A Little Swiss Sojourn - William Dean Howells

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from time to time, and interrogated the vicinity with an eye of sleepless vigilance; and that small boys of suspicious character, whose pleasure or business took them through a vineyard, were obliged to hold up their hands as they passed, like the victims of a Far Western road agency. As the laws and usages governing the grape culture run back to the time of the Romans, who brought the vine into the Vaud, I was obliged to refer my friend's legend of cheapness and freedom to an earlier period, whose customs we could not profit by. In point of fact, I could buy more grapes for thruppence in London than in the Vaud; and the best grapes we had in Switzerland were some brought from Italy, and sold at a franc a pound in Montreux to the poor foreigners who had come to feast upon the wealth of the local vineyards.

      It was the rain that spoiled the grapes, they said at Montreux, and wherever we complained; and indeed the vines were a dismal show of sterility and blight, even to the spectator who did not venture near enough to subject himself to a fine of six francs. The foreigners had protected themselves in large numbers by not coming, and the natives who prosper upon them suffered. The stout lady who kept a small shop of ivory carvings at Montreux continually lamented their absence to me: "Die Fremden kommen nicht, dieses regenes Wetter! Man muss Geduldt haben! Die Fremden kommen nicht!" She was from Interlaken, and the accents of her native dialect were flavored with the strong waters which she seemed always to have been drinking, and she put her face close up to that of the good, all-sympathizing Amerikaner who alone patronized her shop, and talked her sorrows loudly into him, so that he should not misunderstand.

      IV

      But one must not be altogether unreasonable. When we first came in sight of the lake the rain lifted, and the afternoon sun gushed out upon a world of vineyards. In other words, the vines clothe all the little levels and vast slopes of the mountain-sides as far up as the cold will let the grapes grow. There is literally almost no other cultivation, and it is a very pretty sight. On top of the mountains are the chalets with their kine, and at a certain elevation the milk and the wine meet, while below is the water of the lake, so good to mix with both. I do not know that the Swiss use it for that purpose, but there are countries where something of the sort would be done.

      When the train put us down at Villeneuve, among railway people as indifferent as our own at country stations, and much crosser and more snubbing, the demand for grapes began with the party who remained with the baggage, while a party of the second part went off to find the pension where we were to pass the next three months. The grape-seekers strolled up the stony, steaming streets of the little town, asking for grapes right and left, at all the shops, in their imperfect French, and returned to the station with a paper of gingerbread which they had bought at a jeweller's. I do not know why this artist should have had it for sale, but he must have had it a long time, for it was densely inhabited. Afterwards we found two shops in Villeneuve where they had the most delicious petits gâteaux, fresh every day, and nothing but the mania for unattainable grapes prevented the first explorers from seeing them.

      In the mean time the party of the second part had found the pension—a pretty stone villa overlooking the lake, under the boughs of tall walnut-trees, on the level of a high terrace. Laurel and holly hemmed it in on one side, and southward spread a pleasant garden full of roses and imperfectly ripening fig-trees. In the rear the vineyards climbed the mountains in irregular breadths to the belt of walnuts, beyond which were only forests and pastures. I heard the roar of the torrent that foamed down the steep; the fountain plashed under the group of laurels at the kitchen door; the roses dripped all round the house; and the lake lapped its shores below. Decidedly there was a sense of wet.

      The house, which had an Italian outside covered with jasmine and wistarias, confessed the North within. There was a huge hall stove, not yet heated, but on the hearth of the pleasant salon an acceptable fire of little logs was purring. Beside it sat a lady reading, and at a table her daughter was painting flowers. A little Italian, a very little English, a good deal of French, helped me to understand that mademoiselle the landlady was momentarily absent, that the season was exceptionally bad, and that these ladies were glad of the sunshine which we were apparently bringing with us. They spoke with those Suissesse voices, which are the sweetest and most softly modulated voices in the world, whether they come from the throat of peasant or of lady, and can make a transaction in eggs and butter in the market-place as musical as chanted verse. To the last these voices remained a delight, and the memory of them made most Italian women's voices a pang when we heard them afterwards.

      V

      At first we were the only people in the house besides these Swiss ladies and their son and brother, but later there came two ladies from Strasburg, and with them our circle was complete at the table and around the evening lamp in the drawing-room. I am bound to say for the circle, outside of ourselves, that it was a cultivated and even intellectual company, with traits that provoked unusual sympathy and interest. But those friendly people are quite their own property, and I have no intention of compelling them to an involuntary celebrity in these pages, much as I should like to impart their quality to my narrative. In the Strasbourgeoises we encountered again that pathos of an insulted and down-trodden nationality which had cast its melancholy over our Venice of Austrian days. German by name and by origin, these ladies were intensely French in everything else. They felt themselves doomed to exile in their own country, they abhorred their Prussian masters, and they had no name for Bismarck that was bad enough. Our Swiss, indeed, hated him almost as bitterly. Their sympathies had been wholly with the French, and they could not repress a half-conscious dread of his principle of race nationality, which would be fatal to Switzerland, one neither in race nor religion, but hitherto indivisible in her ancient freedom. While he lives this fear can never die in Swiss hearts, for they know that if he will, he can, in a Europe where he is the only real power.

      Mademoiselle sat at the chief place of the table, and led the talk, imparting to it a flavor of humorous good sense very characteristic. The villa had been her father's country-house, and it abounded in a scholar's accumulations of old books in divers languages. She herself knew literature widely in the better way that it was once read. The memories of many years spent in Florence made common Italian ground for us, and she spoke English perfectly.

      As I wish to give a complete notion of our household, so far as it may be honestly set down, I will add that the domestics were three. Two of them, the cook and the housemaid, were German Swiss, of middle class, who had taken service to earn what money they could, but mainly to learn French, after the custom of their country, where the young people of a French or Italian canton would in like manner resort to a German province. The third was Louis, a native, who spoke his own patois, and found it sufficient for the expression of his ideas. He was chiefly employed about the grounds; in-doors his use was mostly to mount the peculiar clogs used for the purpose, and rub the waxed floors till they shone. These floors were very handsome, of hard woods prettily inlaid; and Louis produced an effect upon them that it seemed a pity to mar with muddy shoes.

      I do not speak of Alexis, the farmer, who appeared in domestic exigencies; but my picture would be incomplete without the portrait of Poppi. Poppi was the large house-dog, who in early life had intended to call himself Puppy, but he naturally pronounced it with a French accent. He was now far from young, but he was still Poppi. I believe he was the more strictly domestic in his habits because an infirmity of temper had betrayed him into an attack upon a neighbor, or a neighbor's dog, and it was no longer safe for him to live much out-of-doors. The confinement had softened his temper, but it had rendered him effeminate and self-indulgent. He had, in fact, been spoiled by the boarders, and he now expected to be present at meals, and to be fed with choice morsels from their plates. As the cold weather came on he developed rheumatism, and demanded our sympathy as well as our hospitality. If Elise in waiting on table brushed him with her skirts, he set up a lamentable cry, and rushed up to the nearest guest, and put his chin on the table for his greater convenience in being comforted. At a dance which we had one evening Poppi insisted upon being present, and in his efforts to keep out of the way and in the apprehensions he suffered he abandoned himself to moans and howls that sometimes drowned the piano.

      Yet Poppi was an amiable invalid, and he was on terms

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