THE NEW START
It was the first week in May when we started—the 5th, in fact. The car had been thoroughly overhauled, and I had spent a week personally on it, scraping and polishing, so that we might make a fine appearance as we stood in front of the hotel in the bright morning sunlight where our fellow guests would gather to see us glide away.
I have had many such showy dreams as that, and they have turned out pretty much alike. We did not start in the bright morning. It was not bright. It was raining, and it continued to rain until after eleven o'clock. By that time our fellow guests were not on hand. They had got tired and gone to secluded corners, or to their rooms, or drabbling into the village. When the sun finally came out only a straggler or two appeared. It was too bad.
We glided away, but not very far. I remembered, as we were passing through the town, that it might be well to take some funds along, so we drove around to the bank to see what we could raise in that line. We couldn't raise anything—not a centime. It was just past twelve o'clock and, according to Swiss custom, the bank was closed for two hours. Not a soul was there—the place was locked, curtained, barred. Only dynamite would have opened it.
We consulted. We had some supplies in our basket to eat by the roadside as soon as we were well into the country. Very good; we would drive to some quiet back street in the suburbs and eat them now. We had two hours to wait—we need feel no sense of hurry. So we drove down into Vevey la Tour and, behind an old arch, where friends would not be likely to notice us, we sat in the car and ate our first luncheon, with a smocked boy for audience—a boy with a basket on his arm, probably delaying the machinery of his own household to study the working economies of ours. Afterward we drove back to the bank, got our finances arranged, slipped down a side street to the lake-front, and fled away toward Montreux without looking behind us. It was not at all the departure we had planned.
It rained again at Montreux, but the sun was shining at Chillon, and the lake was blue. Through openings in the trees we could see the picture towns of Territet, Montreux, Clarens, and Vevey, skirting the shore—the white steamers plying up and down; the high-perched hotels, half lost in cloudland, and we thought that our travels could hardly provide a more charming vision than that. Then we were in Villeneuve, then in the open flat fields of the Rhone Valley, where, for Europe, the roads are poor; on through a jolty village to a bridge across the Rhone, and so along the south shore by Bouveret, to St. Gingolph, where we exhibited our papers at the Swiss douane, crossed a little brook, and were again in France. We were making the circuit of the lake, you see. All winter we had looked across to that shore, with its villages and snow-mantled hills. We would now see it at close range.
We realized one thing immediately. Swiss roads are not bad roads, by any means, but French roads are better. In fact, I have made up my mind that there is nothing more perfect in this world than a French road. I have touched upon this subject before, and I am likely to dwell upon it unduly, for it always excites me. Those roads are a perfect network in France, and I can never cease marveling at the money and labor they must have cost. They are so hard and smooth, so carefully graded and curved, so beautifully shaded, so scrupulously repaired—it would seem that half the wealth and effort of France must be expended on her highways. The road from St. Gingolph was wider than the one we had left behind. It was also a better road and in better repair. It was a floor. Here and there we came to groups of men working at it, though it needed nothing, that we could see. It skirted the mountains and lake-front. We could look across to our own side now—to Vevey and those other towns, and the cloud-climbing hotels, all bright in the sunshine.
We passed a nameless village or two and were at Evian, a watering-place which has grown in fame and wealth these later years—a resort of fine residences and handsome hotels—not our kind of hotels, but plenty good enough for persons whose tastes have not been refined down to our budget and daily program of economies.
It was at Thonon—quaint old Thonon, once a residence of the Counts and Dukes of Savoy—that we found a hostelry of our kind. It had begun raining again, and, besides, it was well toward evening. We pulled up in front of the Hôtel d'Europe, one of the least extravagant of the red-book hostelries, and I went in. The "Bureau" as the French call the office, was not very inviting. It was rather dingy and somber, and nobody was there. I found a bell and rang it and a woman appeared—not a very attractive woman, but a kindly person who could understand my "Vous avez des chambres?" which went a good ways. She had "des chambres" and certainly no fault could be found with those. They were of immense size, the beds were soft, smooth, and spotlessly clean. Yes, there was a garage, free. I went back with my report. The dinner might be bad, we said, but it would only be for once—besides, it was raining harder. So we went in, and when the shower passed we took a walk along the lake-front, where there is an old château, once the home of royalty, now the storehouse of plaster or something, and we stopped to look at a public laundry—a square stone pool under a shed, where the women get down on their knees and place the garments on a board and scrub them with a brush, while the cold water from the mountains runs in and out and is never warmed at all.
Returning by another way, we found about the smallest church in the world, built at one corner of the old domain. A woman came with a key and let us into it and we sat in the little chairs and inspected the tiny altar and all the sacred things with especial interest, for one of the purposes of our pilgrimages was to see churches—the great cathedrals of France. Across from the church stood a ruined tower, matted with vines, the remains of a tenth-century château—already old when the one on the lake-front was new. We speak lightly of a few centuries more or less, but, after all, there was a goodly period between the tenth and the fourteenth, a period long enough to cover American history from Montezuma to date. These old towers, once filled with life and voices and movement, are fascinating things. We stood looking at this one while the dusk gathered. Then it began sprinkling again and it was dinner time.
So we returned to the hotel and I may as well say here, at once, that I do not believe there are any bad dinners in France. I have forgotten what we had, but I suppose it was fish and omelet, and meat and chicken, and salad and dessert, and I know it was all hot and delicious, and served daintily in courses, and we went to those soft beds happy and soothed, fell asleep to the sound of the rain pattering outside, and felt not a care in the world.