Black Cat Weekly #9

THE NEW PASS, by Amelia B. Edwards-1

THE NEW PASS,

by Amelia B. EdwardsThe circumstances I am about to relate happened just four autumns ago, when I was travelling in Switzerland with my old school and college friend, Egerton Wolfe.

Before going further, however, I wish to observe that this is no dressed-up narrative. I am a plain, prosaic man, by name Francis Legrice; by profession a barrister; and I think it would be difficult to find many persons less given to look upon life from a romantic or imaginative point of view. By my enemies, and sometimes, perhaps, by my friends, I am supposed to push my habit of incredulity to the verge of universal scepticism; and indeed I admit that I believe in very little that I do not hear and see for myself. But for these things that I am going to relate, I can vouch; and in so far as mine is a personal narrative, I am responsible for its truth. What I saw, I saw with my own eyes in the broad daylight. I offer nothing, therefore, in the shape of a story; but simply a plain statement of facts, as they happened to myself.

I was travelling, then, in Switzerland with Egerton Wolfe. It was not our first joint long-vacation tour by a good many, but it promised to be our last; for Wolfe was engaged to be married the following Spring to a very beautiful and charming girl, the daughter of a north-country baronet.

He was a handsome fellow, tall, graceful, dark-haired, dark-eyed; a poet, a dreamer, an artist—as thoroughly unlike myself, in short, as one man having arms, legs, and a head, can be unlike another. And yet we suited each other capitally, and were the fastest friends and best travelling companions in the world.

We had begun our holiday on this occasion with a week’s idleness at a place which I will call Oberbrunn—a delightful place, wholly Swiss, consisting of one huge wooden building, half water-cure establishment, half hotel; two smaller buildings called Dependances; a tiny church with a bulbous steeple painted green; and a handful of village—all perched together on a breezy mountain-plateau some three thousand feet above the lake and valley. Here, far from the haunts of the British tourist and the Alpine Club-man, we read, smoked, climbed, rose with the dawn, rubbed up our rusty German, and got ourselves into training for the knapsack work to follow. At length, our week being up, we started—rather later on the whole than was prudent, for we had a thirty miles’ walk before us, and the sun was already high. It was a glorious morning, however; the sky flooded with light, and a cool breeze blowing. I see the bright scene now, just as it lay before us when we came down the hotel steps and found our guide waiting for us outside. There were the water-drinkers gathered round the fountain on the lawn; the usual crowd of itinerant vendors of stag-horn ornaments and carved toys in wood and ivory squatted in a semi-circle about the door; some half-dozen barefooted little mountain children running to and fro with wild raspberries for sale; the valley so far below, dotted with hamlets and traversed by a winding stream, like a thread of flashing silver; the black pinewood half-way down the slope; the frosted peaks glittering on the horizon.

“Bon voyage!” said our good host, Dr. Steigl, with a last hearty shake of the hand.

“Bon voyage!” echoed the waiters and miscellaneous hangers-on.

Some three or four of the water-drinkers at the fountain raised their hats—the ragged children pursued us with their wild fruits as far as the gate—and so we departed. For some distance our path lay along the mountainside, through pine woods and by cultivated slopes where the Indian corn was ripening to gold, and the late hay-harvest was waiting for the mower. Then the path wound gradually downwards—for the valley lay between us and the pass we had laid out for our day’s work—and then, through a succession of soft green slopes and ruddy apple-orchards, we came to a blue lake fringed with rushes, where we hired a boat with a striped awning, like the boats on Lago Maggiore, and were rowed across by a boatman who rested on his oars and sang a yodel-song when we were halfway across.

Being landed on the opposite bank, we found our road at once begin to trend upwards; and here, as the guide informed us, the ascent of the Hobenhorn might be said to begin.

“This, however, meine Herren,” said he, “is only part of the old pass. It is ill-kept; for none but country folks and travellers from Oberbrunn come this way now. But we shall strike the New Pass higher up. A grand road, meine Herren—as fine a road as the Simplon, and good for carriages all the way. It has only been open since the Spring.”

“The old pass is good enough for me, anyhow!” said Egerton, crowding a handful of wild forget-me-nots under the ribbon of his hat. “It’s like a stray fragment of Arcadia.” And in truth it was wonderfully lovely and secluded—a mere rugged path winding steeply upwards in a soft green shade, among large forest trees and moss-grown rocks covered with patches of velvety lichen. A little streamlet ran singing beside it all the way—now gurgling deep in ferns and grasses; now feeding a rude trough made of a hollow trunk; now crossing our road like a broken flash of sunlight; now breaking away in a tiny fall and foaming out of sight, only to reappear a few steps further on. Then overhead, through the close roof of leaves, we saw patches of blue sky and golden shafts of sunshine, and small brown squirrels leaping from bough to bough; and in the deep rich grass on either hand, thick ferns, and red and golden mosses, and blue campanulas, and now and then a little wild strawberry, ruby red. By-and-by, when we had been following this path for nearly an hour, we came upon a patch of clearing, in the midst of which stood a rough upright monolith, antique, weather-stained, covered with rude carvings like a Runic monument—the primitive boundary-stone between the Cantons of Uri and Unterwalden.

