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.

CHAPTER XLIII
ENTERING GERMANY

If a preliminary glance at Switzerland suggested to me a high individuality, primarily Teutonic but secondarily national and distinctive, all I saw afterwards in Germany and Holland with which I contrasted it, confirmed my first impression. I believe that the Swiss, for all that they speak the German language and have an architecture that certainly has much in common with that of medieval Germany, are yet of markedly diverging character. They struck me in the main as colder, more taciturn, more introspective and less flamboyant than the Germans. The rank and file, in so far as I could see, were extremely sparing, saving, reserved. They reminded me more of such Austrians and Tyrolians as I have known, than of Germans. They were thinner, livelier in their actions, not so lusty nor yet so aggressive.

The new architecture which I saw between Lucerne and the German frontier reminded me of much of that which one sees in northern Ohio and Indiana and southern Michigan. There are still traces of the over-elaborate curlicue type of structure and decoration so interesting as being representative of medieval Teutonic life, but not much. The new manufacturing towns were very clean and spruce with modern factory buildings of the latest almost-all-glass type; and churches and public buildings, obviously an improvement or an attempt at improvement on older Swiss and Teutonic ideals, were everywhere apparent. Lucerne itself is divided into an old section, honored and preserved for its historic and commercial value, as being attractive to travelers; a new section, crowded with stores, tenements and apartments of the latest German and American type; and a hotel section, filled with large Anglicized and Parisianized structures, esplanades, small lounging squares and the like. I never bothered to look at Thorwaldsen’s famous lion. One look at a photograph years ago alienated me forever.

I had an interesting final talk on the morning of my departure from Lucerne with the resident manager of the hotel who was only one of many employees of a company that controlled, so he told me, hotels in Berlin, Frankfort, Paris, Rome and London. He had formerly been resident manager of a hotel in Frankfort, the one to which I was going, and said that he might be transferred any time to some other one. He was the man, as I learned, whom I had seen rowing on the lake the first morning I sat out on my balcony—the one whom the wild ducks followed.

“I saw you,” I said as I paid my bill, “out rowing on the lake the other morning. I should say that was pleasant exercise.”