
pines and the sea.
For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the
storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure,
chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-
weather scenes. When sun and storm contend together - when the
thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden
daylight - there will be startling rearrangements and
transfigurations of the mountain summits.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 59 of 70
Words from 59135 to 60163
of 70588
