Part 12

Well, now, these men were pleased to see in autumn grass growing between the setts of the street, especially in one steep street where they lived. It rejoiced their hearts; they said within themselves, “This is indeed an Old Town!” But the Town Council of that town had said among themselves, “What if it become publicly known that grass grows in our streets? We shall be thought backward; the rich will not come to visit us. We shall not make so much money, and our brothers-in-law and others indebted to us will also grow impoverished. Come! Let us pull up this grass.”

So they paid a poor man, who would otherwise have starved, the amount of his food on the condition that he should painfully pull up all the grass, which he did.

Then the artists, seeing him at work, paid him more not to pull it up. Then the Town Council, finding out this, dismissed him from their employ, and put upon the job a distant man from some outlandish county, and had him watched, and he pulled up all the grass, every blade of it, by night, but thoroughly. The next morning the artists saw what had been done, and they went out by train to another town, and bought grass seed and also a little garden soil, and the next night they scattered the soil carefully between the stones and sowed the grass seed; and the comedy is not yet ended.

There is a moral to this, but I will not write it down, for in the first place it may not be a good moral, and in the second place I have forgotten what it was.

A Crossing of the Hills

When it was nearly noon my companion said to me:

“By what sign or track do you propose to cross the mountains?” For the mountains here seem higher than any of highest clouds: the valley beneath them is broad and full of fields: beyond, a long day off, stands in a huge white wall the Sierra del Cadi. Yet we must cross these hills if ever we were to see the secluded and little-known Andorrans. For the Andorrans live in a sort of cup fenced in on every side by the Pyrenees; it was on this account that my companion asked me how I would cross over to their land and by what sign I should find my way.

When I had thought a little I answered:

“By none. I propose to go right up at them, and over unless I find some accident by which I am debarred.”

“Why, then,” said he, “let us strike up at once, walking steeply until we come into a new country.”

This advice was good, and so, though we had no longer any path, and though a mist fell upon us, we began walking upwards, and it was like going up a moor in the West Riding, except that it went on and on and on, hour after hour, and was so steep that now and then one had to use one’s hands.

The mist was all round us; it made a complete silence, and it drifted in the oddest way, making wisps of vapour quite close to our faces. Nor had we any guide except the steepness of the hill. For it is a rule when you are caught in a storm or mist upon the hills, if you are going up, to go the steepest way, and though in such a fog this often took us over a knoll which we had to descend again, yet on the whole it proved a very good rule. It was perhaps the middle of the afternoon, we had been climbing some five hours, we had ascended some six thousand or seven thousand feet, when to our vast astonishment we stumbled upon a sort of road.

It must here be explained why we were astonished. The way we had come led nowhere; there were no houses and no men. The Andorrans whom we were about to visit have no communication northward with the outer world except a thin wire leading over the hills, by which those who wish to telephone to them can do so; and of all places in Europe, Andorra is the place out of which men least desire to get and to which men least desire to go. It is like that place beyond Death of which people say that it gives complete satisfaction and from which certainly no one makes any effort to escape, and yet to which no one is very anxious to go. When, therefore, we came to this road, beginning suddenly half way up a bare mountain and appearing unexplained through the mist, we were astonished.

It was embanked and entrenched and levelled as would be any great French military road near the frontier fortresses. There was a little runnel running underneath the road, conveying a mountain stream; it was arched with great care, and the arch was made of good hewn stone well smoothed. But when we came right on to this road we found something more astonishing still: we found that it was but the simulacrum or ghost of a road. It was not metalled; it was but the plan or trace or idea of a road. No horses had ever trod its soft earth, no wheels had ever made a rut in it. It had not been used at all. Grass covered it. The explanation of this astonishing sight we did not receive until we had spoken in their own tongue the next day to the imperturbable Andorrans.

It was as though a school of engineers had been turned on here for fun, to practise the designing of a road in a place where land was valueless, upon the very summit of the world.

We two men, however, reasoned thus (and reasoned rightly as it turned out):

“The tall and silent Andorrans in a fit of energy must have begun this road, though later in another fit they abandoned it. Therefore it will lead towards their country.”

And as we were very tired of walking up a steep which had now lasted for so many hours, we determined to follow the large zigzags of this unknown and magic half-road, and so we did.

It was the oddest sensation in the world walking in the mist a mile and more above the habitations of men, upon unmetalled, common earth which yet had the exact shape of pavements, cuttings, and embankments upon either side, with no sort of clue as to where it led or as to why men began to make it, and still less of an argument as to why they had ceased.

