Curiously enough, though I think English women, as a whole, far surpass the Italians in their looks, the other perfectly beautiful woman whom I have seen was also an Italian. I was taking an early walk, with my younger brother, from Baveno to the summit, or at any rate, to the shoulder of the Monte Moteroni. The time was between five and six o'clock in the morning, and the place a small peasant's farm just at the fringe of the land between the open mountain and the cultivated slopes. I looked over the hedge or wall, I forget which, and there was a bare- legged girl of some seventeen or eighteen working in the field with her father and her brothers, hoeing potatoes. Here, indeed, was something worth writing home about—a figure like the Lombard girl in Browning's "Italian in England, "—a face gentle, simple, kind, but, above all, beautiful, and a figure worthy of the face.
The fourth figure in my gallery of the visions that the turn of the road took from my eyes and "swept into my dreams for ever" was seen during a purely prosaic walk in South Kensington. Unsuspecting, unperturbed, I was bent on a constitutional, or maybe a shopping expedition, when there suddenly arose before my astonished eyes, out of a man-hole in the middle of the street—I honestly believe it was the Cromwell Road—a young workman with flaxen hair and a short beard,—a man with something of the face and figure which the Italian painters gradually came to attribute to the Christ. But here again, as in the case of the Madonna of the tram-car, the man evidently had never been told of, or thought of, the resemblance. He seemed perfectly unconscious and natural. Though the trained eye might notice a resemblance in the outline of the face, the happy smile and negligent air showed nothing of the Man of Sorrows. He was just an ordinary Englishman.
When I think of those four figures of resplendent beauty—and especially of the two women, for the Syrian had something sinister and uncanny about him and the young Englishman was too prosaic in essentials—I recall the passage which I know is somewhere in Sir Thomas Browne, though I am quite unable to find it, in which the Physician Philosopher declares that when he sees specially beautiful persons he desires to say a grace or thanksgiving to Heaven for the joy that has been vouchsafed him.
As to the strange stories and strange things told me, I should have liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pass. The English mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb. Suddenly he saw to his astonishment a chamois, the shyest of all animals, standing stock- still on a steep glacier. She actually let him come so close to her that he could have touched her with his hand, and then he saw the reason. The chamois stood at the very edge of a deep crevasse, and up from its cold, blue depths came the cry of a terrified and agonised creature—cries that were answered by the mother chamois. The little chamois had fallen through the ice-bridge and lay some hundred feet or so below and beyond all recovery. The narrator was an ordinary table-d'hote Smoking-Room tourist, but he could hardly recount the story without tears. He tried, but it was impossible to effect a rescue, and he had to leave the wretched mother where she was. As he said, "Considering what chamois are, it sounds absolutely incredible that the mother should have been able to overcome her shyness of mankind and stay by the young one. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. She took no more notice of me and my guide than if we had been rocks. Poor brute!"
Another chapter would have recorded the influence upon my life of great writers, great poets, great painters, great sculptors, and great musicians. Next, I should have loved to give in detail accounts of my travels, not in strange or dangerous parts of the earth, but through some of the most beautiful scenery of Europe and in the fringes of Africa and Asia. As a young man, I journeyed in sledges over most of the Alpine passes in the winter, for, owing to my uncle John Symonds being one of the discoverers of the High Alps in winter, I was early, so to speak, in the snow-field. To this day nothing attracts me more than the thought of a long day or night spent in a sledge.
I crossed the Splugen by day in the winter, and by moon-light in the summer. I crossed the St. Gothard (before the tunnel was made) in a Vetturino carriage. I have crossed the Simplon, and I have many times crossed the Bernina and all the other passes of the Orisons in the snow in mid-winter. For those who like, as I do, sharp cold, and ardent sunlight, there is nothing more delightful, and if as sometimes happens, one can see or hear an avalanche really close, without getting into it, a pleasant spice of danger is added. But I did not love the Alps merely in the winter. Though no expert climber, I was fond of the mountains to the point of fanaticism, and though I never got higher than 11,000 feet, or a little over, I had the extremely interesting experience of falling into a crevasse. Fortunately I was well held by the rope against the white grey edge of the blue abyss, while my legs kicked freely in the illimitable inane.
Is there anything in the world like being aroused in the grey of dawn by the man with the axe and the rope? Can anything equal that succession of scenes, the Alpine village in sleepy silence, the pastures and the cultivated land, the inevitable little bridge on the inevitable stream, then the belt of pines, then the zone of rocks and flowers, best and gayest of all gardens, and last the star gentians and the eternal snows? A holiday heart, twenty years of age, a friend, a book of poetry, and a packet of food in one's pocket!—Truly, "If there is a Paradise, it is here, it is here!"
Horses that I have known and liked, and on whose backs I have felt supremely happy—rides on mules in Spanish or African mountains, rides in the Syrian or Libyan Deserts on true Arabs, or, perhaps most thrilling of all, night rides on the Downs, would make a tale, whether delightful to read by others I know not, but certainly delightful to be recorded by me.
"Projects Fulfilled and Unfulfilled" would have made a good chapter, as would also "Quotations and the Effects of Poetry on Everyday Existence."
Another chapter which I have not written, but should like to have written, would have been "Some Uncles"—I use the word "some" in both the common and the slang sense—for I may be said to have been specially rich in this relationship. Two of my Indian uncles were well known to the public. One was Sir John Strachey, for six months acting Viceroy of India, owing to Lord Mayo's assassination and the delay in his successor taking up the post. The other was Sir Richard Strachey, who began his Indian life as a subaltern in the Hon. East India Company's Corps of Sappers and Miners. He had a horse killed under him at the Battle of Sobraon, and afterwards became one of the greatest of Indian Civil Engineers, a Member of Council (Public Works Department), and one of the greatest of canal and railway constructors. Henry Strachey, another uncle, commanded a battalion of Gourkhas, and died over ninety years of age. Though little known to the world, he was a man of memorable character and in his youth accidentally and temporarily the talk of London as a Thibetan explorer. William Strachey, a fourth uncle, was the strangest of men. Like the "Snark," he breakfasted at afternoon tea and lived by candlelight instead of sunlight,—a wholly fantastic man, though one of great ability. At one time he was what our forefathers called "a man about town,"—a member of Brook's Club during the Fifties and Sixties, a friend of Thackeray and of "Flemming, the Flea," and a clerk in the Colonial office. He was often selected by Lord Palmerston for special work. Later, however, he developed such strangely nocturnal, though by no means noisy habits, that he almost disappeared from the ken of his family. He, by the way, once spoke to me of Lady William Russell, of whom I have already written, describing her as one of the most beautiful and in later years one of the most delightful people he had ever seen, and the best of all hostesses—"You used to look up at the fanlight over the door of her house in South Audley Street, and if you saw the gas-jet burning you knew that she was at home, expecting the company of her friends, and needed no further invitation. Whatever the hour was, if the light was burning you could go in and finish your evening in talk with her and her other guests." She was thus at home almost every evening to the people favoured enough to have the entry of her house.