LUCERNE
I entered Switzerland at Chiasso, a little way from Lake Como in
Italy, and left it at Basle near the German frontier, and all I saw
was mountains--mountains--mountains--some capped with snow and some
without, tall, sharp, craggy peaks, and rough, sharp declivities, with
here and there a patch of grass, here and there a deep valley, here
and there a lonely, wide-roofed, slab-built house with those immense
projecting eaves first made familiar to me by the shabby adaptations
which constitute our “L” stations in New York. The landscape hardens
perceptibly a little way out of Milan. High slopes and deep lakes
appear. At Chiasso, the first stop in Switzerland, I handed the guard
a half-dozen letters I had written in Milan and stamped with Italian
stamps. I did not know until I did this that we were out of Italy, had
already changed guards and that a new crew--Swiss--was in charge of
the train. “Monsieur,” he said, tapping the stamp significantly, “vous
êtes en Suisse.” I do not understand French, but I did comprehend that,
and I perceived also that I was talking to a Swiss. All the people
on the platform were “Schweitzers” as the Germans call them, fair,
chunky, stolid-looking souls without a touch of that fire or darkness
so generally present a few miles south. Why should a distance of ten
miles, five miles, make such an astonishing change? It is one of the
strangest experiences of travel, to cross an imaginary boundary-line
and find everything different; people, dress, architecture, landscape,
often soil and foliage. It proves that countries are not merely soil
and climatic conditions but that there is something more--a race stock
which is not absolutely a product of the soil and which refuses to
yield entirely to climate. Races like animals have an origin above
soil and do hold their own in spite of changed or changing climatic
conditions. Cross any boundary you like from one country into another
and judge for yourself.
Now that I was started, really out of Italy, I was ready for any
change, the more marked the better; and here was one. Switzerland is
about as much like Italy as a rock is like a bouquet of flowers--a
sharp-edged rock and a rich colorful, odorous bouquet. And yet, in
spite of all its chill, bare bleakness, its high ridges and small
shut-in valleys, it has beauty, cold but real. As the train sped on
toward Lucerne I kept my face glued to the window-pane on one side or
the other, standing most of the time in the corridor, and was rewarded
constantly by a magnificent panorama. Such bleak, sharp crags as stood
always above us, such cold, white fields of snow! Sometimes the latter
stretched down toward us in long deep cañons or ravines until they
disappeared as thin white streaks at the bottom. I saw no birds of any
kind flying; no gardens nor patches of flowers anywhere, only brown or
gray or white châlets with heavy overhanging eaves and an occasional
stocky, pale-skinned citizen in a short jacket, knee trousers, small
round hat and flamboyant waistcoat. I wondered whether I was really
seeing the national costume. I was. I saw more of it at Lucerne,
that most hotelly of cities, and in the mountains and valleys of the
territory beyond it--toward Basle. Somebody once said of God that he
might love all the creatures he had made but he certainly couldn’t
admire them. I will reverse that for Switzerland. I might always
admire its wonders but I could never love them.
And yet after hours and hours of just this twisting and turning
up slope and down valley, when I reached Lucerne I thought it was
utterly beautiful. Long before we reached there the lake appeared
and we followed its shores, whirling in and out of tunnels and along
splendid slopes. Arrived at Lucerne, I came out into the piazza
which spreads before the station to the very edge of the lake. I was
instantly glad that I had included Lucerne in my itinerary. It was
evening and the lamps in the village (it is not a large city) were
already sparkling and the water of the lake not only reflected the
glow of the lamps along its shores but the pale pinks and mauves
over the tops of the peaks in the west. There was snow on the upper
stretches of the mountains but down here in this narrow valley filled
with quaint houses, hotels, churches and modern apartments, all was
balmy and pleasant,--not at all cold. My belongings were bundled into
the attendant ’bus and I was rattled off to one of the best hotels
I saw abroad--the National--of the Ritz-Carlton system; very quiet,
very ornate, and with all those conveniences and comforts which the
American has learned to expect, plus a European standard of service and
politeness of which we can as yet know nothing in America.
