The Alpine fastness, already alluded to, was not gained for a further couple of days, during which an awakening distaste for Switzerland slowly grew in us, though it did not thoroughly mature till mellowed by a mule ride up a mountain. Reticence in narration is a quality that I endeavour to cultivate. It becomes a necessity in treating of the village and its surrounding slums from and through which our start was made. Having, in a state nearing starvation, been offered the sole refreshment available, namely, concentrated essence of typhoid in the guise of glasses of milk, and having retained sufficient self-control to refuse them, we started on mule-back for the mountain. Traversing, as I have every reason to believe, the open main drain of the village, our animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and precipitous watercourse.
"La voie la plus directe," explained the mule-driver, lashing his ancient cattle in a general way, and without animosity.
The cloud that accompanied our wanderings, as in the case of the Israelites, did not fail of its usual office. Even through the crown of a Panama straw hat the rain attained to my skin. Thence it descended, enveloping me, as it were an inner garment. Twice my mule fell down. I could not reproach it. Indeed, nothing but the fact that one of its parents had been an ass explained its readiness to pick itself up and go on again. It had, however, an incentive, supplied in the rear by its proprietor; we had naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us onward, and its potency was beginning to weaken.
One week of the mountain hotel was as much as we were able to endure. The usual "exceptional" weather prevailed. How familiar is the formula, and how entirely unworthy of credence!
"For seventeen years"—the Landlord calls heaven to witness—"it has never been so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time. If Monsieur or Madame, had come but three weeks ago—or would wait but three days longer——"
There was a time when the glamour of holiday might have induced belief, might even have beguiled a further endurance of the age-long table-d'hôte repasts, of the aggressive muscularity of the English schoolmaster, who, during the progress of the ménu from the watery soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry, faced us, boasting at large and in detail; of the German bride, who practised the piano for four hours daily (her head upon her bridegroom's shoulder, his faithful arm round her waist). These things, though unattractive in themselves, might once have been submitted to as elements of the theoretical holiday (in Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in the rose-leaf.
But, on this occasion—it is possibly one of the compensations of advancing years—we found ourselves endowed with a juster sense of proportion. The close of the eighth day saw us heading for home with a speed that almost amounted to rout. The mule-driver's maxim, "la voie la plus directe" seemed good common sense; we drew neither breath nor bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but names in the night, till we found ourselves facing America from the front doorstep of a certain remote hostelry in the far west of Connaught.
FACING AMERICA
Then, and not till then, did something of the largeness, the leisure, the absurdity, the unconventionality, that should enter into all true holiday, begin for us.