I amgoing to see a gentleman cremated at the famous monumental cemetery of Milan. I am specially invited to be present at nine o’clock in the morning, and if my courage does not ooze out of my fingers’ ends, I shall certainly go in the interest of my readers who may wish to be cremated, and who would like to know beforehand what they have to go through and what it is like.
To the ‘crematorio’ of Milan people are brought from all parts of the world. The room in which the furnace is situated is a very nice comfortable one, and there are black chairs set against the walls, in which the friends of the deceased sit and wait while his body is in the oven. The process is very simple. Suppose you want to be cremated. You are brought into the room dressed in a nice white shirt and drawers, and you are gently laid on an iron plate that looks like a large tea-tray turned up at the ends. As soon as the oven is sufficiently heated the door is opened, and you are pushed into a receptacle inside on the tray, much on the same principle as a baker puts bread into the oven. The door is then closed for two hours, and then the iron coffer is taken out. Inside it your friends see a nice white powder and a few fragments of white-coloured bone. That is you. You are then put into an urn, or glass box,or anything you like, and put away in a nice little locker in the great hall of the cemetery. Outside your locker is a lid with your name and the date of your cremation inscribed on it.
I was shown in this hall, in a glass case, the ashes of a lady, aged twenty-six, who was cremated a year or two since. She left her body in her will to be burned, and afterwards shown in the interests of the Cremation Society. Outside, in the grounds, there is a monument to her, and on it in a glass frame is her photograph. She was a very pretty lady, and it is difficult to imagine that she is the same person as the little heap of white ashes in the glass jar. But she is.
It is a general I am to see cremated. He has been brought a long distance in a coffin, and is temporarily deposited in the cemetery. The performance is public, and there are no reserved seats. From what I have seen it is absolutely devoid of offensiveness in any way, and all the officials are smiling, happy-looking folks. I took so much interest in the place that the chief official fancied I might one day be a customer. He pointed out to me that in the hall of the cemetery the places for ‘urns’ to be deposited were booking fast, and would soon be quite full. He had a capital stall—I mean locker—to let in the third row and one in the fifth. The offer was very tempting, but I didn’t close with it.
I don’t know whether many people, when they are exhilarated by Nature’s champagne, cry out, ‘I’m glad I’m alive.’ I do sometimes, and just at present I have very good grounds for the exclamation. I have been cremated, and that is enough to make any man rejoice that he can see and hear and eat and smoke a cigar.
As I told you, I had an invitation to the ‘crematorio’ of Milan to see a general cremated, whichI accepted. Wonderful things have happened since then, and that they may be understood let me proceed methodically. On the day preceding the proposed cremation I made up my mind to spend the evening at La Scala, with the exception of the San Carlo at Naples the largest theatre in the world. I sent to the office for a box, and was told there were none; they were all let. If I wanted one I must apply to a subscriber who did not intend to use his that night. Off I started in search of a subscriber. I inquired of the ladies and gentlemen I met in the street, all in my choicest Italian, ‘Pray, have you a box at La Scala, and do you intend to use it?’ At last in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele I met an old lady, who told me her master, the Count Somebody, was out of town. I could have his key for fifty francs. I sent to the address she gave, and received the key, and in the evening marched into the theatre, unlocked my box, and was, for the time being,chez moi. It seems droll to an Englishman to buy a key instead of a ticket, but this is a common way of doing business in Italy, where, in some of the theatres, the boxes are bought right out by nobles and others for a lifetime. This perpetual proprietorship accounts for the fact that the boxes are many of them differently decorated and lined. Some are blue, some green, some red—all are furnished after the fancy of the owner, and the general effect to the foreign eye isbizarrein the extreme.
The performance was, of course, magnificent. They know how to sing and how to mount an opera at La Scala, and there were some processions and stage pictures in ‘Don Carlos’ that Sir Augustus might have studied, and Sir Henry made notes of. After the opera there was a ballet. It was a prologue and six acts, and I was very interested in it, somuch so that I forgot for a long time to look at my watch, and when I did, in the middle of the fourth act, I found it was 1.30.
I went home and to bed at once. I had to be in the cemetery by nine in the morning to see the General cremated, and was terribly tired. I awoke in the morning at 8.30. Then began a struggle in my mind. Should I dress and rush up to the cemetery without my breakfast? I hesitated. A man wants a meal before he sees a sight like that. I hesitated, and I was lost, for I turned over and went to sleep again, and when I woke it was 10.30. The General was finished, and I had not been there to see.
I was sorry that, like my Lord Tomnoddy who went to the coffee-house opposite Newgate, I had slept too long, but after a ballet that lasts until 2 a.m. a man may be excused if he doesn’t get up in time for a cremation at nine. I had made special arrangements with the officials and a famous scientific gentleman of Milan, who was most anxious for me to publish an account of the proceedings in England, and the thing worried me a little all day; but at night I stepped into a compartment in the sleeping-car for Lugano, and forgot all about the matter. Just, however, as the train was starting and my eyes were closing in sleep—I had dined well an hour previously—who should enter the car but the scientific gentleman. ‘They told me where to find you at the hotel,’ he said. ‘Come out at once; there’s a cremation to-night.’ ‘But my ticket,’ I said; ‘I must go on to Lugano.’ ‘Bother your ticket! Come with me, and see what I’ll show you. You’ll never regret it.’ Before I could expostulate further he had me out of the station and into a cab, and we were soon driving along through the night in the direction of the cemetery.
