He Came For That,
He Looked For It, And He Throws It From Him With The Thought.
A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either
hand that rise higher and higher and shoot
Up new summits the
higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a
village of hotels; a world of black and white - black pine-woods,
clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it,
and papering it between the pine-woods, and covering all the
mountains with a dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching
to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks,
possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the
hotel - and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.
A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace
never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it;
and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to
witness. It is a river that a man could grow to hate. Day after
day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and
creeps, growing and glowing, down into the valley. From end to end
the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles
with the light, clear and dry like crystal. Only along the course
of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one
waving scarf of vapour. It were hard to fancy a more engaging
feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe that
delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the
incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the sky is
arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale and melting
in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An English
painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger
that 'the values were all wrong.' Had he got among the Alps on a
bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who
has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your
eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles
away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand;
the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no
relation, and might be in another sphere. Here there are none of
those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and
spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and
light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring
piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism
and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding
definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more
than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the
nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the winter
daytime in the Alps.
With the approach of evening all is changed. A mountain will
suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that
are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile,
overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place,
the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
The latest gold leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the
moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be
mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon
a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house,
between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.
But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be
eternally exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink;
the wind bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead,
the snow-flakes flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail
comes in later from the top of the pass; people peer through their
windows and foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and
death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn; and when at
last the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of
unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to
wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men. Or perhaps from
across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about
the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain
valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a
gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the
whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently
recognises the empire of the Fohn.
CHAPTER XI - ALPINE DIVERSIONS
There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium. The
place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in
double column, text and translation; but it still remains half
German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a
company of actors able, as you will be told, to act. This last you
will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet,
confine themselves to German and though at the beginning of winter
they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before
Christmas they will have given up the English for a bad job. There
will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races; the German
element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
mysterious item, the Kur-taxe, which figures heavily enough already
in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting.
Meantime in the English hotels home-played farces, tableaux-
vivants, and even balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar
sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year are solemnised
with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the young folks
carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a
singing quadrille.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 61 of 70
Words from 61194 to 62263
of 70588
