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.”