There were any number of old men and women gathered round wailing, but none of them seemed to know what to do in such a case. The woman’s mother suggested giving her a cup of coffee, which was attempted, most of it being spilt over her. Then someone took off her shoes and began slapping the soles of her feet with a piece of board.
I chanced to have a “first aid” case with me, and—greatly to the distrust of the peasants—administered what suitable remedies I had; I also insisted on one going post-haste down the valley for a medical man. But they would do nothing except wail and shake their heads. Finally the patient came round all right, saying that her head “felt full of hot things,” and the next morning, when I called to inquire after her, I found that she was at work in the hayfields, hatless, under the scorching sunlight, as usual. At another time a little child of three was taken with convulsions from having eaten too much cheese, and died without having anything done to save the little creature; the old women simply wagging their heads wisely and muttering something about their all “going” when taken like that. With them it is evidently a case of the survival of the fittest.
Last summer I was in Champéry at the time of the great Swiss national holiday, when everybody celebrates Swiss freedom by making as much noise as possible during the day and lighting huge bonfires at night. Everyone was dressed in holiday finery, many of the younger women appearing in grey-check trousers and hats with artificial flowers! One happy family party, consisting of the father and mother and four children, had evidently a decided fondness for royal purple—or perhaps this was the colour of their clan—for the six of them, even to the babe in arms, were arrayed in the purple of kings and emperors!
The baby in particular attracted my interest insomuch that I ventured to take the little creature in my arms in the hope that I might slip it out of the cartridge-like swaddling-case in which these poor little wretches are carried about. I might just as well have tried to pull off the muzzle of a gun; the babe was as tightly fixed in his terribly hot case as though it were a vice. And yet I doubt not he will grow into a fine stalwart son of the mountains, though how they ever manage to expand or lengthen at all is a mystery to me.
I once sat talking to an old goatherd who certainly looked as if he had sat in the same nook in the mountains for at least a century. He was so bent and rheumaticky-looking that I quite failed to see how he could possibly make his way along the steep and slippery paths. His “old woman,” as he called her, was off down the valley gathering faggots. “She be a great worker,” he told me, and never got tired the way he did. I asked him if he liked the idea of the women doing most of the hard work; he answered by saying that it “was their way.” It suited the women to work at the hay, he seemed to think; and, besides, they hadn’t to smoke, which was evidently sufficient occupation for the men.
This old man had never seen a railway until this last summer, when a branch line was run on to the village of Champéry, at the foot of his mountain home. I asked him what he thought of it, and he grumbled out a long tale of how it had already killed a lot of goats and sheep!
Any sort of progress is looked upon with the greatest prejudice and suspicion by these people, who will undergo any fatigue and discomfort rather than change the routine of centuries.
Coming down a mountain path one evening, I ran into a party of peasant girls toiling up with huge baskets of provisions strapped to their backs. In the half light I mistook them for men from their garb, but coming nearer I recognised their red togas, and later their women’s voices.
A MOUNTAIN IDYLL.
From a Photo. by Jullien Bros.