I am afraid I have an insatiable appetite for natural beauty. I am
entertained by character, thrilled by art, but of all the enlarging
spiritual influences the natural panorama is to me the most important.
This night, after my first day of rambling about Lucerne, I sat out
on my hotel balcony, overlooking the lake and studied the dim moonlit
outlines of the peaks crowding about it, the star-shine reflected in
the water, the still distances and the moon sinking over the peaks
to the west of the quaint city. Art has no method of including, or
suggesting even, these vast sidereal spaces. The wonder of the night
and moonlight is scarcely for the painter’s brush. It belongs in verse,
the drama, great literary pageants such as those of Balzac, Turgenieff
and Flaubert, but not in pictures. The human eye can see so much and
the human heart responds so swiftly that it is only by suggestion that
anything is achieved in art. Art cannot give you the night in all its
fullness save as, by suggestion, it brings back the wonder of the
reality which you have already felt and seen.
I think perhaps of the two impressions that I retained most distinctly
of Lucerne, that of the evening and of the morning, the morning was
best. I came out on my balcony at dawn, the first morning after I
arrived, when the lake was lying below me in glassy, olive-black
stillness. Up the bank to my left were trees, granite slopes, a small
châlet built out over the water, its spiles standing in the still lake
in a soothing, restful way. To my right, at the foot of the lake, lay
Lucerne, its quaint outlines but vaguely apparent in the shadow. Across
the lake only a little space were small boats, a dock, a church, and
beyond them, in a circle, gray-black peaks. At their extreme summits
along a rough, horny skyline were the suggestions of an electric dawn,
a pale, steely gray brightening from dark into light.
It was not cold at Lucerne, though it was as yet only early March. The
air was as soft and balmy as at Venice. As I sat there the mountain
skyline brightened first to a faint pink, the snow on the ridges took
on a lavender and bluish hue as at evening, the green of the lower
slopes became softly visible and the water began to reflect the light
of the sky, the shadow of the banks, the little boats, and even some
wild ducks flying over its surface,--ducks coming from what bleak,
drear spaces I could only guess. Presently I saw a man come out from
a hotel, enter a small canoe and paddle away in the direction of the
upper lake. No other living thing appeared until the sky had changed
from pink to blue, the water to a rich silvery gray, the green to a
translucent green and the rays of the sun came finally glistering over
the peaks. Then the rough notches and gaps of the mountains--gray where
blown clear of snow, or white where filled with it--took on a sharp,
brilliant roughness. You could see the cold peaks outlined clearly
in the water, and the little steeples of the churches. My wild ducks
were still paddling briskly about. I noticed that a particular pair
found great difficulty in finding the exact spot to suit them. With a
restless quank, quank, quank, they would rise and fly a space only to
light with a soft splatter and quack cheerfully. When they saw the lone
rower returning they followed him, coming up close to the hotel dock
and paddling smartly in his vicinity. I watched him fasten his boat and
contemplate the ducks. After he had gone away I wondered if they were
pets of his. Then the day having clearly come, I went inside.
By ten o’clock all Lucerne seemed to have come out to promenade
along the smooth walks that border the shore. Pretty church-bells in
severe, conical towers began to ring and students in small, dark,
tambourine-like hats, jackets, tight trousers, and carrying little
canes about the size of batons, began to walk smartly up and down.
There were a few travelers present, wintering here, no doubt,--English
and Americans presenting their usual severe, intellectual, inquiring
and self-protective dispositions. They stood out in sharp contrast to
the native Swiss,--a fair, stolid, quiescent people. The town itself
by day I found to be as clean, spruce and orderly as a private pine
forest. I never saw a more spick and span place, not even in ge-washed
and ge-brushed Germany.
This being Sunday and wonderfully fair, I decided to take the trip
up the lake on one of the two small steamers that I saw anchored at
apparently rival docks. They may have served boats plying on different
arms of the lake. On this trip I fell in with a certain “Major Y.
