III

Looking out on cocoa-palms and mango trees from my Puerto Rican balcony

(whatever bad things may be said about the life of a naval officer’s

wife, nobody ever accused it of monotony) it is hard to realize that

last summer our outlook was on Alpine meadows and glaciers.... How

can I catch and imprison in words that glorious Swiss air or the more

elusive spiritual atmosphere of it all? How tint the pictures with that

characteristic “local color” of which we talked so much that it became

family slang?

The air at first was a little thin for us, and we easily got out

of breath. Accustoming ourselves to it and gradually enlarging our

climbing radius, we were soon doubling and by the end of the season

nearly trebling our altitude without inconvenience. It was when we

went down to the low levels that we felt oppressed by the dense air

and fatigued by the heat. A sudden change of altitude either up or

down most of us found produced clicking of the eardrums alternating

with a wad-of-cotton-in-the-ear sensation. Antonio was like the man

who couldn’t shiver. His eardrums wouldn’t click. Our assurance to

him that there was nothing especially joyous in the sensation made no

difference. He felt that he wasn’t in the swim, and it grieved him.

There was certainly a magic in the air. It made us all healthy and

hungry and happy and filled us with the desire and eventually the

ability to walk almost unlimited distances.

Belle Soeur, the Elder Babe and I did most of the preliminary exploring

together. Shall I ever forget the beauty of the wild flowers that first

month? They were lovely all summer, but never so lovely nor so many

as during June, when the Alpine meadows in our vicinity were all blue

with forget-me-nots or yellow and purple with little Johnny-jump-ups.

I don’t remember the gentians till later, and I know the Alpenroses

blossomed in July. The Swiss have a great sentiment for this flower,

a sort of rhododendron whose clusters of pink blossoms growing on low

scraggly shrubs color miles of mountain-side at the proper season. But

they have no such loveliness as the dainty little flowerets that grow

down in the grass. The Edelweiss cult, of course, is entirely a matter

of sentiment. The furry, pulpy little plant, stalk, leaves, flowers,

all of the same grayish, greenish white, has no trace of beauty and

indeed does not look like a flower at all. Only its fondness for

growing in dangerous and inaccessible places could make it desirable.

There seems to be plenty of it, too, if you know where to go for it.

During the season the tourist routes are lined with little solemn,

silent children selling edelweiss. The supply never fails. But I may as

well confess right here that though of course we purchased a certain

amount of this article of commerce, we never found a sprig of it

growing. We could doubtless have done so by paying a native to lead us

to a proper place, but there would have been no sentiment in that. We

were always hoping to come upon it accidentally, but we never did.

We soon decided that it was a waste of time to eat our meals in a

stuffy little dining-room, looking out only at an upward slope of

grass, even though it was adorned with two chamois and a Schützenfest

prize. So we had the deal table and the chairs transferred to the more

private of the lower balconies, the one that did not communicate with

the street; and we found that the Eiger and Mettenberg and the Lower

Glacier, the whole regal glory of our outlook, added a wonderful savor

to our simple repasts,—changed the prosaic process of eating, in fact,

into a sort of Magnificat. For it is true that there are places in this

world which make even a pagan feel religious, and among all the winds

and rains and fields and rivers and beasts and stars which “praise

the Lord,” there are none which entone their hymns in a voice more

inspiringly audible than the mountains which lift their snow-crowned

heads so near to Heaven.

Is it surprising that the Swiss are a simple and an honest race? It

seems to me it would be surprising if they were anything else. It must

be almost a physical impossibility to lie in the presence of a glacier

or on the edge of a precipice. Before these hoary Titans of mountains

the complexities of our life fall away from us like dust from a shaken

garment. All our artificial distinctions and sophistications become

infinitely unimportant. Perhaps ants feel this way in the presence of

the Pyramids, or flies who light on the buttresses of Cologne Cathedral.

After all, the Simple Life is not hard to live if you get the right

setting for it.

We breakfasted, lunched, drank tea and dined on that balcony till the

snow drove us indoors at the end of September. When it rained we pulled

the table back into the shelter of the glass at the north end of the

veranda. When it was cold, we put on overcoats and golf capes. As we

lived with those mountains day by day, and grew to know all their moods

and manners, good and bad, as one knows those of one’s truly intimates,

they became to us, not scenery, but friends and kindred, not anything

external, but a part of our larger selves.

We watched the snow line creep up at the beginning of the season

and down again at the end. We watched the mountains hide themselves

in black lowering clouds, saw them lit up by flashes of lightning,

heard them roll back the thunder, saw them repent and hang out a

rainbow from the Wetterhorn precipice across the white of the Upper

Glacier and down in front of the Mettenberg, the upper peaks shake off

their bad humor and emerge from the clouds all wet and shiny, rocks

as well as snow, in the happy sunlight. Eiger is the same as ogre,

etymologically, I suppose. Anyhow, it means giant, I have somewhere

read. But when the wind blew fleecy white clouds across his gray flank

and summit, half-hiding, half-revealing, the effect was as alluring as

a chiffon veil on a beautiful woman. Then there was the delicate pink

Alpenglow to hope for about simultaneously with dessert. Sometimes

instead there were eerie green lights among firns and snowfields and

white peaks above the Lower Glacier, wherefore one of them is named

the Grindelwalder Grünhorn. And later, when the dinner things had

been cleared away and the moon came up over the mountain walls of the

valley, our world was too beautiful to be true. It was so exquisite

that it almost _hurt_. It induced silence and a sort of swelling of the

heart and an overpowering desire to be good....

