第16章

There are other reasons why I should remember that year,but they are too long to state formally in this place.Moreover,they have nothing to do with that holiday.What has to do with the holiday is that before the day on which the remark was made we had seen Vienna,the Upper Danube,Munich,the Falls of the Rhine,the Lake of Constance,--in fact,it was a memorable holiday of travel.Of late we had been tramping slowly up the Valley of the Reuss.It was a delightful time.It was much more like a stroll than a tramp.Landing from a Lake of Lucerne steamer in Fluelen,we found ourselves at the end of the second day,with the dusk overtaking our leisurely footsteps,a little way beyond Hospenthal.This is not the day on which the remark was made:in the shadows of the deep valley and with the habitations of men left some way behind,our thoughts ran not upon the ethics of conduct,but upon the simpler human problem of shelter and food.There did not seem anything of the kind in sight,and we were thinking of turning back when suddenly,at a bend of the road,we came upon a building,ghostly in the twilight.

At that time the work on the St.Gothard Tunnel was going on,and that magnificent enterprise of burrowing was directly responsible for the unexpected building,standing all alone upon the very roots of the mountains.It was long,though not big at all;it was low;it was built of boards,without ornamentation,in barrack-hut style,with the white window-frames quite flush with the yellow face of its plain front.And yet it was a hotel;it had even a name,which I have forgotten.But there was no gold laced doorkeeper at its humble door.A plain but vigorous servant-girl answered our inquiries,then a man and woman who owned the place appeared.It was clear that no travellers were expected,or perhaps even desired,in this strange hostelry,which in its severe style resembled the house which sur mounts the unseaworthy-looking hulls of the toy Noah's Arks,the universal possession of European childhood.However,its roof was not hinged and it was not full to the brim of slab-sided and painted animals of wood.Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in evidence.We had something to eat in a long,narrow room at one end of a long,narrow table,which,to my tired perception and to my sleepy eyes,seemed as if it would tilt up like a see saw plank,since there was no one at the other end to balance it against our two dusty and travel-stained figures.

Then we hastened up stairs to bed in a room smelling of pine planks,and I was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.

In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow University)woke me up early,and as we were dressing remarked:

"There seems to be a lot of people staying in this hotel.I have heard a noise of talking up till eleven o'clock."This statement surprised me;I had heard no noise whatever,having slept like a top.

We went down-stairs into the long and narrow dining-room with its long and narrow table.There were two rows of plates on it.At one of the many curtained windows stood a tall,bony man with a bald head set off by a bunch of black hair above each ear,and with a long,black beard.He glanced up from the paper he was reading and seemed genuinely astonished at our intrusion.By and by more men came in.Not one of them looked like a tourist.Not a single woman appeared.These men seemed to know each other with some intimacy,but I cannot say they were a very talkative lot.The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the table.It all had the air of a family party.By and by,from one of the vigorous servant-girls in national costume,we discovered that the place was really a boarding house for some English engineers engaged at the works of the St.Gothard Tunnel;and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language,as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not believe in wasting many words on the mere amenities of life.

This was my first contact with British mankind apart from the tourist kind seen in the hotels of Zurich and Lucerne--the kind which has no real existence in a workaday world.I know now that the bald-headed man spoke with a strong Scotch accent.I have met many of his kind ashore and afloat.The second engineer of the steamer Mavis,for instance,ought to have been his twin brother.I cannot help thinking that he really was,though for some reason of his own he assured me that he never had a twin brother.Anyway,the deliberate,bald-headed Scot with the coal-black beard appeared to my boyish eyes a very romantic and mysterious person.

We slipped out unnoticed.Our mapped-out route led over the Furca Pass toward the Rhone Glacier,with the further intention of following down the trend of the Hasli Valley.The sun was already declining when we found ourselves on the top of the pass,and the remark alluded to was presently uttered.