A Tramp Abroad
Visp--Dangerous Traveling--Children's Play--The Parson's Children--A
Landlord's Daughter--A Rare Combination--Ch iIIon--Lost Sympathy--Mont
Blanc and its Neighbors--Beauty of Soap Bubbles--A Wild Drive--The King
of Drivers--Benefit of getting Drunk
CHAPTER XXXVI
[The Fiendish Fun of Alp-climbing]
We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at
four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued
to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the
invitation through his head. Most church-bells in the world are of poor
quality, and have a harsh and rasping sound which upsets the temper and
produces much sin, but the St. Nicholas bell is a good deal the worst
one that has been contrived yet, and is peculiarly maddening in its
operation. Still, it may have its right and its excuse to exist, for the
community is poor and not every citizen can afford a clock, perhaps; but
there cannot be any excuse for our church-bells at home, for there is
no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair
pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from
our steeples. There is much more profanity in America on Sunday than in
all in the other six days of the week put together, and it is of a more
bitter and malignant character than the week-day profanity, too. It is
produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap church-bells.
We build our churches almost without regard to cost; we rear an edifice
which is an adornment to the town, and we gild it, and fresco it, and
mortgage it, and do everything we can think of to perfect it, and then
spoil it all by putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears
it, giving some the headache, others St. Vitus's dance, and the rest the
blind staggers.
An American village at ten o'clock on a summer Sunday is the quietest
and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature; but it is a pretty
different thing half an hour later. Mr. Poe's poem of the “Bells” stands
incomplete to this day; but it is well enough that it is so, for the
public reciter or “reader” who goes around trying to imitate the sounds
of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find himself “up a
stump” when he got to the church-bell--as Joseph Addison would say. The
church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be
a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still
clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are
not useful now, neither are they ornamental. One is the bell-ringing
to remind a clock-caked town that it is church-time, and another is the
reading from the pulpit of a tedious list of “notices” which everybody
who is interested has already read in the newspaper. The clergyman even
reads the hymn through--a relic of an ancient time when hymn-books are
scarce and costly; but everybody has a hymn-book, now, and so the public
reading is no longer necessary. It is not merely unnecessary, it is
generally painful; for the average clergyman could not fire into his
congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse reader than himself, unless
the weapon scattered shamefully. I am not meaning to be flippant and
irreverent, I am only meaning to be truthful. The average clergyman, in
all countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader. One would
think he would at least learn how to read the Lord's Prayer, by and by,
but it is not so. He races through it as if he thought the quicker
he got it in, the sooner it would be answered. A person who does not
appreciate the exceeding value of pauses, and does not know how to
measure their duration judiciously, cannot render the grand simplicity
and dignity of a composition like that effectively.
We took a tolerably early breakfast, and tramped off toward Zermatt
through the reeking lanes of the village, glad to get away from that
bell. By and by we had a fine spectacle on our right. It was the
wall-like butt end of a huge glacier, which looked down on us from an
Alpine height which was well up in the blue sky. It was an astonishing
amount of ice to be compacted together in one mass. We ciphered upon it
and decided that it was not less than several hundred feet from the base
of the wall of solid ice to the top of it--Harris believed it was
really twice that. We judged that if St. Paul's, St. Peter's, the Great
Pyramid, the Strasburg Cathedral and the Capitol in Washington were
clustered against that wall, a man sitting on its upper edge could not
hang his hat on the top of any one of them without reaching down three
or four hundred feet--a thing which, of course, no man could do.
To me, that mighty glacier was very beautiful. I did not imagine that
anybody could find fault with it; but I was mistaken. Harris had been
snarling for several days. He was a rabid Protestant, and he was always
saying:
“In the Protestant cantons you never see such poverty and dirt and
squalor as you do in this Catholic one; you never see the lanes and
alleys flowing with foulness; you never see such wretched little sties
of houses; you never see an inverted tin turnip on top of a church for
a dome; and as for a church-bell, why, you never hear a church-bell at
all.”
All this morning he had been finding fault, straight along. First it was
with the mud. He said, “It ain't muddy in a Protestant canton when it
rains.” Then it was with the dogs: “They don't have those lop-eared dogs
in a Protestant canton.” Then it was with the roads: “They don't leave
the roads to make themselves in a Protestant canton, the people make
them--and they make a road that IS a road, too.” Next it was the goats:
“You never see a goat shedding tears in a Protestant canton--a goat,
there, is one of the cheerfulest objects in nature.” Next it was the
chamois: “You never see a Protestant chamois act like one of these--they
take a bite or two and go; but these fellows camp with you and stay.”
