| Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks |
| In Vallombrosa — |
Old Jacobeans, ghostly, innumerable, whose desks like tombstones would bear for a little while the perishable ink of their own idle epitaphs.
Lucerne was airless; the avenue of pollarded limes sheltered a depressed bulk of dusty tourists; the atmosphere was impregnated with bourgeois exclamations; the very surface of the lake was swarming with humanity, noisy with the click of rowlocks, and with the gutturals that seemed to praise fitly such a theatrical setting.
Mrs. Fane wondered why they had come to Switzerland, but still she asked Michael and Stella whether they would like to venture higher. Michael, perceiving the hordes of Teutonic nomads who were sweeping up into the heart of the mountains, thought that Switzerland in August would be impossible whatever lonely height they gained. They moved to Geneva, whose silverpointed beauty for a while deceived them, but soon both he and Stella became restless and irritable.
“Switzerland is like sitting in a train and travelling through glorious country,” said Michael. “It’s all right for a journey, but it becomes frightfully tiring. And, mother, I do hate the sensation that all these people round are feeling compelled to enjoy themselves. It’s like a hearty choral service.”
“It’s like an oratorio,” said Stella. “I can’t play a note here. The very existence of these mobs is deafening.”
“Well, I don’t mind where we go,” said Mrs. Fane. “I’m not enjoying these peculiar tourists myself. Shall we go to the Italian lakes? I used to like them very much. I’ve spent many happy days there.”
“I’d rather go to France,” said Michael. “Only don’t let’s go far. Let’s go to Lyons and find out some small place in the country. I was talking to a decent chap—not a tourist—who said there were delightful little red-roofed towns in the Lyonnais.”
So they left Switzerland and went to Lyons where, sitting under the shade of trees by the tumbling blue Rhône, they settled with a polite agent to take a small house near Châtillon.
Hither a piano followed them, and here for seven weeks they lived, each one lost in sun-dyed dreams.