Part 5

Here the little English artist who had been so sociable all the way from Villeneuve was reinforced by other Englishmen, whom we found on the much more crowded boat to which we had to change. Our company began to diversify itself: there were French and German parties as well as English. We changed boats four times in the tour of the lake, and each boat brought us a fresh accession of passengers. By-and-by there came aboard a brave Italian, with birds in cages and gold-fish in vases, with a gay Southern face, a coral neck button, a brown mustache and imperial, and a black-tasselled red fez that consoled. He was the vividest bit of color in our composition, though we were not wanting in life without him. There began to be some Americans besides ourselves, and a pretty girl of our nation, who occupied a public station at the boat's prow, seemed to know that she was pretty, but probably did not. She will recognize herself in this sketch; but who was that other pretty maiden, with brown eyes wide apart, and upper lip projecting a little, as if pulled out by the piquant-nose? I must have taken her portrait so carefully because I thought she would work somewhere into fiction; but the reader is welcome to her as she is. He may also have the spirituelle English girl who ordered tea, and added, "I want some kaetzchens with my tea." "Kaetzchens! Kaetzchen is a little cat." "Yes; it's a word of my own invention." These are the brilliant little passages of foreign travel that make a voyage to Europe worth while. I add to this international gallery the German girl in blue calico, who had so strong a belief that she was elegantly dressed that she came up on deck with her coffee, and drank it where we might all admire her. I intersperse also the comment that it is the Germans who seem to prevail now in any given international group, and that they have the air of coming forward to take the front seats as by right; while the English, once so confident of their superiority, seem to yield the places to them. But I dare say this is all my fancy.

I am sure, however, of the ever-varying grandeur and beauty of the Alps all round us. Those of the Savoyard shore had a softer loveliness than the Swiss, as if the South had touched and mellowed them, as it had the light-colored trousers which in Geneva recalled the joyous pantaloons of Italy. These mountains moulded themselves one upon another, and deepened behind their transparent shadows with a thousand dimmer and tenderer dyes in the autumnal foliage. From time to time a village, gray-walled, brown-roofed, broke the low helving shore of the lake, where the poplars rose and the vineyards spread with a monotony that somehow pleased; and at Nyon a twelfth-century castle, as noble as Chillon, offered the delight of its changing lines as the boat approached and passed.

At Geneva we had barely time to think Rousseau, to think Calvin, to think Voltaire, to drive swiftly through the town and back again to the boat, fuming and fretting to be off. There is an old town, gravely picturesque and austerely fine in its fine old burgherly, Calvinistic, exclusive way; and outside the walls there is a new town, very clean, very cold, very quiet, with horse-cars like Boston, and a new Renaissance theatre like Paris. The impression remains that Geneva is outwardly a small moralized Bostonian Paris; and I suppose the reader knows that it has had its political rings and bosses like New York. It also has an exact reproduction of the Veronese tombs of the Scaligeri, which the eccentric Duke of Brunswick, who died in Geneva, willed it the money to build; like most fac-similes, they are easily distinguishable from the original, and you must still go to Verona to see the tombs of the Scaligeri. But they have the real Mont Blanc at Geneva, bleak to the eye with enduring snow, and the Blue Rhone, rushing smooth and swift under the overhanging balconies of quaint old houses. With its neat quays, azure lake, symmetrical hotel fronts, and white steamboats, Geneva was like an admirable illustration printed in colors, for a holiday number, to imitate a water-color sketch.

When we started we were detained a moment by conjugal affection. A lady, who had already kept the boat waiting, stopped midway up the gang-plank to kiss her husband in parting, in spite of the captain's loud cries of "Allez! Allez!" and the angry derision of the passengers. We were in fact all furious, and it was as much as a mule team with bells, drawing a wagon loaded with bags of flower, and a tree growing out of a tower beside the lake, could do to put me in good-humor. Yet I was not really in a hurry to have the voyage end; I was enjoying every moment of it, only, when your boat starts, you do not want to stop for a woman to kiss her husband.

Again we were passing the wild Savoyard shore, where the yellow tops of the poplars jutted up like spires from the road-sides, and on the hill-sides tracts of dark evergreens blotted their space out of the vaster expanses of autumn foliage; back of all rose gray cliffs and crags. Now and then we met a boat of our line; otherwise the blue stretch of the water was broken only by the lateen-sails of the black-hulked lake craft. At that season the delicate flame of the Virginia-creeper was a prominent tint on the walls all round the lake.

Lausanne, which made us think Gibbon, of course, was a stately stretch of architecture along her terraces; Vevay showed us her quaint market square, and her old church on its heights; then came Montreux with its many-hotelled slopes and levels, and chalets peeping from the brows of the mountains that crowd it upon the lake. All these places keep multitudes of swans, whose snow reddened in the sunset that stained the water more and more darkly crimson till we landed at Villeneuve.

VIII

When December came, and the vintage and elections were over, and the winter had come down into the valley to stay, Italy called to us more and more appealingly.

Yet it was not so easy to pull up and go. I liked the row-boat on the lake, though it was getting too cold and rough for that; I liked the way the railway guards called out "Verney-Montreux!" and "Territey-Chillon!" as they ran alongside the carriages at these stations; I liked the pastel portraits of mademoiselle's grandmothers on the gray walls of our pretty chamber that overlooked the lake, and overheard the lightest lisp of that sometimes bellowing body of water; I liked the notion of the wild-ducks among the reeds by the Rhone, though I had no wish to kill them; I liked our little corner fireplace, where I covered a log of the grand bois every night in the coals, and found it a perfect line of bristling embers in the morning; I liked Poppi and the three generations of Boulettes; and, yes, I liked mademoiselle and all her boarders; and I hated to leave these friends. Mademoiselle made a grand Thanksgiving supper in honor of the American nation, for which we did our best to figure both at the table, where smoked a turkey driven over the Alps from his Italian home for that fete (there are no Swiss turkeys), and in the dance, for which he had wellnigh disabled us. Poppi was in uncommon tune that night, and the voice of this pensive rheumatic lent a unique interest to every change of the Virginia reel.

But these pleasures had to end; it grew colder and colder; we had long since consumed all the old grape-roots which constituted our petit bois, and we were ravaging our way through an expensive pile of grand bois without much effect upon the climate. One morning the most enterprising spirit of our party kindled such a mighty blaze on our chamber hearth that she set the chimney on fire, thus threatening the Swiss republic with the loss of the insurance, and involving mademoiselle in I know not what penalties for having a chimney that could be set on fire. By the blessing of Heaven, the vigor of mademoiselle, and the activity of Louis and Alexis the farmer, the flames were subdued and the house saved. Mademoiselle forgave us, but we knew it was time to go, and the next Sunday we were in Florence.

THE END