A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.—V.
11'0 THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] Chur, September 28, 1867. SIR,—Our holiday culminated, or, as the Almanacks say of the moPP, "eQ4thed," at rootresina, for there it passed its meridian, its middle point in time, and its most southerly in space. Indeed, by this day week I hope to be at home once more. Edward says our holiday has lost all its spring and elasticity in consequence. He has been mumbling at intervals ever since, in dirge-like tones, to himself, "Hail of their heavy task was done, and the clock told the hour for retiring ;" nay, he has even been so illogical—i am sure men even beat women in that at times—as to wish that he could always "have all his holiday in the first half ;" for he says its back seems somehow broken when there is more of it behind than before. But I have tried to impress upon him that to have all of anything in the first half is impossible ;—doesn't Miss Cobbe Pall that sort of thing impossible a priori ?—and what is worse, inconvenient. My little Colin, who, as he is only three years old, can scarcely have contracted an appetite for anything so morbid, so much like a metaphysical pâté de foie gras, as an a priori impossibility, always seems to me to be in the way of wishing to have all his cake in the first half ; and if it came to be the family ambition of our house in general, which it might, you know, if the master sets the example, what a domestic circle ours at Wandsworth would be! However, we have enjeyed ourselves excessively since leaving Pontresina, but Edward will say "the gold is off the gingerbread" because his office draweth nigh. I tell him he should be ashamed to regret going back to his little family. For my part, I feel, with the runaway postman in Martin Chuzztewit, that "my bright home is in the settin' Sun" (on Wandsworth Common), and I think it's hardly kind of Edward, after I have made such sacrifices, to lament that the moment is approaching when I shall be united to my little ones again. When, after a perilous day's journey, I open my pocket-book at night, and pore over the thick, dark, curly tress of that dear, naughty, high-spirited romp, the silky lock of that darling little trot of mine, and the soft innocent ringlet of my noble little Colin, I am sure Edward might often see, if he would, that "The heart he thought so free and tame Would struggle like a captive bird." My sweet Cohn! Edward read aloud the other day, I believe in a critical mood, one pf Mr. Kinglake's eloquent sentences about Sir Colin Campbell Yet he was of so fine a nature, that although he' did not always avoid great bursts of anger, there was no ignoble bitterness in his sense of wrong." "That's our Celia to a hair 1" I said, and burst into tears. Edward did his best to soothe me, but I suppose I cannot expect that oven he should understand all the mysterious tenderness of such a love as mine. Forgive me I—it's Colin's birthday to-morrow. I will struggle for composure.
From Pontresina we turned westward once more. It was a lovely morning, as we retraced our steps in a broken-springed Einspanner, from which there was a rather alarming rebound,—it tossed us like pancakes—down the Engadin again as far as Ponte, whence we were to cross the Rhmtian Alps by the Albula pass to the Upper Valley of the Rhine. Here Edward discovered that he had brought away with him the gigantic door-key of our Pontresina lodging. And, would you believe ? he had a struggle to part with it. It had always reminded him, he said, in his misty way, of the mysteriousarey which Mephistopheles gives Faust in that strange second part of the drama,—the key which waxes and grows heavy in Faust's hand, and leads him on, through the heart of the Earth, into the Solitudes and Wildernesses of absolute Emptiness, where "the Mothers" reign. When I stared, and asked what it was all about, Edward admitted he never had had the least idea what Goethe really meant, but this big Pontresina key, which he main- tained always did grow heavier as he held it, the wildernesses and solitudes of this wild land, and the eerie old crone to whom the key belonged, and who might well stand for one of Goethe's mysterious "mothers," combined to make him feel as if the key were a sort of charm to the inner secrets of the Alps, and he didn't see why the old woman should have it back. Only think of an elderly householder at Wandsworth talking such trash as that ;— the old goose ! However, I interfered at once. I'm always losing my own keys, and I can feel for a fellow-creature, even though she be a German crone. I took it sternly from him and gave it to our driver, explaining in broken German that it was to be returned to the old lady of No. 10, whom he said he well knew and respected. Edward looked after the key wistfully, but made no resistance ; yet he was distrait and low for some time after. I am convinced Goethe reading and German Universities are very bad training for practical Englishmen. Poor dear Edward ! He has a lot of cobwebs somewhere at the bottom of his dear addled old brain !
