Like the remainder of Christian Europe, those valleys shared once upon a time in the Catholic faith, and this had wonderfully commingled the early and earthly beliefs of our kind with the teachings of Divinity. Free-thinkers in the Protestant sense of the word, those boys, creeping under the shadow of the cliffs up to the snowy vastness above, saw welling up from the depths of their minds, as in a mirror, the images of the strange beings with which the rude fancy of the peasantry peoples those upper reaches of the Alps which they call the Evil Country. But on that day nothing came of those forebodings.
On the next morning, after a night spent in complete freedom from haunting ghosts, my boys hesitated a moment before rounding the shoulder of the Oldenhorn. The Zan Fleuron glacier opened up just beyond. This was the known Synagogue, or meeting place of the spirits. They dreaded to see what they might see there if they turned the corner before the arrows of light-bearing Apollo had scattered the night mists of Hecate.
Suddenly the sun broke and poured forth in floods upon a world springing up innocently from the folds of sleep. My lads felt saved by glad day.
But, if they went through this first expedition without suffering injury from the spirits, they were less fortunate in their dealings with myself. They had allowed themselves to be drawn into a temptation for which they were yet to undergo punishment; namely, they had, for gold, disregarded the rules of the Bernese corporation of guides. It is a salutary regulation of that honourable guild that none who is not an officially certificated guide shall accompany alone a gentleman in the district. Now, a terrible thing had happened. Two young men, neither of whom was a certificated guide, had accompanied a gentleman in the district. Indeed, the mother of the boys must in the end be proved to be right in her mistrust. That gentleman had induced her boys to make light of the fundamental rule of local etiquette as to keeping off the Zan Fleuron beat entirely reserved for the spirits from All Souls’ Day to Easter Sunday, and, in addition, he was getting them into trouble with the police.
One or two months later I was busily and peacefully engaged in my study when a member of the Geneva detective force was ushered in. I started up. What could be the matter?
The gentleman then explained politely that I was wanted somewhere in the Canton de Berne. What for? It could be no light matter.
Now I knew—by repute, rather than by personal experience—that justice in Berne is extremely rough and even handed. I said I would rather appear before a Geneva judge. On repairing to the courts, I was informed that the brothers Marti were summoned at Saanen for palming themselves off as guides upon an unwary gentleman of uncertain age and feeble complexion. They had preyed upon his weak mind and enthusiasm to drag him in midwinter up to the top of the Diablerets, exposing his body to grave risks, and his soul to the resentment of the fairies, and thus indirectly infringing a privilege which certificated guides alone enjoyed, to the exclusion of the remainder of man and womankind.
Reassured on my own behalf, I at once became “cocky” and proceeded to prick that legal bubble and take the guiding corporation down a few pegs. I solemnly swore before the judge—in presence of the clerk who took my words down with forced gravity—that I had engaged Victor Marti as lantern-bearer to the elderly Diogenes I actually was, and his brother Ernest to act for me as crossing-sweeper over the Zan Fleuron glacier, because I expected there might be some snow, and it is bad for old men to have cold feet.
I have since heard that the two boys got off that time without a stain on their character.
I say that time, because this trouble is not the last I got them into. But this is another tale, and will appear hereafter.