As we entered the gates the moon was high, andthe figures of angels and women in white marble, keeping guard over the graves, had a ghostly effect. It was with something like a shudder that I passed through the black doors of the chapel-like building where the crematory rites are performed. The furnace was roaring already, and the heat was intense. I glanced at the metal tray raised to the level of the oven, expecting to see the body ready, but, to my surprise, this was empty. I turned to my guide. ‘Where is the person to be cremated?’ I asked. ‘Here,’ was the reply, and he touched me on the shoulder. Instantly I was seized, and bound, and gagged, and hoisted on to the awful tray, where I lay dumb and helpless. ‘You wished to have a thorough knowledge of cremation,’ said the fiend who had lured me to this awful place. ‘You shall have it.’ I tried to scream; I tried to burst my bonds—all, all in vain. The great doors of the oven were flung open, and there came forth a great gust of heat that seemed to scorch my living flesh. Slowly the tray moved nearer and nearer to the mouth of the oven. I was going to my death—to be cremated alive! The heat grew more and more intense. I scorched and singed; my eyeballs started from their sockets; my body seemed to swell and crack. Suddenly with a violent jerk I was shot forward into the oven, the great doors closed on me with a clang—— and—and—the conductor of the sleeping-car came rushing into my berth to know what was the matter.
I woke with a start. The heat was intense, the fumes of the charcoal terrible, and I had been dreaming a dyspeptic dream in my berth. Moral: Never travel by an overheated sleeping-car after thinking about cremation all day.
Allthings come to those who wait. I have waited nearly a fortnight in Ticino for a revolution, and I have seen it at last. I have seen the soldiers charge the mob, and I have seen the mob stone the soldiers. I have seen the soldiers retire with cracked skulls, and I have seen the citizens flying to the chemists and the doctors to have their bayonet wounds dressed. I have seen a town suddenly seized with panic, the streets cleared, the shops shut, and the cafés barred and bolted. And it all happened in a minute, without the slightest warning. It all happened just when I had packed my portmanteau and was going to leave Ticino because the excitement was over and everything was getting insufferably dull, and the weather was giving the Ticinese a seasonable hint to keep indoors by their wood fires and to abandon politics as an outdoor amusement.
Last Sunday was the day of the general election all over Switzerland for members of the National Council, which sits at Berne. In Ticino the greatest interest attached to the election, because of recent unfortunate events and the terrible pitch which the enmity long existing between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party had reached.
On Sunday in Ticino things went off pretty quietly. I was in Lugano, and spent the morning watchingthe voters as they went to the poll and the populace that stood about the public squares and discussed the situation. The Liberals made a big show in Lugano. The trees of liberty, surmounted by the hat of William Tell, were everywhere decorated with the red flag of Radicalism. To some of them were affixed wreaths of laurel ‘offered by the Liberal ladies of Lugano'; others were ornamented with Liberal inscriptions couched in language that, to say the least of it, was thorough. The Italian—I beg pardon, the Ticinese—politician is given to discuss matters as much with his hands as with his tongue, and all day long an energetic crowd indulged in vehement finger-wagging and hand-elevating, which would have given a stranger not used to the wealth of Italian gesture an idea that St. Vitus’s dance was a national disease.
The Liberals were easily distinguished from the Conservatives by red ties, by red feathers worn bravely in enormous brigand hats, and by red flowers in their buttonholes. Every Liberal sported a little red, and even the Liberal ladies had arrayed themselves in accordance with their political sympathies.
Apart from the idea that the election of October 26 might lead to a little revolution, I was interested in it for another reason. Was not my old friend Agostino Gatti, of the Adelaide Gallery and of the Adelphi Theatre, a Consigliere di Stato? and was not Agostino Gatti up for re-election as one of the six members for Ticino in the National Council of Switzerland?
It was a great day for all Ticino. Every man was expected to vote, and nearly every man did. Some of them travelled miles and miles to fulfil the duty of citizenship. I soon found out how seriously the Ticinese take politics. Very early on Sunday morning my waiter hurried me over my breakfast with athousand apologies; he was going to vote, and his native place was in a valley across the lake ten miles away. The porter brought me a day’s supply of wood to my room before I was up; a thousand pardons, but he had to catch an early train that he might go home to vote. There was not a flyman outside my hotel when I went out; they had all gone to vote. The boats upon the lake lay floating empty on the wave; the boatmen had all gone to vote. When I went into thesalle-à-mangerI quite expected to see a note to the effect that, ‘In consequence of all the waiters having gone home to vote, there will be notable d’hôte.’
Giuseppe, my sitting-room waiter, is a Conservative; Napoléon, thesalle-à-mangerwaiter, is a fierce Radical. Between them I endeavoured to arrive at the truth of the various incidents which they narrated for my benefit. Giuseppe hails from the village to which poor Rossi belonged—Rossi, the unfortunate victim of the brutal outrage of September 11. Rossi was a young man universally beloved and respected. He had only joined the Government a few months. He had never done any man harm; he was only recently married, and he was assassinated in cold blood in the name of civil and religious liberty. Giuseppe trembles so violently with rage when he tells me of Rossi, his fellow-townsman, that I expect him to drop the tray every moment; but Napoléon talks of it calmly, says it was a pity, but won’t have it that the Radicals are to blame for it. But I am digressing. Of Giuseppe and Napoléon more anon.
I wait patiently opposite the Municipio all day expecting a demonstration, and none comes. So I fill up my time by noting one or two minor matters. A gentleman selling fowls wrings their necks one by onecoram populo, and I watch the process till I feel sick. A Conservative dog creates a diversion byhaving a furious fight with a Radical dog. The dogs are arrayed in their masters’ colours, and the red dog walks up to the blue dog in a most insulting manner. Then the row begins, and all the dogs of Lugano rush to the square and take sides. Heaven only knows if it would not have ended in a dog revolution had the Federal troops not interfered. Two soldiers separated the combatants, and once more, thanks to the Federal bayonets, peace is restored.
In the evening we get the news. The Conservatives have gained a majority all over Ticino. The Liberals are glum, and, after a night spent in the cafés, I walk home with Albert Edward, and we both prophesy trouble on the morrow. We have heard what we have heard, and we have seen what we have seen.
On Monday there was general Conservative jubilation. The church bells rang violently; from the mountain-tops guns were fired and bonfires were lighted. The little boys formed themselves into processions, and waved flags and shouted through the villages, and dogs, decked out in Conservative colours, followed proudly at the heels of their little Conservative masters. And here, on the eve of the lamentable outbreak which took place at Lugano on Monday evening, let me give you a few particulars of the first revolution which led up to all the recent trouble and excitement.
