A Few Utopian Impressions

Section 1.

But now we are in a better position to describe the houses and ways
of the Utopian townships about the Lake of Lucerne, and to glance a
little more nearly at the people who pass. You figure us as
curiously settled down in Utopia, as working for a low wage at
wood-carving, until the authorities at the central registry in Paris
can solve the perplexing problem we have set them. We stay in an inn
looking out upon the lake, and go to and fro for our five hours'
work a day, with a curious effect of having been born Utopians. The
rest of our time is our own.

Our inn is one of those inns and lodging houses which have a minimum
tariff, inns which are partly regulated, and, in the default
of private enterprise, maintained and controlled by the World
State throughout the entire world. It is one of several such
establishments in Lucerne. It possesses many hundreds of practically
self-cleaning little bedrooms, equipped very much after the fashion
of the rooms we occupied in the similar but much smaller inn at
Hospenthal, differing only a little in the decoration. There is
the same dressing-room recess with its bath, the same graceful
proportion in the succinct simplicity of its furniture. This
particular inn is a quadrangle after the fashion of an Oxford
college; it is perhaps forty feet high, and with about five stories
of bedrooms above its lower apartments; the windows of the rooms
look either outward or inward to the quadrangle, and the doors give
upon artificially-lit passages with staircases passing up and down.
These passages are carpeted with a sort of cork carpet, but are
otherwise bare. The lower story is occupied by the equivalent of a
London club, kitchens and other offices, dining-room, writing-room,
smoking and assembly rooms, a barber's shop, and a library. A
colonnade with seats runs about the quadrangle, and in the middle
is a grass-plot. In the centre of this a bronze figure, a sleeping
child, reposes above a little basin and fountain, in which water
lilies are growing. The place has been designed by an architect
happily free from the hampering traditions of Greek temple building,
and of Roman and Italian palaces; it is simple, unaffected,
gracious. The material is some artificial stone with the dull
surface and something of the tint of yellow ivory; the colour is a
little irregular, and a partial confession of girders and pillars
breaks this front of tender colour with lines and mouldings of
greenish gray, that blend with the tones of the leaden gutters and
rain pipes from the light red roof. At one point only does any
explicit effort towards artistic effect appear, and that is in the
great arched gateway opposite my window. Two or three abundant
yellow roses climb