Then it was the guide-boards: “In a Protestant canton you couldn't get
lost if you wanted to, but you never see a guide-board in a Catholic
canton.” Next, “You never see any flower-boxes in the windows,
here--never anything but now and then a cat--a torpid one; but you take
a Protestant canton: windows perfectly lovely with flowers--and as for
cats, there's just acres of them. These folks in this canton leave a
road to make itself, and then fine you three francs if you 'trot' over
it--as if a horse could trot over such a sarcasm of a road.” Next about
the goiter: “THEY talk about goiter!--I haven't seen a goiter in this
whole canton that I couldn't put in a hat.”
He had growled at everything, but I judged it would puzzle him to find
anything the matter with this majestic glacier. I intimated as much; but
he was ready, and said with surly discontent: “You ought to see them in
the Protestant cantons.”
This irritated me. But I concealed the feeling, and asked:
“What is the matter with this one?”
“Matter? Why, it ain't in any kind of condition. They never take any
care of a glacier here. The moraine has been spilling gravel around it,
and got it all dirty.”
“Why, man, THEY can't help that.”
“THEY? You're right. That is, they WON'T. They could if they wanted to.
You never see a speck of dirt on a Protestant glacier. Look at the Rhone
glacier. It is fifteen miles long, and seven hundred feet thick. If this
was a Protestant glacier you wouldn't see it looking like this, I can
tell you.”
“That is nonsense. What would they do with it?”
“They would whitewash it. They always do.”
I did not believe a word of this, but rather than have trouble I let it
go; for it is a waste of breath to argue with a bigot. I even doubted if
the Rhone glacier WAS in a Protestant canton; but I did not know, so I
could not make anything by contradicting a man who would probably put me
down at once with manufactured evidence.
About nine miles from St. Nicholas we crossed a bridge over the raging
torrent of the Visp, and came to a log strip of flimsy fencing which
was pretending to secure people from tumbling over a perpendicular wall
forty feet high and into the river. Three children were approaching; one
of them, a little girl, about eight years old, was running; when pretty
close to us she stumbled and fell, and her feet shot under the rail of
the fence and for a moment projected over the stream. It gave us a
sharp shock, for we thought she was gone, sure, for the ground slanted
steeply, and to save herself seemed a sheer impossibility; but she
managed to scramble up, and ran by us laughing.
We went forward and examined the place and saw the long tracks which her
feet had made in the dirt when they darted over the verge. If she had
finished her trip she would have struck some big rocks in the edge of
the water, and then the torrent would have snatched her downstream among
the half-covered boulders and she would have been pounded to pulp in two
minutes. We had come exceedingly near witnessing her death.
And now Harris's contrary nature and inborn selfishness were strikingly
manifested. He has no spirit of self-denial. He began straight off, and
continued for an hour, to express his gratitude that the child was not
destroyed. I never saw such a man. That was the kind of person he was;
just so HE was gratified, he never cared anything about anybody else. I
had noticed that trait in him, over and over again. Often, of course, it
was mere heedlessness, mere want of reflection. Doubtless this may have
been the case in most instances, but it was not the less hard to bar
on that account--and after all, its bottom, its groundwork, was
selfishness. There is no avoiding that conclusion. In the instance under
consideration, I did think the indecency of running on in that way might
occur to him; but no, the child was saved and he was glad, that was
sufficient--he cared not a straw for MY feelings, or my loss of such a
literary plum, snatched from my very mouth at the instant it was
ready to drop into it. His selfishness was sufficient to place his own
gratification in being spared suffering clear before all concern for
me, his friend. Apparently, he did not once reflect upon the valuable
details which would have fallen like a windfall to me: fishing the child
out--witnessing the surprise of the family and the stir the thing would
have made among the peasants--then a Swiss funeral--then the roadside
monument, to be paid for by us and have our names mentioned in it. And
we should have gone into Baedeker and been immortal. I was silent. I was
too much hurt to complain. If he could act so, and be so heedless and so
frivolous at such a time, and actually seem to glory in it, after all
I had done for him, I would have cut my hand off before I would let him
see that I was wounded.
We were approaching Zermatt; consequently, we were approaching the
renowned Matterhorn. A month before, this mountain had been only a name
to us, but latterly we had been moving through a steadily thickening
double row of pictures of it, done in oil, water, chromo, wood, steel,
copper, crayon, and photography, and so it had at length become a shape
to us--and a very distinct, decided, and familiar one, too. We were
expecting to recognize that mountain whenever or wherever we should run
across it. We were not deceived. The monarch was far away when we first
saw him, but there was no such thing as mistaking him. He has the rare
peculiarity of standing by himself; he is peculiarly steep, too, and is
also most oddly shaped. He towers into the sky like a colossal wedge,
with the upper third of its blade bent a little to the left. The broad
base of this monster wedge is planted upon a grand glacier-paved Alpine
platform whose elevation is ten thousand feet above sea-level; as the