No. 4 created in us a frantic resolve to reach St. Moritz that night, or perish in the attempt.
No banner with a strange device did we bear, yet as the shades of night were falling fast, and we stopped to change horses at a little inn in an Alpine village, and queer-looking men with lanterns walked about the wild place speaking in an unknown tongue (it was Romanisch, but then we did not know), and the road was steep before us, we gloried in resembling the immortal “youth” of the poem. We always have admired him from the time we learned him by heart, and repeated him in our first infant sing-song; but never before did we have the remotest idea why his brow was sad, why his eye flashed like a falchion from its sheath, why he persisted in his eccentric career. Now it is clear as light before us. He was goaded on, as we were, by the Swiss innkeepers.
“O, stay!” said they.
“Excelsior!” cried we. And on we went, feeling that a mighty fate was impelling us, alluding grandly to “Sheridan's Ride,” “How they brought the Good News,” and all similar subjects that we could remember where people pushed on with high resolve, and being in the end grateful to the petty souls who had roused our obstinacy, ignorant that even the Alps are no obstacle to woman's will; for the latter part of the journey was by perfect moonlight, and therefore do we bless the innkeepers. Our obstinacy, do I say? Let the sneering world use that unpleasant term. We will say heroism, for who shall always tell where the line between the two is to be drawn?
Never shall we forget that wonderful white night, the gleams and glooms on the mountains, the silver radiance of the lakes, the vast glaciers outstretched before us, the mighty peaks towering to the skies, the impressive stillness broken only by the bells on our horses' necks, the sound of their hoofs on the hard road, the rumbling of our carriage, and the cracking of the whip. We, with our miserable jarring noises, were the only discordant element, and we well knew we ought to be suppressed. It seemed profane to intrude upon such grandeur, such majestic stillness.
In the full sunlight since, all is quite different; yet we close our eyes, and that glorious white, still night comes vividly before us, and always there will be to us a glamour about the Engadine on account of it.
The village of St. Moritz lies picturesquely on the hillside above a pretty lake of the same name. The St. Moritz baths are a mile farther on, where numerous hotels and pensions stand on a grassy plateau between high mountains, whose sharp contour is wonderfully defined in this clear atmosphere against the peculiar deep-blue of the sky.
In a very interesting article about the Upper Engadine in the Fortnightly Review for March, the writer speaks with undisguised contempt of “the Germanized Kurhaus,” “the damp Kurhaus,” “the huge and hideous Kurhaus,” even telling people to beware of it. Now, if it were not a shockingly audacious thing to dare to have any opinion at all in the presence of the Fortnightly Review, I would venture most humbly to state that I am at present staying at that object of British scorn, the Kurhaus, and like it.
It is ugly. It is immensely long and awkward. If your room is in one end and you have a friend in the other, you feel, walking through the interminable corridors, that the introduction of horse-cars and carriages would promote economy of time and strength. The Kurhaus certainly has its unamiable qualities. It is tyrannical. It puts out its lights at ten o'clock “sharp,” leaving you in Egyptian darkness and not saying so much as “by your leave.” [I have observed that men, whom I have believed to be faultlessly amiable, under these circumstances lose their composure and utter improper ejaculations, as they find themselves, in the midst of an interesting game of whist, unable to see the color of a card.] But after all, unless you are in the village proper, where we—again differing from the awful Fortnightly—would not prefer to be, it seems to be the best abiding-place, because everything centres in it. The people from the other hotels must all come here to drink the mineral waters and take the baths, to dance twice a week if they wish, to hear the music three times a day, to attend various entertainments given by marvellous prestidigitateurs from Paris and singers from Vienna; and though these things are very ignoble to talk about when one is among the grand mountains, yet there come nights and days when it rains in torrents, and when the most enthusiastic mountain-climber must condescend to be amused or bored under a sheltering roof. Then, the Kurhaus, being the largest hotel, the place where things of interest most do congregate, seems to us the most desirable abode. The Victoria, which the English frequent, has fresher paint and newer carpets and finer rooms. But we are true to the Kurhaus, notwithstanding. We are grateful to it for a few charming weeks, and in some way we don't like to see Albion's proud foot crushing it.
It is “Germanized.” That is enough, to be sure, in the opinion of many English and Americans, to condemn it; they often like a hotel exclusively for themselves, and dislike the foreign element even in a foreign land. But to many of us it is infinitely more amusing to live in exactly such a place, where we meet Italians and Spaniards, French, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Russians, people from South America and islands in the far seas,—in fact, from every land and nation,—than to establish a little English or American corner somewhere, wrap ourselves in our national prejudices, and neither for love nor money abandon one or the other.