Myata, M.D., Surgeon, Imperial Japanese Army” as his card read,
who, I soon learned, was doing Europe much as I was, only entirely
alone. I first saw him as he bought his ticket on board the steamer
at Lucerne,--a small, quiet, wiry man, very keen and observant, who
addressed the purser in English first and later in German. He came on
the top deck into the first-class section, a fair-sized camera slung
over his shoulder, a notebook sticking out of the pocket, and finding a
seat, very carefully dusted his small feet with the extreme corners of
his military overcoat, and rubbed his thin, horse-hairy mustache with a
small, claw-like hand. He looked about in a quiet way and began after
the boat started to take pictures and make copious notes. He had small,
piercing, bird-like eyes and a strangely unconscious-seeming manner
which was in reality anything but unconscious. We fell to talking of
Switzerland, Germany and Italy, where he had been, and by degrees I
learned the route of his trip, or what he chose to tell me of it, and
his opinions concerning Europe and the Far East--as much as he chose to
communicate.
It appeared that before coming to Europe this time he had made but
one other trip out of Japan, namely to California, where he had spent
a year. He had left Japan in October, sailed direct for London and
reached it in November; had already been through Holland and Belgium,
France, Germany, Italy, and was bound for Munich and Hungary and,
not strange to relate, Russia. He was coming to America--New York
particularly, and was eager to know of a good hotel. I mentioned
twenty. He spoke English, French, Italian and German, although he
had never before been anywhere except to California. I knew he spoke
German, for I talked to him in that language and after finding that
he could speak it better than I could I took his word for the rest.
We lunched together. I mentioned the little I knew of the Japanese in
New York. He brightened considerably. We compared travel notes--Italy,
France, England. “I do not like the Italians,” he observed in one
place. “I think they are tricky. They do not tell the truth.”
“They probably held up your baggage at the station.”
“They did more than that to me. I could never depend on them.”
“How do you like the Germans?” I asked him.
“A very wonderful people. Very civil I thought. The Rhine is beautiful.”
I had to smile when I learned that he had done the night cafés of
Paris, had contrasted English and French farce as represented by
the Empire and the Folies-Bergère, and knew all about the Post
Impressionists and the Futurists or Cubists. The latter he did not
understand. “It is possible,” he said in his strange, sing-songy way,
“that they represent some motives of constructive subconscious mind
with which we are not any of us familiar yet. Electricity came to man
in some such way as that. I do not know. I do not pretend to understand
it.”
At the extreme upper end of Lucerne where the boat stopped, we decided
to get out and take the train back. He was curious to see the shrine or
tomb of William Tell which was listed as being near here, but when he
learned that it was two or three miles and that we would miss a fast
train, he was willing to give it up. With a strange, old-world wisdom
he commented on the political organization of Switzerland, saying that
it struck him as strange that these Alpine fastnesses should ever have
achieved an identity of their own. “They have always been separate
communities until quite recently,” he said, “and I think that perhaps
only railroads, tunnels, telegraph and telephone have made their
complete union satisfactory now.”
I marveled at the wisdom of this Oriental as I do at so many of them.
They are so intensely matter-of-fact and practical. Their industry is
uncanny. This man talked to me of Alpine botany as contrasted with that
of some of the mountain regions of Japan and then we talked of Lincoln,
Grant, Washington, Li Hung Chang and Richard Wagner. He suggested quite
simply that it was probable that Germany’s only artistic outlet was
music.
I was glad to have the company of Major Myata for dinner that same
evening, for nothing could have been duller than the very charming
Louis Quinze dining-room filled with utterly conventional American and
English visitors. Small, soldierly, erect, he made quite an impression
as he entered with me. The Major had been in two battles of the
Russian-Japanese War and had witnessed an attack somewhere one night
after midnight in a snowstorm. Here at table as he proceeded to explain
in his quiet way, by means of knives and forks, the arrangement of the
lines and means of caring for the wounded, I saw the various diners
studying him. He was a very forceful-looking person. Very. He told me
of the manner in which the sanitary and surgical equipment and control
of the Japanese army had been completely revolutionized since the date
of the Japanese-Russian War and that now all the present equipment was
new. “The great things in our army to-day,” he observed very quietly
at one point, “are artillery and sanitation.” A fine combination! He
left me at midnight, after several hours in various cafés.