He returned to Clarens unappeased, spent a few days and then, unable to hold still, strapped on his pack and set off to Geneva, and from there to Bern. A railroad car packed full of "angular Germans," "effete French," who "want to be on a spree wherever they go," "stocky, blooming Swiss," a class of schoolboys and girls with their teacher, shouting and laughing . . . When the train stopped in the middle of some fields, Tolstoy leaned out the door to breathe in the drowsing landscape: "A moist prairie, lighted by the moon, with the cries of the landrails and croaking of frogs; something I can't define draws me out there, farther, farther. And yet if I went, I should be drawn farther still. My response to the beauty of nature is not joy, but a sweet pain."26
Bern, flag-bedecked for some shooting match, was a disappointment. He was particularly ill-disposed, having dreamed again that night that he had tuberculosis. The oppressive jollity of the crowd, the shooting, the carousing, the people clambering on top of the tables and, in the zoo—oh, shame!—"one wretched Russian bear," terrified by the din- no, he could take no more of that! When the shadows began to lengthen, he followed "a fat beauty" down the street, returned to his hotel exhausted and, as soon as he fell into bed, dreamed the tuberculosis nightmare once again.
When he awoke he decided to go to Lucerne, where his two "aunt- grandmothers," his beloved babushki, were staying. He went to the best hotel in town, the Schweizerhof, which stood on the edge of the Lake of Lucerne and was patronized almost exclusively by the English. In his room, he opened the window and was transfixed: "I was literally submerged by the beauty of that water, and deeply moved," he wrote to Botkin. "I suddenly needed to hold someone in my arms, someone I love deeply, to hug her with all my strength, crush her against my breast and share my great joy with her . . . The lake is greenish and mauve, striped with moirl bands, dotted with rowboats. . . "27
The magnificent view was unfortunately spoiled by the Englishwomen, "shiny and scrubbed, with long red faces and Swiss straw hats" and the Englishmen, "wearing cardigans and carrying traveling-rugs over their arms." Looking at forty or fifty of them seated at two long tables in the dining room, Tolstoy felt as though he were watching a collection of automatons, masticating, drinking and thinking nothing. "As the eight courses comc and go, each applies himself to eating more fastidiously than the others, and all are completely dead," he wrote, "literally dead. ... I have listened to more than five hundred conversations between the English, I have talked to them myself, but if I have ever heard a single living word from one of them . . . may I be struck down by lightning."28
One evening he met a Tyrolian in the street, who was singing and accompanying himself on his guitar with such skill and gaiety that Tolstoy invited him to play under the windows of the hotel. The Tyrolian consented. At the first notes, a crowd gathered around him: cooks in white coats and tall hats, footmen in livery, doormen and chambermaids. Ladies "in long, wide gowns" and gentlemen "in detachable white collars" appeared on the Schweizerhof balconies. After three songs the performer, a squat, deformed little man, held out his C3p, but nobody threw any coins into it. He mournfully mumbled, "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," and turned away, dragging his feet, while the flunkeys' snickers rippled at his back. "It hurt mc," wrote Tolstoy. "I felt bitterness and shame for the poor fellow, for the crowd, for myself. As though they had been laughing at me, as though I, too, were guilty. . . ."29 He raced after the singer, caught up with him and invited him to drink with him in the hotel. Scandal! 'Ilie patrons cringed in horror from the unwashed mountebank that so-called Russian count was bringing into the lobby. A waiter with a poisonous smile preceded the two men, not into the main lounge, but into a room furnished with wooden tables and benches, which was reserved for the personnel. Women were washing dishes in a corner.
"Do you want vin ordinaire?" asked a maitre-d'h6tel.
"Moet champagne," snapped Tolstoy.
The bottle arrived. At first the Tyrolian thought his rich stranger was tTying to get him drunk as a joke. Then, understanding that his gesture of friendship was sincere, he began to tell the story of his life. The servants gathered around. A doorman sat down unceremoniously beside the narrator and stared at him, sneering. Tolstoy turned white with indignation.
"What are you smirking at?" he cried. "Stand upl"
The doorman got up, grumbling. But Tolstoy could no longer contain himself.
"Why have you put us here, I and this gentleman, instead of in the other room? Well? Doesn't everyone who pays have the same rights? Your dirty republic!"
"The other room is closed," answered the doorman.
"That's not true!"
Intimidated by his tone of authority, which only a true master could command, a footman led the count and his singer into the main hall, which was in fact open. There, an Englishman and his wife were eating mutton chops. The man murmured "Shocking!" and the woman stared, pinched her lips together and left the room, "flouncing her silken gown." Soon afterward the embarrassed singer also left. Tolstoy ostentatiously shook hands with him outside the door. 'Ilie doormen, valets and patrons were all staring rudely at him. They needed a little lesson in Russian charity. To cool himself off, Tolstoy went for a walk, alone, through the streets, with clenched fists and feverish brow. The cool, star-studded night made him forget human pettiness. He raised his eyes and let himself be swept away in a mystical ecstasy. Beauty always prompted him to question himself and God. "A marvelous night," he wrote in his diary. "What is it I so ardently desire? I do not know. At any rate, it is not the blessings of this world. How can one fail to believe in the immortality of the soul, feeling such incommensurable grandeur in one's own? ... It is dark, holes in the sky, light. I could die! My God! My God! What am I? Where am I going? Where am I?"30
The incident of the Tyrolian singer had impressed him so unfavorably that he began to write a story about it three days later, in the
form of a travel letter: Lucerne. "Which is more civilized, which more of a barbarian: the lord who stamped away from the table in a huff at the sight of the singer's threadbare suit, who refused to pay him for his work with the millionth part of his fortune, and who now, after eating a hearty dinner, is sitting in a handsome, well-lighted room, calmly passing judgment on events in China and justifying the murders committed there; or the little singer who has been out on the road for twenty years, with two sous in his pocket, risking prison, doing no harm to anyone, roaming over hill and dale, cheering people with his songs, and has now gone off, humiliated, almost driven away, tired, hungry and ashamed, to sleep in some nameless place on a heap of rotting straw?"
After what had happened at the Schwcizerhof, Tolstoy could no longer stand the sight of his over-comfortable room, the dining hall full of the gleam of "real white lace, false white collars, real or false white teeth, white faces and white hands," the feigned courtesy of the staff and the haughty manners of the English, whom he would cheerfully have cut to bits "in the Sevastopol trenches." He moved into a modest family pension, where he rented two attic rooms above the caretaker's cottage. Outside his windows there were apple trees, high grass, the lake and the mountains. And, as an added attraction, the landlady's daughter, aged seventeen, in a white blouse, who bounded hither and yon "like a young cat."31 Temporarily reconciled with Switzerland, he took a few short trips—to Lake Zug, Sarnen ("Here one re-enters the region of bald women with goiters and blond, self- satisfied cretins"), Stans ('Two young ladies from Stans made advances to me, one of them with a magnificent pair of eyes; I had a wicked thought, for which I immediately punished myself by a fit of bashfulncss!"), Ricd ("A feeble-minded woman with blond hair asked mc if I had ever seen a woman like her and began to yodel and prance about"), the Rigi ("Depressing, senseless panorama"). He observed, upon his return, that the landlady's daughter was still prowling around him, but she was "too regal" to be used for impure purposes; he went to see his "aunt-grandmothers," was bored by them for a change, and made plans for a long tour, the high points of which would be the cities of the Rhine, The Hague, London, Paris, Rome, Naples, Constantinople and Odessa.