[Illustration: _Grindelwald Valley and Wetterhorn_]

I did not mean to be betrayed into a rhapsody. Permit me to call

attention to the dash of “local color” on our dinner-table furnished by

the cow-bell with which we summoned Suzanne from the kitchen. I have

that cow-bell still among my most valued possessions. It and the bowl

of wild flowers in the center of the table (not to mention the view)

quite redeemed the meagerness of the Frau Secundärlehrer’s table linen

and our consciousness that there were just _exactly_ enough knives,

forks, spoons, cups, saucers, plates and glasses to go around once and

that they had to be washed between courses! If I wanted to ask anyone

to dinner, I would have to send to the village to buy one more of

everything!

I have now confided to you nearly everything I know about our

housekeeping arrangements, but I have not even mentioned our good cook,

Anna. This is not surprising, for she was the most unobtrusive person

I ever met in my life. I secured her through an Interlaken employment

agency, but she was not at all like the output of an employment agency

in our own glorious land of the free. Her voice was so low and she

was so timid and deprecatory that it was sometimes extremely difficult

to find out what she was talking about. She was so superlatively meek

that she seemed always to be inviting one to ill-treat her. I suppose

it was this characteristic which made Suzanne bully her so at first.

At Nice we had had a cook who kept Suzanne terrorized, drove her out

of the kitchen with a poker and reduced her to daily tears. The joy of

emancipation from that servitude, combined with Anna’s meekness, were

evidently too much for her. This time it was Anna who wept. She came to

me at the end of a fortnight and told me she would have to leave, that

she seemed to be able to please Madame well enough, but that it was

quite impossible to satisfy Suzanne. I told her to think better of it,

reasoned with Suzanne and appealed to her sympathies (she has the best

heart in the world), and the two soon became excellent friends.

Dear little mild, meek, faithful Anna, I do hope she is prospering!

She was a widow and supported her three little children on the

thirty-five francs a month she got from me. I put it up to forty-five,

unsolicited, from pure sympathy, but I don’t suppose she could get more

than half of that through the winter. She was bilingual,—French and

German,—so it was easy for all of us to communicate with her, and she

had pretty rosy cheeks and soft, good eyes.

I remember the time I asked her (speaking French) what they called a

bureau (_commode_) in German. “_On l’appelle comme ça_,” she murmured

flutteringly. “_Comme ça?_” I repeated. “But what do they call it?”

“_On l’appelle comme ça_,” she said again more flutteringly than

before. We bandied this back and forth until I thought we had struck

an impasse like that of the famous story where the Englishman asks the

Scotchman what there is in haggis. The Scotchman begins to enumerate,

“There’s leeks intilt,” and the Englishman, not understanding the

word, interrupts, “But what’s ‘_intilt_’?” “I’m telling ye,” says

the Scotchman, “there’s leeks intilt.” “But I want to know what’s

‘_intilt_.’” “If ye’ll only keep quiet ye’ll know what’s intilt.

There’s leeks....” And so it goes on forever. Anna and I would

probably be doing the same until now, her voice growing more frightened

and fluttering each time, had I not lost patience and exclaimed,

“_Comme_ QUOI, _mon Dieu_? Say to me in German, ‘There’s a bureau in

my room.’” By which means I discovered that she meant the same word,

_commode_, was used in German as in French.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to tell a little more about

our landlord and his family. The Herr Secundärlehrer, as might be

inferred, taught in the higher grades at the big school-house, with

so many lovely mottoes painted outside, at the edge of the village.

He was evidently proud of his learned calling, for his title was

inscribed on his cards and letterheads and invariably appended to his

signature. But that, of course, is characteristically German. He was

a good-looking man of about thirty, his face a trifle heavy in repose

and just a little weak, but lighting up charmingly when he smiled.

Like most Swiss, he carried himself rather slouchily. I don’t know how

strenuously he may have labored during school hours, but he was nearly

always resting out of them. Not so his wife. She was a teacher in the

primary school, but that was merely an incident in her life. She also

kept the store and cared for her three small children and took charge

of the family housekeeping (with the aid of the little dienst-mädchen),

did washing and sewing, and along in the late twilight would be

standing by a table outside the door of the store (ready for a customer

if one should come) ironing till the last ray of light faded. Or she

and the dienst-mädchen would take hoe and spade and weed the cabbage

patch or get the ground ready for planting turnips. While they did

that, the masculine head of the family would sit on a bench smoking.

They don’t spoil their women in Switzerland.

That reminds me of the local newspaper we subscribed to. It came three

times a week and once in a while contained an illustrated supplement,

with stories and poems, which were not exciting, but highly moral.

The news part contained, besides local items of occasional interest,

a quaint little summary of what was going on in the world, from the

standpoint of the Grindelwald valley, and delicious editorials on such

burning topics of the day as Love, Shakespeare, or the Sphere of Woman.

It was from the last that we culled the useful phrase, “Housely Herd.”

I was reading it aloud to the assembled family, translating into

English as I went, “The good God is not pleased,” I read (that editor

was always well posted as to the Almighty’s views and sentiments)—“The

good God is not pleased when women leave the _housely herd_ and force

themselves into business and professions for which He never intended

them.” Now of course I should have translated “_häuslicher Herd_,”

“domestic hearth,” but I honestly thought it was housely herd at the

moment, and the phrase so beautifully expressed the masculine attitude

of this pastoral people toward their women that it ought to have been

true if it wasn’t. We therefore put it into our daily vocabulary, and

the feminine part of the family joyously referred to itself as the

Housely Herd all the rest of the season.