At route the mail was just starting over the Albula pass for Bergiin, Tiefenkasten, and Chur (Coire), the last the capital of the Grisons. We were given places on the box of a satellite of the main coach,—a three-horse coach, which followed in its wake. We began immediately to wind up the terraces of the pass, which alarmed me greatly by their steepness, and I could not conceive how the mails dare descend them at night, as they do in coming from Coire. In about an hour and a half we got to the top of the steepest part, took our last look back at the Bernina Alps and the great glaciers—the Morderatech Paradies, and Roseg—gleaming in the distance, saw the sun glitter for the last time on the green-white Inn, and dived into the deso- late and sterile defile of the Albula pass. We were already above the snow, which lay in big patches wherever it had a little shelter from the sun, in every hollow beneath us, a chill wind came whistling through the pass from the west, we began to see the heavier and more lumpy masses of the Rhine mountains looming up in the dis- tance before us, and at every step the defile around us became wilder and more savage. The Albulastock, as it is called, reared its stiff wall in a precipice on our right, with one mass of pendent glacier, and on our left was the ragged saw of a mountain ridge, whose jagged teeth gave something like ferocity of expression to the barren and precipitous mountains which they crowned. As we advanced, the pass, at least a mile wide, became strewn with frag- ments of rock from brink to brink without any grass or tint of green amongst them—the debris, I suppose, of recent landslips or ava- lanches, but pounded so small that scarcely any one rock seemed to exceed the size of an ordinary milestone. I never saw a scene so de- solate. The wind whistled coldly through the pass, a cloud came over the sun, and I could not help saying to Edward that the landscape seemed to have carved upon it with a rudeness of hand that added to its grandeur the very frown of God. There must, neverthe- less, have been plants, and rare plants, in the crevices between the rocks which carpeted this Arabia Petrrea of a pass, for I saw two botanists with botanical boxes hunting carefully for specimens. Soon we began to descend. Down we dashed, terrace after terrace, sweeping round such sharp corners that I held my breath and squeezed Edward's hand,—more in excitement than terror,—as we approached them at a pace that made me giddy. There was a fearful sort of rapture in it, too, and it reminded me of Edgar Poe's fanciful account of the descent of the Maelstrom. Our three-horse coach had a great sprawling piebald for the leader; it was harnessed before the other two, and apt to take offence at the flicks our coachman would give it. I am sure I thought that at one of these corners that piebald would have taken us over the
little dwarf posts, which were often the only things between us and seventy feet of perpendicular rock. Before long we reached a little circular green basin or valley, where there was a rude little inn. But after stopping barely two minutes, we rushed off again down another descent quite as perilous as the last, towards a lower green basin, where there were a few Alpine lints. Mr. Dickens would have described the drive thus
Yoho ! past patches of eternal snow, and desolate precipices, and wildernesses of pounded rock,—yoho ! past little Alpine inns, and green oases sprinkled with the huts of Alpine herdsmen,— yoho ! past cows and goats with tinkling bells, and patches of blue campanula and withered Alpine roses, and little roaring streams white from their glacier source ;" but as nobody does say yoho ! on either English or German coaches on such occasions, as far as I know, and I never could seize the full force of that remarkable expression, I will only refer to the fact that it occurred to me here as being not improbably Mr. Dickens's not very expressive device for suggesting the inarticulate excitement of such a wild drive as this of ours. I admit that I felt at times inclined to scream with something between pain and pleasure when I saw the mail coach rattling on, a terrace or so beneath us, and knew that we must be in another minute or two where it was ; but if I had shrieked, it certainly would not have been yoho ! which strikes me as a somewhat feeble and sentimental form of yell. There was one terrible moment. My broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, trimmed, as I think I have before remarked, with a slight but elegant wreath of ivy leaves,—by this time somewhat the worse for wear,—escaped from my trembling grasp, and flew on the road behind us. Edward explained the catastrophe to the driver, who was just before us, and that excellent person imme- diately put the thongs into my dear Edward's weak grasp, and decended in search of my hat. The corner just in front was a fearful one ; the stage coach was rushing on swiftly before us ; the sprawling piebald was showing a good deal of competitive zeal ; and Edward was, I may say, entirely unaccustomed to driving a three-in-hand. I trembled for the result. I exclaimed im- petuously, "Perish my straw hat and its elegant though no longer brilliant wreath, rather than eight lives should be endangered I" But while I was uttering this apostrophe, which, being in English, was naturally unintelligible to the coachman, he returned with my hat, took the reins from the uncertain hand which held them, and we were again in comparative safety. I shall have that hat— my Albula hat—cleaned and retrimmed when I get home. It re- presents, as Louis Napoleon would say, a memory and an escape. We rushed down that corkscrew descent for hours, passing from one green basin to another at a lower level, till it seemed as if we should get into the heart of the earth.
