The feast of S. Rocco is kept at Fusio with considerable solemnity. Jones happened to be outside the church and kissed a relic of the saint which was handed round after service. I was sorry not to have been there at the moment, but I joined in the procession and helped to carry S. Rocco out of the church and down the valley to Peccia. There a table covered with a handsome cloth had been placed in the middle of the road, and on this the bearers rested the silvered statue. The officiating priest approached it, said some appropriate words before it, I believe in Latin, at any rate I could not catch them, and then we all turned home again. When the procession doubled round we could see the faces of the people as they met us in pairs. First came the women, one of them bearing a crucifix turned so that the people following might see the figure on the cross. Then came the men in white shirts, some carrying candles, among whom we saw Guglielmoni, and some bearing the image of the saint. Then came the men of the place in their ordinary dress, and we followed last of all. The older women wore the Fusio costume, which is now fast disappearing; many of them wore white linen drapery over their heads, but we did not understand why some did and some did not. Immediately before the statue of S. Rocco came two nuns from Italy who were seeking alms for some purpose in connection with the Church.
We thought the people did not as a general rule look in robust health; some few, both men and women, seemed to have little or nothing the matter with them, but most of them looked as though they were suffering from the unwholesome conditions under which they live, for the conditions in the villages are not much healthier than in the alpi. The houses in such a village as Fusio are few of them even tolerably wholesome. Signor Dazio’s houses are all that can be wished for in this respect, but in too many of the others the rooms are low, without sufficient sunlight, and too many of them are far from inodorous.
We see a place like Fusio in summer, but what must it be after, say, the middle of October? How chill and damp, with reeking clouds that search into every corner. What, again, must it be a little later, when snow has fallen that lies till the middle of May? The men go about all day in great boots, working in the snow at whatever they can find to do; they come in at night tired and with their legs and feet half frozen. The main room of the house may have a stufa in it, but how about the bedrooms? With single windows and the thermometer outside down to zero, if the room is warm enough to thaw and keep things damp it is as much as can be expected. Fancy an elderly man after a day’s work in snow climbing up, like David, step by step to a bed in such a room as this. How chill it must strike him as he goes into it, and how cold must be the bed itself till he has been in it an hour or two. We asked Guglielmoni how he warmed his house in winter and what he did about his bedroom. He said he put his wife and children into the warm room and slept himself in one that on inquiry proved to have only single windows and no stove. It then turned out that he had been at death’s door this last spring and the one before, and that the doctors at Locarno said he had serious chest mischief. The wonder is that he is alive at all. I advised him to get a half-crown petroleum burner and, if he felt he had caught cold, to keep it in his room burning all night. He asked how much it would cost and, when told from twenty to twenty-five centimes a night, said this was prohibitive, and I have no doubt to him with his wife and family it was.
One cause of the mischief doubtless lies in the fact that the high-altitude houses have descended with insufficient modification from ancestors adapted to a warmer climate. Their forefathers were built for the plains. These houses should have been begotten of Russian or Canadian dwellings, not of Piedmontese or Lombard. At any rate, if a reform is to be initiated it should begin by a study of the Canadian or Russian house.
But it is not only the hard, long cold winters, with rough living of every kind, that weigh the people down; the monotony of the snow, seven months upon the ground, is enough to bow even the strongest spirit. It is not as if one could get the “Times” every morning at breakfast and theatres, concerts, exhibitions of pictures, social gatherings of every kind. Day after day not a blade of grass can be seen, not a little bit of green anywhere, save the mockery of the pine-trees. I once spent a remarkably severe winter at Montreal and saw the thermometer for a month at 22° below zero in the main street of the city. True, it was warm enough indoors, and grass does not usually grow in houses, so that one ought not to have missed it; nevertheless one did miss it, as one misses a dead friend whom one may have been seeing but seldom. There is a depressing effect about long cold and snow which one feels whether one is cold or not. I suspect it is the monotony of the snow-surface that is so fatiguing. I used to trudge up to the far end of Montreal Mountain every day because there was a space of a few yards there on which the snow positively would not lie by reason of the wind. Here I could see a few roots of brown dried grass and moss with a tinge of yellow in it, having looked at which for a little while I would return comparatively contented. If the monotony of surface was found so depressing even in a city like Montreal, where so many interests and amusements were open, what must it be in a place like Fusio, where there are none?
The two great foes of life are the two extremes of change. Too much, that is to say too sudden change and too little change are alike fatal. That is why there is so little organic life a few feet below the surface of the earth. It gets too slow altogether and things won’t stand it. Cut away for months together the incessant changes involved in the changed vibrations consequent upon looking at a surface whose colour is varied, and a monotony is induced which should be relieved by the entry of as much other change as possible to supply the place of what is lost.
What a vineyard for the Church is there not in these subalpine valleys, if she would only work in it! The beauty and sweetness of the children show what the people are by nature and prove that the raw material is splendid. Their flowers are not gayer and lovelier than their children; but they do not get a fair chance. If the Church would only use her means and leisure to teach people how to make themselves as healthy and happy in this life as their case admits! If she would do this with a single eye to facts and to the happiness of the people, cutting caste, dogma, prescription, and self-aggrandisement direct or indirect, what a hold would she not soon have upon a grateful people. Nay, if the priests would only set the example of washing, of keeping their houses clean and their bedrooms warm and light and dry, and of being at some pains with their cookery, their example would be enough without their preaching. I grant honourable exceptions, but the upland clergy are as a rule little above their flocks in regard to cleanliness of house and person; instead of facing the many problems that surround them, they rather, I am afraid, have every desire to avoid them. They do not want their people to learn continually better and better in health and wealth how to live; they want things to go on indefinitely as hitherto, only they hold that the people should be even more docile and obedient than they are. I may be wrong, but this is certainly the impression that remains with me.
The priest himself must have a hard time of it in winter. We see the church steps basking in the morning sun of August. It is an easy matter then to dawdle into church and sit quiet for a while amid a droning old-world smell of cheese, ancestor, dry-rot, Alpigiano, and stale incense, and to read the plaintive epitaphing about the dear, good people “whose souls we pray thee visit with the everlasting peace that waits on saints and angels.”
As the clouds come and go the gray-green cobweb-chastened light ebbs and flows over the ceiling. If a hen has laid an egg outside and has begun to cackle, it is an event of magnitude. A peasant hammering his scythe, the clack of a wooden shoe upon the pavement, the dripping of the fountain, all these things, with such concert as they keep, invite the dewy-feathered sleep till the old woman comes and rings the bell for mezzo giorno.
This is the sunny side of subalpine church-going, but how is it when these steps are hidden under a metre of frozen snow? How about five o’clock on a Christmas morning, when the priest can hardly get down the steps leading from his house into the church from the fury of the wind and the driving of the fine midge-like snow? Even when the horrors of the middle passage have been overcome and the church has been reached, surely it is a nice, cosy place for an infirm old gentleman or lady with bronchitic tendencies! How is it conceivable that any one should keep even decently well who has to go to church in a high subalpine village at five, six, seven, eight, or in fact at any hour before about noon upon a winter morning? And yet they go, and some of them reach good old ages. Still one would think that, if a little pains were taken, the thing might be managed so that more of them could reach better old ages. As for the priest, he will carry the last sacraments of the Church any distance, in any weather, at any hour of the night, in summer or winter, but he must have an awful time of it every now and then. So, for the matter of that, has an English country parson or doctor. Still, the Alpine roads are rougher and the snow deeper, and the pay, poor as it often is in England, is here still poorer.