The revolution was a prearranged affair. In Lugano they managed it this way. Some men went into a field and made a bonfire, which caused a great smoke. Then some of their confederates suddenly rang the fire-alarm from the church belfry. Out rushed the officers from the Municipio to see what was the matter, and in rushed the revolutionists and took possession of the building. The Government officers were seized and dragged to prison. The mob rushedinto the cafés and laid violent hands on prominent Conservatives, yelling, ‘To prison! to prison!’ It was Bedlam broken loose, for surely there was nothing but madness in what followed.
Every Conservative was threatened by the Liberals—the active Conservatives were actually seized and put in prison—an instance of the height of absurdity to which this so-called ‘revolution’ was carried. The man on duty at one of the little piers where the steamers embark passengers was known to be a Conservative. He was seized and threatened with imprisonment. ‘What for?’ he exclaimed. ‘You are a Conservative!’ yelled his Liberal aggressors. The same thing happened to shopkeepers, to boatmen, to fly-drivers; the one cry was, ‘To prison with the Conservatives!'—and all this was done in the sacred name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
It is really worth pausing for a moment to reflect that these things were actually done in a Republic, and by a party whose watchword was ‘Liberty.’ It is difficult to treat the thing as anything but a huge burlesque. ‘In the name of Liberty I put you in prison because your political views are not mine.’ Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it—reflect on it! Here is a Republic which claims to be the government of the free by the free, and in this Republic there is a party which calls itself the party of freedom, and its first act, when by force or by stratagem it has snatched temporary power, is to seize and imprison every fellow-citizen whose views upon politics and religion are at variance with its own.
My own belief is that the Liberals of Ticino in their discontent allowed themselves to be the dupes and the tools of a party of disorder, a party which has its headquarters over the frontier. I have seen upon the walls of Bellinzona a proclamation issuedby a society which has its headquarters in Italy, and, putting two and two together, I look a little below the surface of what is generally called politics for the origin of the Ticino revolt against law and order. These things might perhaps be left for the Ticinese to settle among themselves, but unfortunately they have been done in the name of ‘the Liberal party,’ and Liberalism generally all over the world is injured and discredited by such a display of intolerance and persecution on the part of a section of those who profess it and make it their watchword.
But, after all, but for the brutal murder of Rossi, and some subsequent bloodshed, the whole affair might perhaps have been charitably dismissed as a display of what the German calls ‘Kinderei.’ The remark of a Cockney tourist who was in Lugano with me, that it was ‘like a lot of kids playing at revolution,’ is a fair translation of the German expression. The utter childishness of some of the proceedings which are now agitating the Swiss Republic is beyond dispute. The Ticinese have given us a revolutionpour rire, and the whole thing, the murder of Rossi apart, is a cyclone in a coffee-cup, a hurricane in a half-pint pot.
So much for the revolution of September 11; now for the revolution of October 27. I have told you that the Conservatives of Lugano rang the church bells in their joy. On Monday afternoon the Liberals, having had enough of the Conservative rejoicings, thought they would have a turn. So they brought a cannon on the public square and began to discharge it. Now, cannon-firing in a public square is not exactly a parlour pastime, and an officer who was in charge of a small body of soldiers ordered the gay Liberal youths to ‘cease firing.’ They argued the point; the officer insisted, and then—well, nobody knows how it began. The Conservatives say themob threw stones at the officer; the Liberals say the soldiers attacked the crowd; at any rate, stones were thrown and the mob was charged, and presently the soldiers were prodding the people and blood was flowing and stones were flying, and Lugano had another little revolution in miniature all to itself. I was with Albert Edward, and in the middle of it, and I am not ashamed to confess that we executed a strategic movement to the rear and sought the friendly shelter of the Farmacia Internazionale.
Half an hour afterwards the streets were cleared. Every shop and every café was shut, and only groups of excited men gathered under the arcades and discussed the situation. It had been severe while it lasted. I saw plenty of blood—less would have satisfied me—and unfortunately a number of women and children in the crowd were seriously frightened, and I believe a few of them hurt, in the absurd proceedings. A number of wounds were dressed by the chemists of the town that evening, and several of the soldiers were taken to the hospital.
All the troops in Ticino are from the German cantons. Between the German Swiss and the Italian Swiss there is no love lost. The troops have been attacked, and some of the soldiers injured by the people. Relations are now naturally more strained than ever. Some unlucky day something may happen, and then—— Well, let us hope for the best.
The journals of the rival parties and the placards of the rival parties are not going the way to mend matters.Il Credente Cattolicocomes out every day with a black band round it, and it prints on its title-page ‘Il Sangue di Rossi invoca Giustizia'—the blood of Rossi calls for justice. It also pleasantly describes the Liberals as the ‘congrega di Satana'—the congregation of Satan.La Liberta, after a terrificonslaught, calls attention ‘alle infami manovre Radicali,’ and I count the words ‘infamy’ and ‘infamous’ fourteen times on one page.Il Dovere, a Radical sheet, hurls every awful adjective in the Italian language at the Conservative party, and finishes up with a fit of violent hysterics. TheGazette Ticinesecan find no heading to its fierce wrath at the result of Sunday’s election, and so contents itself with an inarticulate ‘!?!’ while another journal declares the vote to be valueless, and writes in huge letters that the Conservative majority is an iniquity, and cries aloud in mighty wrath that 12,066 Liberals return only 35 Deputies to the Grand Council, while 12,833 Ultramontanes return 77. Both sides call each other assassins, and both sides call each other thieves, and the Conservative journals always speak of the Liberals as ‘the party of brigands,’ and it is evident that in Ticino a Republican form of government has not been productive of liberty or equality, and most decidedly not of fraternity.