It went up and up in great long turns and z’s upon the face of the mountain, until at last it grew less steep; the mist grew colder, and after a long flat I thought the land began to fall a little, and I said to my companion:

“We are over the watershed, and beneath us, miles beneath us, are the Andorrans.”

When by the continuance of the fall of the land we were certain of this we took off our hats, in spite of the fog which still hung round us very wet and very cold and quite silent, and expected any moment a revelation.

We were not disappointed. Indeed, this attitude of the mind is never disappointed. Without a moment’s warning the air all round us turned quite bright and warm, a strong gust blew through the whirling vapour, and we saw through the veil of it the image of the sun. In a moment his full disc and warmth was on us. The clouds were torn up above us; the air was immediately quite clear, and we saw before us, stamped suddenly upon the sight, a hundred miles of the Pyrenees.

They say that everything is in the mind. If that be true, then he and I saw in that moment a country which was never yet on earth, for it was a country which our minds had not yet conceived to be possible, and it was as new as though we had seen it after the disembodiment of the soul.

The evening sun from over Spain shone warm and low, and every conceivable colour of the purples and the browns filled up the mountain tangle, so that the marvel appeared as though it had been painted carefully in a minute way by a man’s hand; but the colours were filled with light, and so to fill colour with light is what art can never do. The main range ran out upon either side, and the foothills in long series of peaks and ridges fell beneath it, until, beyond, in what might have been sky or might have been earth, was the haze of the plains of Ebro.

“It is no wonder,” said I to my companion, “that the Andorrans jealously preserve their land and have refused to complete this road.”

When I had said that we went down the mountain side. The lower our steps fell the more we found the wealth and the happiness of men. At last walls and ploughed land appeared. The fields grew deep, the trees more sturdy, and under the shelter of peaks with which we had just been acquainted, but which after an hour or so of descent seemed hopelessly above us, ran rivers which were already tamed and put to a use. One could see mills standing upon them. So we went down and down.

There is no rejuvenescence like this entry into Andorra, and there is no other experience of the same sort, not even the finding of spring land after a month of winter sea: that vision of brilliant fields coming down to meet one after the endless grey waste of the sea.

It was, I tell you again, a country completely new, and it might have been of another world, much better than our own.

So we came at last to the level of the valley, and the first thing we saw was a pig, and the second was a child, and the third was a woman. The pig ran at us: for he was lean. The child at first smiled at us because we were human beings, and then divining that we were fiends who had violated his sacred home began to cry. The woman drove the pig from us and took in the child, and in great loneliness and very sad to be so received we went until we should find men and citizens, and these we found of our own size, upstanding and very dignified, and recognised them at once to be of the wealthy and reserved Andorrans. It was clear by their faces that the _lingua franca_ was well known to them, so I said to the first in this universal tongue:

“Sir, what is the name of this village?”

And he replied: “It is Saldeu.” But this he said in his own language, which is somewhat more difficult to understand than the _lingua franca_.

“I take it, therefore,” said I, “that I am in the famous country of Andorra.”

To which he replied: “You are not many miles from the very town itself: you approach Andorra ‘the Old.’”

The meaning of this I did not at first exactly understand, but as we went on, the sun having now set, I said to my companion: “Were not those epithets right which we attached to the Andorrans in our fancy before we attempted these enormous hills? Were we not right to call them the smiling and the tall Andorrans?”

“You are right,” he answered to me, thinking carefully over every word that he said. “To call them the secluded and the honourable Andorrans is to describe them in a few words.”

We then continued our way down the darkening valley, whistling little English songs.

The Barber

Humanity, my dear little human race, is at once more difficult to get at and more generally present than you seem to know. You are yourselves human beings, dear people. Yet how many have so fully understood their fellows (that is, themselves) that they could exactly say how any man will behave or why any man behaves as he does? But with that I am not to-day concerned. I am concerned with another matter, which is the impossibility of getting away from these brothers of ours, even if we desire to do so.

Note you here, humans, that in reality you do not, even the richest of you, try to get away from your brothers. You do not like solitudes; you like sham, theatrical solitudes. You like the Highlands on condition that you have driven away the people rooted there, but also on condition that you may have there the wine called champagne. Now if you had seen that wine made, the gathering of the apples in the orchards of the Rhine and the Moselle, the adding of the sugar, the watching of the fermentation, and the corking with a curious machine, you would appreciate that if you insist upon champagne in the Highlands, then you are certainly taking humanity with you. If you could follow the thing farther and see them all passing the stuff on, each a little afraid of being found out, then you would know that as you drank your champagne in the most solitary valley you had done far from getting rid of humanity. All the grotesque of man and all his jollity, all his stupidity and all his sin, went with you into your hermitage and it would have gone with you anyhow without the champagne. You cannot make a desert except by staying away from it yourself. All of which leads me to the Barber.

First, then, to give you the true framework of that astonishing man. For exactly thirty-six hours there had been nothing at all in the way of men; and if thirty-six hours seems but a short time to you as you read it, it certainly was a mighty long time for me who am writing this. Of those thirty-six hours the first few had been enlivened (that is, from five in the morning till about noon) with the sight of a properly made road, of worked stone, of mown grass, and of all that my fellow beings are busily at throughout the world. For though I had not seen a man, yet the marks of men were all around, and at last as I went into the Uplands I bade farewell to my kind in the shape of an old rusty pair of rails still united by little iron sleepers, one link of a Decauville railway which a generation before had led to a now abandoned mine.

My way over the mountains lay up a gulley which turned as unexpectedly as might the street of a mediæval town; and which was quite as narrow and as enwalled as the street of any city; but instead of houses there were ugly rocks, and instead of people very probably viewless devils. Still, though I hated to be away from men I went on because I desired to cross the high ridge which separated me from a dear pastoral people, of whom I had heard from poets and of whom I had read in old books. They were a democracy simple and austere, though a little given to thieving, and every man was a master of his house and a citizen within the State. This curious little place I determined to see, though the approach to it was difficult. There are many such in Europe, but this one lies peculiarly alone, and is respected, and I might say in a sense worshipped, by the powerful Government to which it is nominally subject.

Well, then, I went on up over the ridge and, by that common trick of mountains, the great height and the very long way somehow missed me; it grew dark before I was aware, and when I could have sworn I was about four thousand feet up I was close upon eight thousand. I had hoped to manage the Farther Valleys before nightfall, but when I found it was impossible what I did was this: I scrambled down the first four or five hundred feet of the far side before it was quite dark, until I came to the beginnings of a stream that leapt from ledge to ledge. It was not large enough to supply a cottage well, but it would do to camp by, for all one needs is water, and there was a little brushwood to burn. Next morning with the first of the light I went on my scramble downwards--and it was the old story (which everyone who has wandered in the great mountains of Europe knows so well), I was in the Wrong Valley. I was used to that sort of thing, and I recognised the signs of it at once. I made up my mind for a good day’s effort, which, when one is by oneself, is an exasperating thing; I tried to guess from my map what sort of error I had made (and failed). I knew that if I followed running water I should come at last to men. At about three o’clock in the afternoon I made a good meal of stale bread, wine, and my companion the torrent, which had now grown to be a sort of river and made as much noise as though it were a politician. Then I thought I would sleep a little, and did so (you must excuse so many details, they are all necessary). It was five when I rose and took up my journey again. I shouldered the pack and stolidly determined that another night out in these warmer lowlands would not hurt me, when I saw something which is quite unmistakable upon the grass of those particular hills, a worn patch, and another worn patch a yard or two ahead. That meant a road, and a road means men--sooner or later.

Sure enough, within half a mile, the worn patches having become now almost continuous, I rounded a big rock and there was a group of huts.

There were perhaps two dozen of them, perhaps more. Three-quarters were built of great logs with large, very flat roofs over them held down by stones; one quarter were built of the same rough stones, and there was a tiny church of dirt colour, with two windows; and neither window had glass in it. I had found men. And I had found something more.

For as I went down the main street of this Polity (they had “Main Street” stuck up in their language at the corner of the only possible mud alley of their town) I saw that blessed sight which sings to the heart and is one of the thirteen signs of civilisation, a barber’s pole. It was not very good; it was not planed or polished; the bark was still upon the chestnut wood of it; but there was a spiral of red round it in the orthodox fashion, at the end of it a tuft of red wool, and underneath it in very faded rough letters upon a board the words, “Here it is barbered.” More was to follow. I confess that I desired to draw, for beyond the little huts the mountains, once dreadful, now, being so far above me, compelled my attention. But just as I had sat down upon a great stone to draw their outline, there appeared through the disgusting little door under the barber’s pole one of those humans whom I have mentioned so often in these lines.

He was about thirty, but he had never known care; his complexion was pink and white, his eyes were lively, his brown hair was short, curled, trimmed and oily, and some fifteen degrees from the middle of his head to the eastward went a very clear white line which was the parting of his hair. His two little moustaches curled upwards like rams’ horns; his chin was square and firm, but very full and healthy. He was looking out for customers. Oh, Humanity, my brothers, Divine Object of the Positivists, Plaything of the Theologians, Food of the God of War, Great of Destiny, Victim of Experience, Doubtful of Doom, Foreknowing of Death, Humanity enslaved, exultant, always on the march, never arriving, the only thing yet made that can laugh and can cry, Humanity, in fine, which was generously designed as matter for poets, hear! He was looking out for customers! Even to the railways of his own land it was nearly a hundred miles; no one read print; beyond Latin no foreign language perhaps was known. No vehicle on wheels had ever been into that place, even the maps were wrong, no one therein had seen a metalled road, a ship of any kind, nor perhaps one polished stone. But he was looking out for customers.

He spotted me. He used no subterfuge; he smiled and beckoned with his finger, and I went at once, as men do when the Figure appears at the Doorway of the Feast and beckons some one of the revellers into the darkness. I obeyed. He put a towel round my neck; he lathered my chin; I gazed at the ceiling, and he began to shave.

On the ceiling was an advertisement in the English tongue. I am inured by this time to the inconceivable stupidity of modern commerce, but (as the Pwca said to the Acorn) “the like of this I never saw.” There most certainly was not a man in the whole place who had ever heard of the English language, nor, I will bet a boot, had anyone been there before me who did, at any rate not since the pilgrimages stopped. Yet there was this advertisement staring me in the face, and what it told me to do was to buy a certain kind of bicycle. It gave no evidence in favour of the thing. It asserted. It said that this bicycle was the best. There was a picture of a young man riding on the bicycle, and under it in very small letters in the language of the country an address where such bicycles might be bought. The address was in a town as far away as Bristol is from Hull, and between it was range upon range of mountains, and never a road.

I watched this advertisement, and the Barber all the while talked to me of the things of this world.

He would have it that I was a stranger. He mentioned the place--it was about eighty miles away--from which I came. He said he knew it at once by my accent and my hesitation over their tongue. He asked me questions upon the politics of the place, and when I could not reply he assured me that he meant no harm; he knew that politics were not to be discussed among gentlemen. He recommended to me what barbers always recommend, and I saw that his bottles were from the ends of the earth--some French, some German, some American--at least their labels were. Then when he had shaved me he very politely began to whistle a tune.

It was a music-hall tune. I had heard it first eighteen months before in Glasgow, but it had come there from New York. It was already beginning to be stale in London--it did not seem very new to the Barber, for he whistled it with thorough knowledge, and he added trills and voluntary passages of merit and originality. I asked him how much there was to pay. He named so considerable a sum that I looked at him doubtfully, but he still smiled, and I paid him.

I asked him next how far it might be to the next village down the valley. He said three hours. I went on, and found that he had spoken the truth.

In that next village I slept, and I went forward all the next day and half the next before I came to what you would call a town. But all the while the Barber remained in my mind. There are people like this all over the world, even on the edges of eternity. How can one ever be lonely?

On High Places

All over the world every kind of man has had for the high places of his country, or for the high places that he has seen in travel (though these last have made upon him a lesser impression), a sentiment closely allied to religion and difficult to fit in with common words. It is upon such sites that sacrifice upon special occasion has been offered. It is here that you will find rare, unvisited, but very holy shrines to-day, and even in its last and most degraded form the men of our modern societies, who are atrophied in such things, spur themselves to a special emotion by distant voyages in which they can satisfy this adoration of a summit over a plain. It is not capable of analysis; but how marvellously it fills the mind. It is not difficult to understand that monk of the Dark Ages--to be accurate, of the early eleventh century--who, having doubtless seen Paris a hundred times from the height of Montmartre, could not believe that the martyrdom of St. Denis had taken place on the plain. Something primal in him demanded the high and lonely place as the scene of the foundation of the Church of Lutetia, and he would have it that St. Denis was martyred there. All the popular stories were with him, and the legend arose. Up and down Europe, wherever there are hills, you will find upon conspicuous crags or little peaks, upon the loneliest ridges, a chapel. There is one such on a hill near Remiremont; there is another at Roncesvalles; there is another on the high platform at Portofino; there is another on the very height called Holy Cross above Urgel. In its way, St. Martha’s in Surrey is of that kind. There are hundreds everywhere throughout Christendom, and they witness to this need of man for which, I say, there is no name.

I have heard of a mountain in Ireland, in the west of that country, to the summit of which upon a certain day of the year the people and the priests will go together, and Mass will be said in the open air upon that height. And so it is in several places of the Vosges and of the Pyrenees, and in one or two, I believe, of the foothills of the Alps. Everywhere men associate the exaltation of the high places with worship.