IV—ON A MOUNTAIN
Last week I did a thing which you may call hackneyed or unhackneyed, according to your way of life. To some people an excursion to Hampstead Heath is a unique adventure: to others, a walk around the summit of Popocatapetl is all in the year’s work. I went to Switzerland and spent Easter on the top of a mountain. At any rate, the mountain was less hackneyed at that season than Rome or Seville, where the price of beds rises in proportion as religious emotion falls. It was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus who sent me to the mountain. To mention Marcus Aurelius is almost as clear a sign of priggish affectation and tenth-rate preciosity as to quote Omar Khayyam; and I may interject defensively that I prefer Epictetus, the slave, to Marcus Aurelius, the neurotic emperor. Still, it was Marcus Aurelius who sent me to the mountain. He advised me, in certain circumstances, to climb high and then look down at human nature.
I did so. My luggage alone cost me four francs excess in the Funicular.
I had before me what I have been told—by others than the hotel proprietor—is one of the finest panoramas in Europe. Across a Calvinistic lake, whose renown is familiar to the profane chiefly because Byron wrote a mediocre poem about a castle on its shores, rose the five-fanged Dent du Midi, twenty-five miles off, and ten thousand feet towards the sky; other mountains, worthy companions of the illustrious Tooth, made a tremendous snowy semicircle right and left; and I on my mountain fronted this semi-circle. The weather was perfect.
Down below me, on the edge of the lake, was a continuous chain of towns, all full and crammed with the final products of civilisation, miles of them. There was everything in those towns that a nation whose destiny it is to satisfy the caprices of the English thought the English could possibly desire. Such things as baths, lifts, fish-knives, two-steps and rag-times, casinos, theatres, rackets, skates, hot-water bottles, whisky, beef-steaks, churches, chapels, cameras, puttees, jig-saws, bridge-markers, clubs, China tea, phonographs, concert-halls, charitable societies, money-changers, hygiene, picture post cards, even books—-just cheap ones! It was dizzying to think of the refined complexity of existence down there. It was impressive to think of the slow centuries of effort, struggle, discovery and invention that had gone to the production of that wondrous civilisation. It was perfectly distracting to think of the innumerable activities that were proceeding in all parts of the earth (for you could have coral from India’s coral strand in those towns, and furs from Labrador, and skates from Birmingham) to keep the vast organism in working order.
And behind the chain of towns ran the railwayline, along which flew the expresses with dining-cars and fresh flowers on the tables of the dining-cars, and living drivers on the footplates of the engines, whirling the salt of the earth to and fro, threading like torpedo-shuttles between far-distant centres of refinement. And behind the railway line spread the cultivated fields of these Swiss, who, after all, in the intervals of passing dishes to stately guests in hotel-refectories, have a national life of their own; who indeed have shown more skill and commonsense in the organisation of posts, hotels, and military conscription, than any other nation; so much so, that one gazes and wonders how on earth a race so thick-headed and tedious could ever have done it.
I knew that I had all that before me, because I had been among it all, and had ascended and descended in the lifts, lolled in the casinos and the trains, and drunk the China tea. But I could not see it from the top of my mountain. All that I could see from the top of my mountain was a scattering of dolls’ houses, and that scattering constituted three towns; with here and there a white cube overtopping the rest by half an inch, and that white cube was a grand hotel; and out of the upper face of the cube a wisp of vapour, and that wisp of vapour was the smoke of a furnace that sent hot-water through miles of plumbing and heated 400 radiators in 400 elegant apartments; and little stretches of ribbon, and these ribbons were boulevards bordered with great trees; and a puff of steam crawling along a fine wire, and that crawling puff was an international express; and rectangular spaces like handkerchiefs fresh from a bad laundry, and those handkerchiefs were immense fields of vine; and a water-beetle on the still surface of the lake, and that water-beetle was a steamer licensed to carry 850 persons. And there was silence. The towns were feverishly living in ten thousand fashions, and made not a sound. Even the express breathed softly, like a child in another room.