The placards on the walls are all couched in fiery language, with the exception of Colonel Kunzli’s proclamation, which simply forbids any public meeting to be held in any place in Ticino. ‘Proibisco ogni assemblia populare in tutto il Cantone Ticino.’ (What do you think of that in a Republic, my Trafalgar Square friends?) The Liberal addresses al Popolo Ticinese denounce the Conservatives as ruffians, liars, slanderers, thieves, and oppressors; and a proclamation which is posted up all over the walls of Bellinzona itself, within a few feet of the Government House, and signed by ‘The Liberal Committeein Milan,’ calls upon the people to drive out a Government which for years has tyrannized over the country and been guilty of intolerance, assassination, the liberation of the guilty, the condemnation of the innocent, persecution, swindling, extortion, robbery, ‘and allpossible subdivisions of these and other iniquities.’ I have never read as much strong language in my whole life as I have been compelled to peruse during the last fortnight in Ticino.
To-day (Wednesday) we have had another ‘incident’ in Lugano. This morning a great hulking fellow told a little boy of twelve to go and insult the sentries on duty at the Municipio. The lad, nothing loath, trotted off and called the sentries all the bad names he knew. One sentry ordered him off. The boy, encouraged by some roughs, refused to go, whereupon the sentry, like an idiot, prodded him playfully in the arm with his bayonet.
Soldiers and populace alike seem to have lost their heads, and now are thirsting for each other’s gore. A man in a café told me that if it went on they would fire at the soldiers from the windows. Good business this. O Liberty! Liberty! what crimes, etc.
That the military fear a rising is certain. When the train came in from Milan on Tuesday a guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets was posted at every entrance. A number of agitators from Milan were expected to come to the aid of the Luganese. ‘My God!’ exclaimed the station-master, when I asked him what the armed force at the station meant, ‘one would think we were all murderers here.’
The Lucerne and Berne soldiers will be heartily glad to get back home. They have been badly treated in Ticino, where, although Swiss, and the real Swiss, they are looked upon as foreigners. The arrangements made for their accommodation have not increased the pleasure of their stay. Some of them have had to sleep and live in a church, lying down at night on straw spread about on the floor. The accommodation provided for the others is even worse, being at a disused seminary, where they have absolutely had no water-supply at all, and have had to go down to the lake to wash.
Let us turn from the revolution to more pleasant matters. To-day is market-day in Lugano. The greatest crowd is round a man who is displaying on a pole an enormous and highly-coloured picture of a man dripping with blood, who is stabbing a verydécolletéelady in blue silk. The banner is labelled in huge letters, ‘Jack, l’Assassino di Londra! Lo Sventratore di Donne!’ The man is doing a roaring trade in a penny book which is no less than the life and adventures of our old friend Jack the Ripper.
The country people who have come from the mountains and the valleys are positively trampling each other down in their eagerness to purchase copies, and presently the vendor raises his price from a penny to twopence. What a reputation has Jack made for himself! All over the world he is famous. Gladstone is not in the same street with him as a European celebrity. Such is fame!
The women of Ticino are surely the hardest worked women in the world. In the lower classes they are simply beasts of burden. The little girl of twelve and the old woman of eighty carry huge loads everywhere, while the boys and the men carry nothing. I meet old women toiling up the great mountains with huge baskets on their backs. In these baskets they carry not only goods, but animals. I have seen a woman toiling along with a big calf in the basket on her back and a great bundle of faggots under her arm. In the town it is the same. All the heavy porterage is done by the women. At one of the steamboat piers yesterday it was a woman who came for the luggage, and she positively reeled under the weight of a Saratoga trunk, while the men sat with their hands in their pockets and smoked cigars.
From this same steamer there landed a couple of men of the peasant class. Their wives, with baskets on their backs, were waiting for them. The men had a number of packages with them. These they instantly loaded on to their wives, and then, lighting their cigars, strolled off up the mountain path that led to their village. And behind them at a long distance, heavily laden, toiled their beasts of burden—their wives.
FromBellinzona a local train conveys the traveller to Locarno, which is a small town at the extreme head of Lake Maggiore. I had heard a wonderful account of Locarno, and had been assured that in its perfect peace and pure air the malady from which I was suffering would rapidly disappear. I arrived at Locarno full of hope. I also arrived in a heavy storm of rain. I looked around me, and I saw nothing but water and mist and mud. The mountains were wrapped in black cloaks of cloud. The walls of the houses were covered with moss and mushrooms and toadstools, and in the roadways the bulrushes grew several feet high.
On the way to the hotel we passed a few shops. Every shop seems to deal in the same article—umbrellas, green umbrellas and red umbrellas. They hung in rows along the walls of the town; they were piled high in the shop-windows; every man, woman, and child carried one, and still the rain came down upon the desolate scene.
There is no mistake about the dampness of Locarno when it is damp. It is owing to the enormous amount of moisture which Locarno gets in combination with the full glare of an Italian sun that it boasts unique phenomena in the way of vegetation. You find the southern and the Alpineplant in absolute juxtaposition. At one moment your eye is dazzled by the full glory of a tropical garden; at the next you are gazing at peat bogs and into moist green hollows crowded with the sedges of the moors. Let me be fair to Locarno, for it has been fair to me. A fairer place (when it doesn’t rain) it would be almost impossible to find. From the sunny shores of the glorious lake the mighty mountains rise, with soft green skirts of vine and caps of snow. In a hundred gardens the red and white azalea, the camellia, and the wisteria make great clusters of colour. Gaily painted villas, fair white spires, and picturesque villages dot the heights, and over all there floats a balmy southern breeze that bears upon its gentle wings the perfume of a hundred flowers.
Before we left Locarno we explored the beauties of the neighbourhood, and we started with climbing a mountain. One glorious mountain walk we had which will linger in my memory until the last guard blows his whistle, and I start for a country to which as yet neither Murray nor Bradshaw nor Baedeker has published a guide. We started from Locarno for Mergoscia, ascending the mountains by the path that leads to the Madonna del Sasso (Our Lady of the Rock). One starlit night in 1480 a monk kneeling in prayer looked up the mountain. Suddenly a glorious sea of light bathed the rocky peak that rises above the town, and the Virgin was seen surrounded by adoring angels. The monk interpreted his vision as a wish of Heaven that on this rocky mount a chapel should be built. The money was raised, and to-day Our Lady of the Rock, far above the town of Locarno, is one of the famous sights of Switzerland.