“Let us rest here!” cries Egerton, flinging himself at full length on the grass. “Eheu, fugaces!—and the hours are shorter than the years. Why not enjoy them?” But the guide, whose name is Peter Kauffmann, interposes after the manner of guides in general, and will by no means let us have our own way. There is a mountain inn, he urges, now only five minutes distant—“an excellent little inn, where they sell good red wine.” So we yield to fate and Peter Kauffmann and pursue our upward way, coming presently, as he promised and predicted, upon a bright open space and a brown chalet on a shelf of plateau overhanging a giddy precipice. Here, sitting under a vine-covered trellis built out on the very brink of the cliff, we find three mountaineers discussing a flask of the good red wine aforesaid.

In this picturesque eyrie we made our mid-day halt. A smiling Mädchen brought us coffee, brown bread, and goats’-milk cheese; while our guide, pulling out a huge lump of the dry black bread from his wallet, fraternized with the mountaineers over a half-flask of his favourite vintage.

The men chattered merrily in their half-intelligible patois. We sat silent, looking down into the deep misty valley and across to the great amethyst mountains, streaked here and there with faint blue threads of slender waterfalls.

“There must surely be moments, ” said Egerton Wolfe after a while, “when even such men as you, Frank—men of the world, and lovers of it—feel within them some stirrings of the primitive Adam; some vague longing for that idyllic life of the woods and fields that we dreamers are still, in our inmost souls, insane enough to sigh after as the highest good.”

“You mean, don’t I sometimes wish to be a Swiss peasant-farmer, with sabots; a goîter; a wife without form as regards her person, and void as regards her head; and a crétin grandfather a hundred and three years old? Why, no. I prefer myself as I am.”

My friend smiled, and shook his head. “Why take it for granted, ” said he, “that no man can cultivate his brains and his paternal acres at the same time? Horace, with none of the adjuncts you name, loved a country life and turned it to immortal poetry.”

“The world has gone round once or twice since then, my dear fellow,” I replied, philosophically. “The best poetry comes out of cities nowadays.”

“And the worst. Do you see those avalanches over yonder?”

Following the direction of his eyes, I saw something like a tiny puff of white smoke gliding over the shoulder of a huge mountain on the opposite side of the valley. It was followed by another and another. We could see neither whence they came nor whither they went. We were too far away to hear the sullen thunder of their fall. Silently they flashed into sight, and as silently they vanished. Wolfe sighed heavily.

“Poor Lawrence!” said he. “Switzerland was his dream. He longed for the Alps as ardently as other men long for money or power.”

Lawrence was a younger brother of his whom I had never seen—a lad of great promise whose health had broken down at Addiscombe some ten or twelve years before, and who had soon after died of rapid consumption at Torquay. “And he never had that longing gratified?”

“Ah, no—he was never out of England. They prescribe bracing climates now, I am told, for lung disease; but not so then. Poor dear fellow! I sometimes fancy he might have lived, if only he had had his heart’s desire.”

“I would not let such a painful thought enter my head, if I were you,” said I, hastily.

“But I can’t help it! My mind has been running on poor Lawrence all the morning; and, somehow, the grander the scenery gets, the more I keep thinking how he would have exulted in it. Do you remember those lines by Coleridge, written in the Valley of Chamouni? He knew them by heart. ’Twas the sight of yonder avalanches that reminded me... Well! I will try not to think of these things. Let us change the subject.”

Just at this moment, the landlord of the chalet came out—a bright-eyed, voluble young mountaineer about five or six-and-twenty, with a sprig of Edelweiss in his hat.

“Good day, meine Herren,” he said, including all alike in his salute, but addressing himself especially to Wolfe and myself. “Fine weather for travelling—fine weather for the grapes. These Herren are going on by the New Pass? Ach, Herr Gott! a grand work! a wonderful work!—and all begun and completed in less than three years. These Herren see it today for the first time? Good. They have probably been over the Tête Noire? No! Over the Splugen? Good—good. If these Herren have been over the Splugen, they can form an idea of the New Pass. The New Pass is very like the Splugen. It has a gallery tunnelled in the solid rock, just like the gallery on the Via Mala, with this difference that the gallery in the New Pass is much longer, and lighted by loop-holes at regular intervals. These Herren will please to observe the view looking both up and down the pass, before entering the mouth of the tunnel—there is not a finer view in all Switzerland.”

“It must be a great advantage to the people hereabouts, having so good a road carried from valley to valley,” said I, smiling at his enthusiasm.

“Oh, it is a fine thing for us, mein Herr!” he replied. “And a fine thing for all this part of the Canton. It will bring visitors—floods of visitors! By the way, these Herren must not omit to look out for the waterfall above the gallery. Holy St. Nicholas! The way in which that waterfall has been arranged!”

“Arranged!” echoed Wolfe, who was as much amused as myself. “Diavolo! Do you arrange the waterfalls in your country?”

“It was the Herr Becker, ” said the landlord, unconscious of banter; “the eminent engineer who planned the New Pass. The waterfall, you see, meine Herren, could not be suffered to follow its old course down the face of the rock through which the gallery is tunnelled, or it would have flowed in at the loopholes and flooded the road. What, therefore, did the Herr Becker do?”