This eagle, flying past Chillon to the mountains of Ouida’s Ischl, rode a purely romantic blast, and was visible only to romantic eyes. The orthodox climber, however, does not care for romance. His love of the mountains is based, like domestic love, on knowledge and understanding. It is reasoned, almost respectable. But the visions of Byron and of the German Romantics have the magic of first love, passionately adoring what is unknown and out of reach. It is profitless to weigh romance against reason. I can only say that I never loved the mountains better than in those long afternoons when they shone before my spirit, hidden from the eyes of my body.
Cynara, when she reads these pages, will dismiss all this talk of yearnings, spiritual unrest, and what not as literary verbiage. And indeed I might never have left Bavaria, had it not been for memories of the previous summer at Champex, where I had rowed and climbed and quarrelled with Cynara, and where Cynara’s sister, who cultivated a conscientious contempt for men in general, and myself in particular, had stung my young soul by insisting that there were in me the makings of a blameless curate. This summer they had gone to Saas Fee, and Cynara wrote to me from there, praising the place ardently, and ending her letter with the careless-cruel hope that I would like Bavaria. Like Bavaria! And the letter had reached me on the damp, dark evening of my arrival at Oberkreuzberg. The need for a personal protest reinforcing my desire towards the Alps settled any lingering hesitation. I had four pounds with me. Before leaving Dresden I wrote, in the hope of increasing this sum, an essay for a competition in the Saturday Westminster. The subject was, ‘On making a Fool of Oneself,’ and I treated the theme with a humour which at the time seemed quite delicious. In retrospect I am astonished that they gave me an honourable mention. Cruder methods of raising money proved more successful, and a generous uncle solved all material difficulties.
Two evenings before I started I went with Herr Göckeritz after supper to one of the village inns. The landlord played the zither, and Herr Göckeritz, after telling a few anecdotes rather broad than long, sang a little wistful ditty of a poor fiddler wandering through the world in sunshine and rain, with no friend but his fiddle:—
‘Und wenn einst vor der letzten Tür
Mein letztes Lied verklang,
Und wenn an meiner Geige mir
Die letzte Saite sprang,
Ach, nur ein Plätzchen gönnt mir dann
An stiller Friedhofswand,
Wo von der Wandrung ruhen kann
Der arme Musikant.’
The whole essence of that lovable absurd German romanticism is in these lines. They haunted me on my journey, and long after, and even now have power to quicken the memory of those days. As we walked home beneath a quiet starry sky I told Herr Göckeritz that I was going to Switzerland. His only comment was an offer to lend me some money. Life is like that.
It was shortly before five o’clock in the morning that I set out on my journey. For economy’s sake I had decided to walk to a station fifteen miles away, thus saving, as I later realised, a little more than sixpence. My clothes were in a Gladstone bag which I hung over my shoulders, pulling the straps into position with a handkerchief tied across my chest. And so, a curious figure, I swung down a path that led to the main road through a little wood. Before entering the wood I turned round for a last look at the village. It seemed in the still dawn a living thing, sad, and lonely, and patient, like its inhabitants. For the moment I felt sorry to go. It was unlikely that Saas Fee would welcome me with wonder and delight. It was probable that neither Cynara nor Cynara’s sister would regard me with the affectionate awe of Maria, Anna, and Babette. However, I did not return.
The memory of that walk has become like the memory of a dream. When I think of it I understand those words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘My life has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.’ He was thinking, I fancy, not of any events suitable as titles for the chapters in a biography, but of stray incidents unrelated to the main course of his life. Such stray incidents have a magical quality. They might have happened, you feel, to a stranger in some forgotten age, so unattached to ordinary life do they seem. By a lucky chance they happened to you, and you remember them with a love and gratitude incomprehensible to others. In those hours the melody of your own little life sounded in accord with the universal harmony, and the echo of that music never dies away.
I passed on through waking villages. On either side of the road were low-lying hills, where trees half hid ruined castles. Were they really castles? The early morning turned everything to magic, and I seemed to walk in a dream-country of the Middle Ages, my journey a pilgrimage, and my goal a noble one, though the way was over-easy. With the tenth mile the enchantment vanished, as dawn dissolved into day. I became conscious of my Gladstone bag, and the handkerchief across my chest cramped me like a steel band. And so, when I came over a small rising and saw before me the factory chimneys of Regen, my destination, I welcomed modern ugliness with relief, and pressed forward to the squalor of a train. The journey to Munich lasted for six stifling summer hours. Opposite me in the railway carriage sat an old woman, wrinkled and furrowed, incessantly munching ham sandwiches. I suffered agonies of vicarious thirst, and being a teetotaller found no assuagement in the draughts of beer which she drank at every station. At last the train dawdled into Munich. The weather had changed, and I spent seven hours taking shelter from sudden showers, and brooding on the probability that for the next few days the Swiss mountains would be hidden in clouds. A night’s journey brought me to Zurich, dull and dismal in the early morning. By this time I had become an advanced realist, with a super-shavian hatred of romance in every sense of that word.
This was the lowest ebb, and now romance came flooding back. Lausanne at noon was lovely. There was the white house where Cynara used to live; old memories quickened at the sight. Martigny shone like a dream against the Champex mountains. And then, as the train rushed up the Rhone valley, I leant from the window, and the trees and the bushes bending before the wind seemed swaying with my ecstasy.
Late in the afternoon I left Stalden for the last stage of my journey, a fifteen-mile ascent to Saas Fee. Beyond the bridge near the village a young climber overtook me as I stopped to readjust my bag. It appeared that he too had come from Munich, that we had a common friend, and that he wished to make the acquaintance of Cynara and her sister. So we walked on together. Behind us the Bietschorn shone a golden peak in the sunset. On each side of the narrow, high valley fell numberless cascades, pouring into the central torrent. Yes, this was Switzerland at last, far lovelier with its roaring waters and scent of pine-trees than in the dim visions of those stifling Dresden days. I had reached the blue hills of the horizon, and the sinking sun had turned them to gold.