It is a toilsome journey up the mountain-side and past the countless shrines to the church, but the traveller is rewarded with many a quaint sight bythe way for his pains. The old-world peasant population was probably gratified by the realism of some of the groups which are placed here and there up the hill like small waxwork exhibitions. You come to a kind of stone grotto; you peer in through the iron bars, and you start back astonished. You are looking into a stable, with real straw and real stalls, and in a manger you see the infant Saviour lying, and the Holy Family grouped around him. A couple of donkeys are peering into the manger, and nothing is spared that contributes to the almost sensational realism of the scene. A little farther up you peep into another cave, and you see a number of figures sitting at a long table laid with plates and glasses. In front of each figure is a small roll, and a waiter is just coming into the room with a big fish on a plate. You gradually recognise the fact that you are assisting at the Lord’s Supper, and you turn almost with a sigh to think that a beautiful faith ever needed such coarse theatrical adjuncts to impress it on the minds of the populace.
Our Lady of the Rock is much resorted to by people in pain and affliction, and the naves of the church are lined with curiousex votos. No chamber of horrors ever contained a more terrible series of accidents than these pictures represent. Here is a little boy under a carriage wheel, rescued just as the wheel is on his chest. Here is a man falling from a bridge into a river, and just caught by the leg as he is going head first into the water. Here is a woman hurled over a precipice, and caught by the branch of a tree. In one terrible picture a man’s nose is being blown off by his own gun; in another, a gentleman is accidentally mowing his own legs off with a scythe. It is a great relief, after gazing at these pictorial horrors, in which the blood is always laid on thick by the artist, to get out into the openair again, and climb higher up the hill to the narrow path that leads to the Alpine village of Orselina.
Through Orselina we pass over the spur of the mountain to Contra, another village which is perched up higher still. These Alpine villages look beautifully picturesque from the valley below, but they are sad and grim enough when you are in them. All the poetry is gone when you wind in and out through the little tortuous street and see the squalor and the poverty in which the people live. The rough stone walls look so forbidding; the rooms seen through the battered doors look so black and cheerless as the smoke of the wood fire curls slowly out of them. All the poetry is going as you peer into them, and there is no poetry at all left when you have seen the inhabitants. Old men toil painfully along with trembling hands; women, bent almost double beneath the burthen they bear on their backs, pass you with sad faces and dull eyes. The women in these Alpine villages do the work of animals. They are really beasts of burden. They are loaded as in our country we load carts and barrows. I have seen an old woman toiling up a hill with a great wicker basket on her back in which were two calves and a pig. The basket the women have perpetually strapped to their back is called agerlo, and is made to contain anything, from an elephant to a packet of pins.
Half the houses in these Alpine villages are deserted, as are many of the houses lower down in the valleys. Only the old men and the women and children seem to be left in the others. The reason of this is not far to seek. The Ticinese have been the great emigrating race of Switzerland. The men of the hills and valleys are scattered over the world, and most of them have climbed the hill of fortune. Some of them have reached the summit. From a village near Locarno, which is now full of housesbarred and bolted and falling into decay, have gone forth some of the richest men in California. In that far-off land the owners of these houses made a fortune by their industry, and then their fellow-villagers, hearing of it, set out to try and do the same.
Everywhere as one wanders over this part of Switzerland one finds that the manhood is gone. The Ticinese are far away in Italy, in France, in England, in America, and everywhere their industry, their business talents, and their thrift have carried them triumphantly to affluence.
But though he is far away the man of Ticino does not forget his old home, or his poorer brethren left there. From over the seas every year comes the emigrant’s gold for the village poor, and for the Church, and for every good object that can be thought of.
The finest peal of bells in Ticino is the gift of a man of the valley of Maggia, who is far away in California. On one of the bells is this inscription:
‘Anche attraverso sterminati mari,Degli Svizzeri il cor vola a’suoi cari,’
‘Anche attraverso sterminati mari,Degli Svizzeri il cor vola a’suoi cari,’
‘Anche attraverso sterminati mari,Degli Svizzeri il cor vola a’suoi cari,’
which, being translated, reads:
‘Though doomed beyond the boundless seas to roam,The Switzer ne’er forgets his childhood’s home.’
‘Though doomed beyond the boundless seas to roam,The Switzer ne’er forgets his childhood’s home.’
‘Though doomed beyond the boundless seas to roam,The Switzer ne’er forgets his childhood’s home.’
The fortune of the Ticinese emigrants now settled in California alone is estimated at nearly two millions, and from one valley in Ticino, the Vallemaggia, there are forty men who went out from a little cottage such as I have described, and who could now any one of them buy up almost the entire district. Splendid emigrants are these brave, determined fellows—emigrants who benefit not only themselves, but the lands to which they go, and who never, as they climb the rungs of Fortune’s ladder, and build up new homes and new associations in theland of their adoption, forget the dear old home, or those less fortunate companions who still remain there.
I have interrupted my walk to say something about Swiss emigration, but it is a subject that must force itself upon you in whichever way you turn in this portion of Switzerland. Emigration is writ large in every valley. It accounts for much that you see which otherwise would be inexplicable. The subject was forced upon me when I came to Contra and saw the empty village homes of the rich men far away.
I don’t mind confessing to you that after leaving Contra I grew a little nervous. Blondin used to get £100 a time for walking on the tight-rope. I got nothing for walking from Contra to Mergoscia, but there were times when I should have preferred Mr. Blondin’s job, even if in addition to performing gratis I had had to pay for the rope and the pole out of my own pocket. Just after leaving Contra the road crosses a most fearful abyss. Down thousands of feet below you dashes a mad, roaring torrent. You clutch the side of the frail mountain bridge, and you peer over into the yawning jaws of death below. I have seen some grand sights, but never before have I seen anything so sublime in its grandeur as that wild rocky scene, the far-stretching vale, the roaring torrent in the gorge below.
