Swiss allmends, and a walk to see them

by F. Barham Zincke

In nature, and the language of the sense,

The Author of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.—Wordsworth.

August 13.—Madame and the little boy arrived, from Pontresina, yesterday evening, as expected, at five o’clock. This morning, after breakfast, he and I walked to the Devil’s Bridge, and a little way below it, for I wished to see how strong he was upon his legs, and to hear his own account of what he had seen and done during the last year, which he had spent in Switzerland, at school at Aigle during the winter, and in the hot weather at Pontresina with a German tutor. In the afternoon we all went to Hospenthal. These are small matters; but not to mention them would be to exclude the reader for a whole day from our society, which would be a violation of the understanding implied on our title-page. This is the record of a month; and an uneventful day must not be dropped out of the record, but shown to have been uneventful. What, however, was uneventful so far as matter worthy of record goes, must be taken as a part, which, though small, has its place and purpose in the sketch of the whole. The reader, too, will understand that even in a Swiss excursion an uneventful day is not necessarily an unsatisfactory one; for just as peace has its triumphs as well as war, so has repose its charms as well as exertion, and the more so if the repose comes in the midst of the exertion.

August 14.—At 6 A.M. with, figuratively, bands playing and banners waving, that is to say with a fine morning, light hearts, and the good wishes of our host and his wife, we commenced our march. Both the heavy, and the expeditionary baggage was left in charge of my wife’s maid, who was now included in the former. By the diligence that left Andermatt at 10.30 A.M. she was to bring it all on to Am Stag, where she would leave what we were to take with us, take the rest on to Lausanne, and there await our arrival, whenever that might be.

Our first object was Engelberg by the Surenen Pass. With this in view we were to walk to-day to Klus, a little village about four miles beyond Am Stag. The way was all down hill, and the Devil’s Bridge, Göschenen, Wasen, the Priest’s Leap were in succession rapidly left behind and a few minutes after 10 A.M. we had reached Am Stag, somewhat over fourteen miles. For old acquaintance’ sake I was for stopping at La Croix Blanche. My recollections of the good-natured, burly landlord, and his neat-handed, pleasant-mannered manageress, were obligatory. There was too—it was a warm sunny day—a most umbrageous walnut-tree alongside his house, with seats and tables beneath it, just at the foot of the eastern mountain. Only a few paces below the tree was the high road of the valley; beyond that, a few paces more, the murmurous Reuss; and then the opposite western mountain. As it was here that our baggage was to be given up to us, we had to wait for the arrival of the diligence, which would be for two hours. We decided, however, as the day was warm, and our halting place had attractions, and also claims upon us, to stay here till late in the afternoon, and then do the remaining four miles of our day’s work. Having had an early dinner, we took up a position under the umbrageous walnut-tree, and whiled away the time with coffee and ices, which we found were to be had at Am Stag, and with looking at the opposite streams of carriages, from the north, and from the south, which are incessantly passing along this arterial line of road.

As each carriage stopped before the house, down the long flight of steps would waddle the good-natured, burly landlord, to receive his visitors, in gait, bearing, and bulk not unlike a young hippopotamus going down stairs. The parties in the successive carriages had each its own idiosyncrasy, and was a distinct study. Before a word was spoken by the occupants of a carriage, the experienced landlord—for many years he had been a courier—divined at a glance whether he should welcome the new arrival in French, or German, or English. Some had a blasé look. They had had enough of everything, and especially of this kind of thing. They knew very well what it all meant, and just what it was all worth. Others were riant, and reciprocated the host’s politeness. Others had a helpless expression, as if they mistrusted the French of the spokesman of the party, but brightened up when addressed in the familiar accents of the Island tongue. In one of the carriages that stopped before us was an American, as burly as the young hippopotamus, and a head taller. His carriage wheels had hardly ceased to revolve, before he was on the road; and having given an order that the fresh horses were not to be put to for a quarter of an hour, walked off, at a quick pace, to the Reuss, throwing out, as he went, the joints of a telescope fishing-rod. There was a grain of the comical in a big man, in the prime of life, who had crossed the broad Atlantic to see Switzerland, here at Am Stag, with the mountains all around him, entirely absorbed in the hope (it proved fallacious) of being able to beguile, with an artificial fly, to an untimely end, an unwary little trout.

I was reminded of an Englishman, of much the same build, I had met some years ago in Italy. He, too, was a sportsman, and had his gun with him, in expectation of falling in with some quail, or a woodcock or two. That was what, in his way of looking at the world, and all that therein is, Italy might be good for. We were at the time passing through the highly cultivated neighbourhood of Bologna, and were occupying opposite seats, next the same window, in a railway carriage. As far as the eye could reach, the rich level, we were traversing, was all in corn, planted, at regular intervals, with lines of mulberry trees, to which were trained luxuriant vines. It was thus yielding, simultaneously, the three valuable crops of maize or wheat, silk, and wine. My fellow traveller, for some time, contemplated the scene in silence; at last, when he had, with due deliberation, formed his ideas, he gave me the benefit of them. ‘Did you ever see such farming as this? These people here pretend to be growing corn. Just look at their land. Every few yards they have got a hedge of miserable pollards, that will never be worth a shilling a-piece, and of old brambles.’ I afterwards met the same gentleman at Venice; and asked him, if he had seen St. Mark’s, and the pictures at the Accademia? ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘I have been to see them; and all that sort of thing may do very well for the sort of people you have here, but you know I am an Englishman, and can’t take any interest in that sort of thing.’ He had, I thought, hit the nail upon the head. It was because he was an Englishman. He was a public school and University man, and so one of the victims of our public school educational system, which, while undertaking to make classical scholars of the few, who have some taste and capacity for such studies, leaves the minds of all the rest, the great majority, who have no taste or capacity for such studies, utterly blank; and, which is still worse, engenders in most cases an insuperable life-long distaste for every other kind of study. I believe it was the attempt, at the cost of every other kind of knowledge, to force down the throat of my fellow traveller not the Classics, but a grammatical and critical knowledge of Latin and Greek, that must be held answerable for his inability to understand the agriculture of Italy, and to find anything to interest him in Venice.

As soon as Ammer had dined, I sent him on to Altorf to get my malle from the landlord of the Golden Key, in whose charge I had left it, and to post it for Lausanne. He was then to return in the evening to Klus. At 3 P.M. we sent on the little man, in an empty return carriage, in charge of the expeditionary baggage: he had walked 14 miles in the morning. At 4 o’clock my wife and myself followed on foot. We reached Klus a little after 5.