After dinner at Bergiin we were transferred to a still smaller tributary of the mail,—an Einspanner, driven by an infant of ten or eleven, in which, but for the said infant, we were alone,—an intermediate satellite with two horses forming the link between us and the main mail coach, so that now we were a caravan of three. I never saw a child of greater composure than our driver. He drove us down a dark and savage vale which they say is very like the Via Mala in the Sphigen pass, with the utmost sang-froid, and used his drag with an elderly caution that gained him my highest esteem. But, dear me, how hot it got as we descended ! Used as we had been to the Pontresina air, the burning afternoon sun of the close valley as we approached Tiefenkasten (" Deep- Box," as they may well call it) was almost more than I could bear. The dizzy descent, the suspense of that minute wIiiIo Edward held the reins, and the oppressive heat of the evening, rather overcame my frail system. When we got out at Tiefen- kasten I was still just conscious, thanks to my salts. But even then I had much to bear. The inn was excellent, but the Albula torrent roared round it, and the rush of its waters came in so loud at both windows of our room that we could scarcely hear each other speak ; and all night it roared on, so that whether I was part of it, or it was part of me, was the one insoluble problem which I was vainly trying to solve all night, in what Edward was pleased to call my sleep. In the morning I had no nerves at all, and when Edward proposed a new pass, or new passes, first the Schynpass, I think, to Thusis, and then the Spliigen, I said to him at once, "My dear Edward, I have made some sacrifice to come here ; you know how susceptible lam ; these passes are too much for me. They shatter me. Let us have some- thing tame and peaceful."
Well, we did try for it, and I believe Edward intended to have a really tame journey that day up the Landwa.sser to Davos-am- Platz, a quiet and lovely green table-land, strewn with chalets in the most picturesque way. But the truth is, everything is a pass hereabouts. We wound through the pine woods, half-way up the mountain side, in and out, doubling every winding of the moun- tains for miles, along a path which even the natives call a mere "goats' path," in parts artificially made with timber forced into the mountain side, and an immense precipice beneath us. The great glaciers of the Albulaatock closed the view behind us, and the Landwasser roared at an immense depth below. I doubt if we were ever in more real danger than on that jolting little mountain cart, but as we went very slowly it did not impress the imagination so much as the rushing of the mail coach, and when we did reach the Davos table-land everything like danger and terror was clearly over. Anything more like the ideal "Happy Bailey" I never saw. Broad green pasturages below, and, break- ing the thick pine woods above, plenty of those green, fresh, turfy hollows to which the Swiss herdsmen appropriate the name of "Alp ;" chalets, with their roofs dotted with those picturesque stones, were sprinkled everywhere over the broad valley ; church spires peeped up every two or three miles ; cows and goats with tinkling bells sauntered about the mountains ; and the rapid little Landwasser, bridged roughly every half-mile or so, and pouring out of an exquisite little green lake, the Davosersee, in which it takes its source, drew a winding, sparkling, line of beauty across the picture.