We crept over that bridge on tiptoe. We neither of us spoke a word. The scene was too grand for words. We were both awestruck, and both just a little nervous, for after crossing the bridge the road became more awful still.
It certainly was a terrible feat we were about to attempt, but I had set out to go to Mergoscia, and I didn’t want to be beaten. We had been told that, owing to a portion of the path having been carried down into the abyss by a landslip, the road was notvery good, but we had never imagined it was so awful as it now appeared to us. The road absolutely led across the face of a perpendicular rock! To look down below was to turn sick, and there wasn’t even the pretence of a wall on the outside edge of the path! It was barely wide enough to creep over, walking one foot in front of the other, and the rock above jutted out at places so that you were forced nearer the edge.
It was at this point that the road had recently broken away. While we were standing and hesitating before we stepped upon the ledge, a lad came up behind whistling, and with his hands in his pockets stepped boldly upon the broken path, skipped over some bits of rock which had fallen upon it, and was presently safe round the terrible jut and on the broader and sounder pathway that led direct to Mergoscia.
That was enough for us. Steadying ourselves and clenching our teeth, we stepped forward. It was a very bad minute as we nervously crossed the jut. We dared not look down the face of the rock, or think what lay below us. But we arrived safely on the other side, and then we paused to take breath, and we confessed to each other that we wouldn’t do it again for a thousand pounds.
The village of Mergoscia stands at a dizzy height on the side of a sheer precipice. Looking back at the road by which we had reached it, it seemed impossible that anyone but an acrobat could traverse it. It was afterwards explained to us that the road was about to be repaired, that half of it had recently fallen away, and that while it was in its present condition the general way of approaching Mergoscia was from the opposite side of the gorge. That night, after I fell asleep, that awful path to Mergoscia came back to me in my dreams, and I woke up just as Iwas falling into the abyss below. The walk is described in a guide-book as ‘one of the most sublimely grand and romantic on the Alps.’ Romantic it certainly was, but besides the romance there was just a little too much reality about it to make it an unmixed pleasure.
There is a town on Lake Maggiore where all the cooks come from. It is called Brisago. The first person Columbus met when he discovered America was a cook from Brisago, which brings me to another of Albert Edward’s jokes. He was talking to Lord Mayor Monico and the Right Hon. S. Gatti at Dongio, and he said: ‘Ah, if William Tell had been a Ticinese, do you know what he would have done with the apple after he had shot it?’ ‘No,’ said Lord Mayor Monico, ‘I don’t.’ ‘He would have made it into an apple dumpling, and opened a restaurant with it,’ replied A. E. And everybody laughed so heartily that several avalanches fell in the neighbourhood.
There is one thing which cannot fail to strike the close observer of Swiss contemporary history, and that is the extraordinary contempt which the rival political parties have for each other. The Radical and the Conservative members of the Council never associate in private or in public life. They won’t even sit at the same café, they won’t put up at the same hotel, they won’t walk on the same side of the street.
And oh, the dreadful things they say of each other! The Conservatives assure me that the Radicals would not hesitate to set fire to Switzerland, or to blow it up with dynamite upon the slightest provocation. The Radicals tell me that the Conservatives are ruining the country; that they want to make the people slaves, and divide Switzerland among themselves. It is a sight to see a Radical and a Conservative meet accidentally. The scowl is a thing to remember for a lifetime. You can almost see them arch their backs at each other like rival tomcats, and you are quite astonished when they don’t spit. There is no place in the world where political antagonism becomes such real and personal antagonism as in the land of the gentleman who immortalized the apple trick.
One fine day we went over on a specially-conducted expedition to the Val Gatti—the beautiful and romantic valley, some four or five miles from Biasca, from which the celebrated brothers came forth many years ago to conquer London. Our expedition was almost a royal progress. In Bellinzona we were entertained by Mr. Stephen, M.P. for Switzerland, at a sumptuous breakfast, at the fifteenth course of which Albert Edward broke down, and shed tears because he couldn’t eat any more; then we all adjourned to the Presidential Palace, where we had cigars with the Government; and then it came on to thunder and to lighten and to hail, and presently—note this, for it is a remarkable fact—it became so pitch dark that we had to light lamps in order to see each other—and this was between twelve and one o’clock in the day. When in glorious Switzerland in the middle of May I saw the gas and the lamps and the candles alight in all the shops and houses at noon, I felt that I owed some slight apology to London for the unkind things I have sometimes said about it.
By one o’clock, however, the storm was over and gone, and the sun shone out, and then we took train for Biasca. At Biasca we alighted, and found a carriage and four horses, and postilions in magnificent uniforms, waiting to take us over the marvellous four miles of mountain road that lead to Dongio, the beautiful spot in the Val de Blenio in which the Palazzo Gatti is situated.
It is impossible for me to describe that drive. My adjectives would not hold out, and my neck is still aching with the twisting I gave it while endeavouring to gaze up at the kaiser crags and monarch mountains that stand like solemn sentinels guarding the glorious Gatti valley. The drive was spirit-stirring and sublime, and the face of Stephen, M.P., positively beamed as he saw how much we were impressed with the glory of his mountain home. We only had one or two trifling accidents by the way. Once the postilions took a road that the M.P. didn’t wish them to go ‘for fear of our nerves,’ and, in endeavouring to turn round on a wooden bridge across a torrent, they came so near landing us all upside down that the author of a hundred melodramas jumped out for his life. Unfortunately, he hopped out of the frying pan into the fire. Our carriage righted itself; but he jumped badly, and fell on his nose, and his hat went over into the roaring torrent, and the big waves banged it merrily against the rocks, and the last he saw of it it was going down the valley at the rate of fifty miles an hour.
