If the women were not good-looking, if their lives of toil stunted and coarsened them, the men, with greater apparent leisure, were no handsomer. Among the young I noticed the frequency of what may be called the republican face—thin and aquiline, whether dark or fair. The Vaudois as I saw them were at no age a merry folk. In the fields they toiled silently; in the cafés, where they were sufficiently noisy over their new wine, they talked without laughter, and without the shrugs and gestures that enliven conversation among other Latin peoples. They had a hard-favored grimness and taciturnity that with their mountain scenery reminded me of New England now and again, and gave me the bewildered sense of having dropped down in some little anterior America. But there was one thing that marked a great difference from our civilization, and that was the prevalence of uniforms, for which the Swiss have the true European fondness. This is natural in a people whose men all are or have been soldiers; and the war footing on which the little republic is obliged to keep a large force in that ridiculous army-ridden Europe must largely account for the abandonment of the peaceful industries to women. But the men are off at the mountain chalets too, and they are away in all lands, keeping hotels, and amassing from the candle-ends of the travelling public the fortune with which all Swiss hope to return home to die.
Washing Clothes in the Lake
XIII
Sometimes the country people I met greeted me, as sometimes they still do in New Hampshire, but commonly they passed in silence. I think the mountains must have had something to do with hushing the people: far and near, on every hand, they rise such bulks of silence. The chief of their stately company was always the Dent-du-Midi, which alone remains perpetually snow-covered, and which, when not hooded in the rain-bearing mists of that most rainy autumn, gave back the changing light of every hour with new splendors, though of course it was most beautiful in the early sunsets. Then its cold snows warmed and softened into something supernally rosy, while all the other peaks were brown and purple, and its vast silence was thrilled with a divine message that spoke to the eye. Across the lake and on its farther shores the mountains were dimly blue; but nearer, in the first days of our sojourn, they were green to their tops. Away up there we could see the lofty steeps and slopes of the summer pastures, and set low among them the chalets where the herdsmen dwelt. None of the mountains seemed so bare and sterile as Mount Washington, and though they were on a sensibly vaster scale than the White Mountains generally, I remembered the grandeur of Chocorua and Kearsarge in their presence. But my national—not to say my hemispheric—pride suffered a terrible blow as the season advanced. I had bragged all my life of the glories of our American autumnal foliage, which I had, in common with the rest of my countrymen, complacently denied to all the rest of the world. Yet here, before my very eyes, the same beautiful miracle was wrought. Day after day the trees on the mountain-sides changed, and kindled and softly smouldered in a thousand delicate hues, till all their mighty flanks seemed draped in the mingling dyes of Indian shawls. Shall I own that while this effect was not the fiery gorgeousness of our autumn leaves, it was something tenderer, richer, more tastefully lovely? Never!