Serlig Dörfli
[CHAPTER XXIV]
ON THE SHORES OF LAKE LUCERNE
MY classmate, Ned Allen, was always a dilettante; if he had been obliged to work, he might have accomplished great things; but, though he may have had ambitions, the days of his young manhood slipped away while he travelled all over the world. Then he became disgusted with what he considered unjust taxation, and, converting all his property into income-bearing bonds, so that he had no care or worry, he came to Europe and lived part of the time in his villa on the Lake of the Four Cantons and part of the time in a lovely palazzo near Palermo in Sicily.
He had everything to make him happy, and, yet, like most of the rich men whom I have ever known, he was not happy. Happiness comes only in forgetting one’s self, and that he had no time to do, because he had all the time there was.
It did him good, I think, to be obliged to exert himself a little to show me the sights. Like myself, he was very fond of music, and he followed the example of a good many wealthy men in Switzerland—he had a string quartet play every Sunday afternoon and also two or three evenings a week. One day he took me to the house of a friend of his who supported a large orchestra and gave concerts to a few invited guests or to himself alone according to circumstances. He had been to Paderewski’s villa on the Lake of Constance and to the Count von Hesse-Wartegg’s, where his wife, Madame Minnie Hauk, after retiring from the stage, has lived for a number of years. As I knew them all, I wished that I might pay my respects, but I had no chance—there were so many other things to do.
One of my first objects of pilgrimage at Lucerne was the Peace and War Museum, founded by that remarkable Austrian Jew, Von Bloch. My classmate was inclined to scoff at the notion of Universal Peace. I found he had not read or even thought very deeply on the subject, and I really think that my enthusiasm communicated itself somewhat to him. He had never thought, before I suggested it to him, that the small stature of the present-day French and Italians was probably due to the fact that the best and strongest of the youth of those two nations were killed off in the Napoleonic and subsequent wars. War does not ensure the survival of the fittest. The old and weaklings are left to perpetuate the race.
One would hardly believe it, but Ned had never been to the top of Pilatus; I found he was not especially interested in scenery, he who lived in the midst of the most splendid scenery in Switzerland. But he went with me to Pilatus. As we started I quoted the rhymed proverb:—
“Hat der Pilatus einen Hut