Avalanches fall occasionally in the Val Gatti, and sides of mountains come down without being invited to do so by the inhabitants. I must confess that every now and then, as we dashed along a narrow road, with a yawning abyss below us and about a couple of billion tons of overhanging rock above us, and it began to look like thunderstorms on the weather quarter, I began to think that an Alpine life has its bad quarters of an hour. But we arrived safely at last at Dongio, and, when we reined our reeking steeds up in front of the Palazzo Gatti, and a deputation of Dongio maidens came and presented us with bouquets of mountain flowers, we felt that we had not risked our precious lives in vain.
In front of the Palazzo Gatti the Tree of Libertyis planted in honour of Mr. Stephen, M.P. for the Valley. From the tree float flags and emblems and ribbons. It is by this tree that you know you are on the domain of a patrician, a citizen of renown. There are plenty of beautiful houses scattered about the valley, and any amount near Dongio. ‘English,’ says the Dongio M.P., and you gather at once what he means. The owners are of the London-Swiss division. The names of most of the grandees of the valley sound familiar to a Londoner’s ear. The mayor of Dongio, who gives us a right hearty welcome, is Signor Monico. I fancy I’ve heard that name in Piccadilly. Our host at Aqua Rossa, a health station higher up the valley, is Signor Gianella. I think that name is to be found in London day by day. Whenever I say to the M.P., ‘Whose palazzo is that?’ he mentions a name that is familiar to my cockney ears. One pretty villa, standing a little way out of the village, specially attracts my attention. ‘Whose house is that?’ I say. ‘That,’ replies the M.P., ‘is the house of our manager at the Gallery.’ I uncover my head and bow to the residence. Without knowing it, I have been leaning over the garden wall of the Palazzo Gallizia!
From Dongio we drove to Aqua Rossa. As we pass every hat in the village flies off, and all the old ladies drop curtsies. Mr. Stephen is a great man in these parts, and our progress is a triumphal one. While our host has gone into a house to pay a call we converse with our driver. We ask him, through Albert Edward, who speaks Italian as his mother tongue, many little questions, and he is filled with admiration and reverence for the great men of the valley who live far away in London. He assures us that the whole valley belongs to the Gattis, and that he thinks all the mountains do too. He isn’t quite sure if they have any more valleys anywhere else, butthey could have if they liked. We asked him if he has heard that the Gattis are going to buy up Switzerland, and turn it into a public company. He thinks a minute, and says, No; he has not heard that, but he thinks they have something to do with the big hotel at Aqua Rossa, where, right in the heart of the mountains, there are to be the electric light and the telephone, and your hair is to be brushed by machinery.
We go up the valley to the hotel at Aqua Rossa, which is being enlarged. The ‘Red Water,’ from which the Grande Stabilmento Balneario takes its name, is a marvellous cure for dyspepsia, skin diseases, bronchitis, etc. The situation of the hotel is magnificent. Five miles up the valley, far from the busy hum of men, you can look from your window over a glorious panorama of mountain and vale. The air is exhilarating as champagne, and there is no next-morning headache in it. At the hotel you can have the baths and the treatment, the electric light, and perfect peace, and the pension is only 8fr. a day. I have taken a room for the season there myself, and the entire staff have guaranteed that after a fortnight’s treatment I shall never know a pang of dyspepsia again. Ye gods, what an angel I shall return to my native shores if it comes off!
The shades of night were falling fast ere we left the hospitable homes of the Val Gatti. Our drive back to Biasca in the darkness made us sit tight and clutch each other, and think now and then that we might have been better men had we tried; but we skirted the torrents and dodged the avalanches all right, and we were no sooner in the train than we all fell fast asleep, overcome with fatigue and the mountain air, and we should probably have slept and been taken on to Calais or Milan or Timbuctoo if Albert Edward had not snored so violently as to alarm theengine-driver and to cause him to pull up and hold a hurried conversation with the guard. They both listened, and felt certain that some terrible convulsion of nature was taking place in the mountains. They came to the carriages and begged the passengers to alight. ‘We fear an earthquake or a landslip,’ they said. ‘This thunderous roaring betokens mischief.’ But when they came to our carriage and found the great convulsion of nature was only Albert Edward snoring, they woke us up and apologized to the other passengers, and we resumed our journey. And so ended one of the most remarkable journeys it has ever been my lot to perform.
Snow! Last night the moon shone with a steel-blue light in the cloudless heavens, and the sentinel stars stood out clear and bright, as on a frosty winter’s evening. Never had I seen Berlin look more beautiful. Long after the good citizens had retired to their homes, I lingered under the lime-trees and gave myself up to the enchantment of the scene. It was five-and-twenty years almost to the day since I had set foot within the Prussian capital, and old memories crowded about me as I was lost in reverie. It was not until I turned my steps homeward that I found out how bitterly cold it was. I had not had time to think about the weather, or to remember what season of the year it was. But, walking home, it suddenly occurred to me that it was the merry month of May, and that in a few weeks it would be June. In Berlin it might have been a good old-fashioned Christmas Eve.
And to-day it is snowing—snowing in a way not to be mistaken. There is no half-hearted business about this snow. It doesn’t change to rain just as it falls, like a snow that is ashamed of itself and endeavours to conceal its true character. Down it comes in flakes the size of shilling pieces, and the wayfarers’ umbrellas are as white as their noses are red and their lips are blue.
Only forty-eight hours before, as I stepped gaily into the train at Victoria on the day of the Two Thousand Guineas, I said jokingly, ‘When I travel I like to see Snow.’ But I didn’t mean the snow that fell upon me so unmercifully in Berlin. I meant the excellent Mr. Snow, who, promoted from the Club train to the management of the Sleeping Car Company’s London office, still devotes himself to the comfort of Continental travellers, and makes the way pleasant before them. I had reason to be grateful to this most seasonable Snow. Not only did he take the trouble to send me the winner of the Two Thousand to Dover, but when I arrived at Calais I found that he had ordered by telegraph an excellent dinner for me at the buffet, and had reserved me a compartment in the Cologne express, for all of which I felt exceedingly grateful. The snow that awaited me at Berlin was not nearly so agreeable. Still, as it is over, and the sun once more asserts its rights in the heavens, we may as well take the unseasonable downfall as a little practical joke on the part of the clerk of the weather, and say no more about it.
