18
At thirty-two Martin put his foot for the first time upon the soil of his ancestors. He roamed through Zurich; mounted its narrow cobble-stoned alley-ways, stood before an overhanging house reading the inscription. “This house is three hundred years old.” The lives of Zwingli, Pestalozzi became familiar. He read ravenously the history of the town. He stood on the border of its blue lake, encircled with snow mountains, “A Turquoise on a white bosom.” Something stirred in him, an inward convulsion, like the sudden eruption of an extinct crater; he broke into choking tearless sobs. Martin, unknown to himself, had the Swiss temperament—a people without the gift of self-expression, a deeply religious peasant race, silent before the mystic beauty of their mountains. Patriotism, that misunderstood word, with its medieval clashing of swords, its uniforms, its medals, has no relation to the Swiss adoration of the soil. He worships his valleys, his lakes, his waterfalls; they are living to him; he has a rage for the mountains; he leaves his country to seek wealth, but he rarely stays in the stranger’s land; nostalgia drives him home; he must get back to the heights or die. Martin understood later why his grandfather went mad, why his father was wordless, why his mother died young.
He tried his Swiss on the portier of the Bauer au lac Hotel, a man of all-round information, a veritable encyclopædia of Switzerland, who could answer in the many languages of the cosmopolitan crowd, on its way to and from the mountains. Martin spoke a few words to him in his grandfather’s “lingo,” then said, “What am I speaking, anyhow?”
“Your dialect is Romontsch or Romance. Your people came from the Grisons.”
Then he explained how in the Middle Ages the Barons and Bishops had oppressed the people, and how they formed Leagues and fought for their freedom. The Grisons took their name from the “Gray League,” a heroic band of peasants.
Martin left Zurich by the early train the next morning; he sat the entire day gazing out of the window unconscious of the other passengers. A great moving picture shot before him—green valleys, velvet hills, beautiful grazing animals, brooks changing into waterfalls, cataracts dashing down dark ravines, mountains growing higher, higher. At Tarasp he stayed over night to connect with the stage-coach at daybreak, and spent the evening sitting outside with the guides, who told him of the Val Sinestra, where the bandits used to live in caves, deep down in the ravines, and smuggled wine over the border. Then they spoke in lowered tones of the danger of mountain climbing—of death—of miracles they had seen above in the mist, with their own eyes.
With the rising of the sun, seated beside the coach driver, Martin pierced the mountain passes; they stopped at a quaint hamlet.
“We turn here,” said the old man. Then he wished “Godspeed,” cracked his whip, and went on. The coach pitched from side to side, on a perilously narrow road, but the horses were sure-footed, and the driver, past seventy, had gone the same way for fifty years.
Martin drew deep breaths of the fragrant air; he looked about him. The houses were a mixture of old Swiss and Italian architecture—the protruding windows and little balconies were covered with bright flowers; in the distance he caught sight of a picturesque church and cemetery. He entered an inn with a swinging sign; a rooster flapping its wings. The spotless floors sprinkled with sand, the small counter with shelves of bottles, the peasant girl in the costume of the Canton—it was all so familiar. She brought him a glass of wine and a pretzel, smiling at his jargon. He remarked on the absence of men.
“They are ‘up there’ with the cows for the summer.” She pointed to the green hills, gradually becoming steeper. “In those little huts on the top they make the cheese which they send all over the world. In the winter the sun doesn’t come up very high; it is like a blue twilight here. The storms howl, the snow falls for weeks. When the peasant closes his eyes, the avalanche haunts him; if he awakens in the morning he is grateful to God.” The girl went on chattering in her soft “Romance.” “The doctor goes down to Croire in the winter, but our pastor stays with us. We have service here when the snow is too deep to walk to the chapel.” Then she put down the glass she was polishing, and went joyously to the door to meet a tall man, a gigantic peasant, with masses of thick gray hair falling to his shoulder. He was long past seventy, but showed no signs of age. His voice rang out stentorian, clear. He was warm, wiping the perspiration from his face with a large red handkerchief. He looked at Martin with keen penetrating eyes. Then said, “Good morning.”