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III

It was the first but not the last disappointment we suffered in Switzerland. A friend in London had congratulated us upon going to the Vaud in the grape season. “For thruppence,” he said, “they will let you go into the vineyards and eat all the grapes you can hold.” Arrived upon the ground, we learned that it was six francs fine to touch a grape in the vineyards; that every field had a watch set in it, who popped up between the vines 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.

VII

Early in October, before the vintage began, we seized the first fine day, which the Dent-du-Midi lifted its cap of mists the night before to promise, and made an early start for the tour of the lake. Mademoiselle and her cousins came with us, and we all stood together at the steamer’s prow to watch the morning sunshine break through the silvery haze that hung over Villeneuve, dimly pierced by the ghostly poplars wandering up the road beside the Rhone. As we started, the clouds drifted in ineffable beauty over the mountain-sides; one slowly dropped upon the lake, and when we had sailed through it we had come in sight of the first town on the French border, which the gendarmes of the two nations seemed to share equally between them. All these lake-side villages are wonderfully picturesque, but this first one had a fancy in chimney-tops which I think none of the rest equalled–some were twisted, some shaped like little chalets; and there were groups of old wood-colored roofs and gables which were luxuries of color. A half-built railroad was struggling along the shore; at times it seemed to stop hopelessly; then it began again, and then left off, to reappear beyond some point of hill which had not yet been bored through or blown quite away. I have never seen a railroad laboring under so many difficulties. The landscape was now grand and beautiful, like New England, now pretty and soft, like Old England, till we came to Evains-les-Bains, which looked like nothing but the French watering-place it was. It looked like a watering-place that would be very gay in the season; there were lots of pretty boats; there was a most official-looking gendarme in a cocked hat, and two jolly young priests joking together; and there were green, frivolous French fishes swimming about in the water, and apparently left behind when the rest of the brilliant world had flown.