The sleeping cars which run between Calais and Cologne in connection with the Club train are excellent, but as I didn’t go to sleep until midnight, and had to turn out at half-past two fully dressed at the frontier and fit obstinate keys into troublesome locks, and then had to undress again with the pleasant knowledge that at five a.m. I should be turned out at Cologne, I can’t say that, taken as a whole, my night’s rest was all that a selfish man could wish for himself. At half-past five, however, I had some excellent coffee at the Cologne buffet, and then went into the cathedral and assisted at a most interesting ceremony, in which a bishop was taking the leading part. I stayed in the cathedral till seven, and attwenty minutes to eight I found one of the nicest trains I ever saw in my life waiting to take me on to Berlin. It wasn’t a special train of luxury due to private enterprise, with a premium of fifty or seventy-five per cent. to pay for the privilege of sitting in it, but a train provided by the Government for ordinary first and second class passengers.
A polite conductor, having inspected my ticket, begged me to do him the honour of seating myself, and ushered me into a comfortable compartment containing four easy-chairs and a small dining-table. At the same time he handed me a card containing a map of the route, the time of arrival at each station, and a list of various hot and cold delicacies and refreshing beverages which could be serveden routeto the traveller. The prices attached were most moderate. For instance, feeling hungry about eleven o’clock (remember, I breakfasted soon after five), I touched an electric bell, and instantly a waiter appeared bowing and smiling in front of my easy-chair. I ordered a beefsteak and potatoes and a bottle of Mosel wine. The steak was tenderness itself, and the potatoes were excellent. For this repast, including bread, butter, and cheese, I paid, according to the tariff, 1s. 6d., and the bottle of wine was 2s. Everything on the bill was as moderately priced. For instance, a plate of soup and bread is 4d.; a plate of cold meat, with the usual etceteras, 1s.; half a cold chicken and bread, 1s. 6d. The ‘drinks’ are quite as reasonable. A bottle of seltzer is 3d.; a lemonade, 3d.; a bottle of beer, 3d.; and the wines are proportionately cheap. When you think of these prices you must also remember that the entire train is on the corridor system, and is luxuriously fitted up in first and second class sitting-rooms, with every convenience for the toilet, and that there is a large staff of attendants. Whatever faults the GermanGovernment may have, it has made express railway travelling the comfort of the many instead of the luxury of the few.
In Berlin, when you arrive at a railway-station, an official gives you a huge brass plate with a number of a cab on it, and you can’t have a cab without you have the brass plate. It is an excellent idea if you can get a porter to carry the plate; if you can’t, it takes less out of you to walk to your destination.
Berlin cabs are first-class and second-class. The first-class cab is one in which the united ages of the driver, the horse, and the cab are under one hundred years. As soon as they are more than that they become second class.
Berlin is, I should fancy, now the cleanest and the best-lighted city in Europe. After months of darkest London, brightest Berlin is a distinct relief to me. From end to end in every street and in every shop it is a blaze of electric light and clean white colour.
I went to the steeplechases at Charlottenburg, where a few days previously our well-known gentleman rider, Mr. ‘Charley Thompson,’ had captured the hearts of the Berliners by his plucky riding in the race for the gold cup, which he won after being thrown heavily and having a can-can performed upon his chest by his horse. Berlin racing is a calm and serious affair. The officers (in uniform) ride their own horses, and all the soldiers on the course come to attention and salute as they pass by. No bookmakers are allowed, and you have to pay ten marks for a special ticket before you can even back a horse at the ‘totalizer.’ The object of this is to make it impossible for the working classes to gamble, and it is highly effective.
At one time anybody could patronize the Pari-Mutuel, but the working classes lost their moneyand then kicked up a row about it, and said they were ruined. The Kaiser heard of it, and stopped all racing at once. But after about six weeks he cooled down and gave permission for racing to be resumed again under certain conditions. The ten marks admission to the Pari-Mutuel enclosure is one of them. It is thus that a paternal Government protects the earnings of its workmen. With a view also of keeping the working classes from the racecourse, no racing is now permitted on Sunday. This is ‘all on account of the ‘Lizer'—the totalizer.
Kaiser Wilhelm, in spite of his eccentricities, which the Germans freely acknowledge, is undoubtedly immensely popular with his people. He is a German of Germans, and the Germany-for-the-Germans feeling was never so strong as it is at present. Our national motto is ‘Made in Germany,’ but the Vaterland does not return the compliment. ‘Made in England’ is not a common object of the seashore in the Kaiser’s dominions.
They tell many amusing stories in Berlin of the strength of the ‘national’ feeling. When Queen Victoria sent the Kaiser’s baby-boy a pair of shoes, knitted with her own royal and great-grandmotherly hands, the Emperor shook his head and laid them aside. ‘A German prince,’ he said, ‘must wear German shoes.’ And the baby’s little feet were at once duly encased in the home-made article.
I was in a blissful condition of lazy don’t-careism, enjoying myself in my own way, lounging in the sunshine (it turned suddenly warm after that snowstorm) ‘unter den Linden,’ sitting outside the confectioner’s eating ices, smoking cigarettes, and drinking chocolate, when in an evil hour I came suddenly upon an old German friend, who has been long a resident in Berlin. He insisted at once upon being my guide, philosopher, and friend. He said that hewould ‘take me about’ and show me everything. He has kept his word, and I have had to telegraph home for new boots.
I remember an old song which was in years gone by a great favourite with Italian prime donne during the London opera season. They used to take it as an encore in the middle of various centuries and under every variety of surrounding circumstances. I think it was called ‘Home, Sweet Home.’ There was a passage in it which, as far as I could gather from the singers’ accent and ‘variations,’ ran somewhat after this fashion: