Essays of Travel Tale 14 - Alpine Diversions

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Section 14 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Chapter 11, Alpine Diversions.

There will be no lack of diversion in an alpine sanitarium. The place is half English, to be sure. The local sheet appearing in double column, text and translation, but it still remains half German. And hence we have a band which is able to play, and a company of actors able, as you will be told, to act. This last year will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to German, and though at the beginning of winter, they come with their wig boxes to each hotel in turn, long before Christmas, they will have given up the English for a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races. The German element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a mysterious item, the kirtaks, which figures heavily enough already in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting. Meantime, in the English hotels, home-played farces, tableaux vivants, and even balls in live in the evenings. A charity bazaar sheds genial consternation. Christmas and New Year are solemnized with Pantegru alien dinners, and from time to time, the young folks carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a singing quadrille. A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the quarterly to the Sunday at home. Grand tournaments are organized at chess, drots, billiards, and whisked. Once and again, wandering artists drop into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going you cannot imagine wither, and belonging to every degree in the hierarchy of musical art, from the recognized performer who announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or solitary long-haired German baritone who surprises the guests at dinnertime with songs and a collection. They are all of them good to see. They at least are moving. They bring with them the sentiment of the open road. Yesterday perhaps they were in Tyrol, and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in our mountain prison. Some of them too are welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake. Some of them may have a human voice. Some may have that magic which transforms wooden box into a songbird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mentioned with respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt with which the blind man, seeking pence accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the true virtuoso.

Even that you may perhaps enjoy, and if you do so, you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here, im schnee der Alpen. A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or a piece of music by someone who knows the way to the heart of a violin, are things that in this invariable sameness of the snows and frosty air, surprise you like an adventure. It is droll, moreover, to compare the respect with which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready contempt with which they greet the dinnertime performers. Singing which they would hear with real enthusiasm, possibly with tears from a corner of a drawing room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered by an unknown professional, and no money has been taken at the door.

Of skating, little need be said. In so snowy a climate, their rinks must be intelligently managed. Their mismanagement will lead to many days of vexation and some petty quarreling. But when all goes well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long tracks of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotchman may remember the low flat board with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a hurley. He may remember this contrivance, laden with boys, as laboriously started, it ran rattling down the bray, and was now successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot. He may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and many a grazed skin, bloody coxcomb, and neglected lesson.

The toboggan is to the hurly, what the sled is to the carriage. It is a hurly upon runners, and if for a grating road you substitute a long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist. The correct position is to sit, but the fantastic will sometimes sit hind foremost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back. A few steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the feet.