The landscape was certanly peaceful enough, I must admit ; and thankful I was for two days' rest in this primitive place. We were rather roughly received though. The people at the inn seemed to dislike us as foreigners, and the good old Swiss clergyman dragged us into his sermon rather pointedly on the Sunday, when impressing brotherly feeling on his people. This was partly, I fancy, because Edward and I, who went into church before any- body else, sat together, and it afterwards appeared that the men and the women sit apart, so we were marked out by our blunder as "aliens in blood, language, and (perhaps) religion." Davos is a primitive watering-place, frequented almost solely by Swiss, mostly, indeed, by the people of Chur (Coire, the capital of the Grisons). There is some jealousy felt of strangers there, I think, and certainly we were a good deal snubbed by the young women who seemed to manage the otherwise comfort- able inn,—an old Rathhaus, or town hall. But the Swiss visitors were a kindly, comfortable old set, after all. A venerable old man, with heavy silver spectacles, who sat oppo- site Edward at the table d'hôte, and who had taken a child- like pleasure in our blunder in church, reciting it at dinner to his neighbours with the most rapturous delight, took my fancy, in spite of, perhaps in consequence of, the pleasure we afforded him. Once, when Edward awkwardly dropped a dish with something like ground rice in it,—he was a little agitated by my urgency to know what was in it, and whether it was wholesome or barbarous food, before it was handed to me,—this venerable old man laughed so long and with such harmless and childlike enjoyment, that all the table d'hote, ourselves included, joined him in his mirth, and I am convinced that his declining years will be gilded to the last, as by a sort of sunset, with the glow of this unparalleled event. He was a good old man, and smiled and chuckled in a most friendly way whenever he saw Edward afterwards, as much as to say, "Deep rooted in that ground-rice pudding there is a sentiment of mutual regard between us, which death itself will not extinguish."
Well, here we are at last in Chur (or Coire), the capital of the Gri- sons, and the most beautiful of mountain cities, with its rapid moun- tain torrent, the Plessur, running through its principal street, or avenue, to join the infant Rhine about a mile off, and its great mountains rising on nearly every side, yet not so close but that both north and west you get the loveliest distant views, and great stretches of sunset cloud. Yet certainly of all Swiss cities it seems the most utilitarian. There is not a Swiss toy or a bit of Swiss carving in it. When Edward tried to-day to get a paper knife, so favourite a manufacture of many Swiss Cantons, the only instrument he could with difficulty and after much inquiry pro- cure, was a dirty yellow bit of flat bone with a hole in it, for which he was charged lid. We have not seen a single pretty thing in any one shop of this most lovely town. I can't find anything pretty to buy, and if we don't take something beautiful back to Edward's mother, that austere old lady will certainly frown darkly upon us. She is an Admiral's niece, I believe, and has imbibed quite naval ideas of discipline. Edward says that in his childhood the way she would ring the upstairs bell for him and his brothers, when they were late in the morning, was positively alarming ;—it was like "piping all hands on deck." Then, though so disciplinarian with her sons, she is strictly humanitarian about her servants, and even now won't let Edward ring the bell for them. "No, my
dear," she says, "they have had much more fatigue to-day than you. Go to the bottom of the stairs, and say, 'Annabelle, when you next come upstairs for some other purpose, but not before, please bring candles." Oh dear ! what shall I do if I can't find something pretty to take home to my mother-in-law ? By the way, I should much like to have the Spectator's view,—the " earnest " view, you know,—of mothers-in-law. It might be of the greatest. service, Sir, to your obedient servant, A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.
P.S.—Dear me, I am so fluttered ! How can you speak so lightly of my judgment—" alert, but, we fear, unsound,"—as you do in answer to " Viator," in your number of the 21st, which I have just got? I can't say how grieved I am we didn't go to the Three Kings at Bale. But it was all Edward's fault, you know, not mine. He trusted some foolish person's opinion in the rail- way carriage, whom I should never have advised him to depend upon at all. I assure you my "vivacity," as you are pleased to call it, is the sort of vivacity which springs from lucidity of insight, and is not inconsistent with the most unquestionable weight of character.
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