The Younger Babe made friends with an Italian workman engaged in the
construction of a châlet half a mile up the road and was presented by
him with a piece of wall paper about a foot square. He bore it home
in triumph and asked me to paste it up on the wall above his bed. The
comfort he took in that reminder of what he regarded as civilization
was really touching. He said he didn’t mind the house so much now that
it had _some_ wall paper in it.
Frater said afterwards that the Châlet Edelweiss must have been
conducted as a young ladies’ boarding school previous to the arrival
of himself and Antonio. This is a mistake on his part, but it is
undoubtedly true that we led a much more quiet and decorous life before
that invasion of Goth and Vandal. I am sure that the Secundärlehrer
and his Frau held a much higher opinion of us at that time than they
did later. They had never had the advantage of living in an American
college town and were not educated up to “rough-house” nor to the
unholy noises which were liable to issue from the Châlet at any hour of
the day or night and which led Belle Soeur to christen it our private
lunatic asylum.
It is rather curious, as we were none of us haters of our kind, that in
the four months we spent in Grindelwald we never exchanged a word with
any of the local English colony, which is fairly numerous. Doubtless
most of the people who thronged the English chapel of a Sunday were
transients, but a good many of the hotel people were there for the
season, and there were quite a number of English families keeping
house like ourselves in châlets, though mostly on the other side of
the village. Somehow we seemed to be sufficient unto ourselves. Our
mountains gave us all the outside company we wanted, and if ever we did
pine for human intercourse there was much more “local color” in talking
with Swiss peasants.
Our wildest form of diversion before the transatlantic contingent
joined us was a picnic. Mostly it was combined with a tramp too long
to be taken comfortably in half a day, but the Fourth of July picnic
was celebrated very near the house so that the Younger Babe and Suzanne
could accompany us. We chose a charming level green spot beside a
babbling Alpine brook which the small boys nearly froze their feet
wading. It was shaded by a fine big tree under whose branches we got
an altogether glorious view of the Wetterhorn and Upper Glacier. The
Fourth-of-Julyness was represented by some diminutive American flags
we had purchased at a photograph shop in the village and six of those
engines of war euphoniously yclept “nigger-chasers,” which we bought
(the entire stock) at the druggist’s. This was the nearest we could
come to fire-crackers. One was fired when we got up in the morning, a
second after breakfast, one was reserved for sunset, one went off at
high noon, and the remaining two immediately preceded and followed the
ceremony of lunch.
Among our more distant picnics there stand out in my memory the climb
to the Grosse Scheidegg and our two trips to the Männlichen.
The first Männlichen trip was spoiled by the weather. It is often
impossible to tell on a cloudy morning whether the day will prove
good or bad. This time we guessed wrong. Not having as yet acquired
the climbing habit, we took the train to the Kleine Scheidegg and the
footpath from there to the Männlichen. Instead of the early clouds
blowing away, as we thought they would, they closed in densely, so that
we found ourselves shivering in a thick fog, unable to see twenty feet
before our noses. Still hoping the weather might change for the better,
we made our way along the path, which was fortunately a perfectly plain
and unmistakable one. The path in places ran between snow banks as
high as our heads, and except these banks we saw no scenery. We sat
down on a damp stone and ate our lunch, which was curiously cheerless.
The weather grew worse and worse. Finally, just as it was beginning to
rain hard, there loomed out of the mist ahead of us the Männlichen Inn,
where we were more than glad to find shelter, hot milk and tea, and a
fire.
The rain came down in torrents for several hours. By the time it let
up, it was too late to catch the afternoon train at Scheidegg. Of
course the sensible thing to do would have been to make up our minds to
spend the night at the Männlichen Inn. But we had made no provisions
for staying away over-night and knew that Suzanne and Anna would be
very much alarmed at our failure to return.
Besides, the prospect of passing the rest of the afternoon and evening
at that viewless inn, with nothing to read and nothing to do, was
nowise alluring. So when it stopped raining and the clouds rolled down
the mountain-side an eighth of a mile or so, we announced our intention
of taking the footpath down to Grindelwald.
The waitress who pointed out the beginning of it to us plainly thought
we were crazy, and perhaps we were. For two women and a small boy to
start out at four o’clock in the afternoon to walk seven miles down a
rain-soaked mountain-side, hunting for a path which for the first few
miles would be a rude cow track, no different from countless others
which would cross it or branch off from it, knowing that if they got
lost or night overtook them they would find no human habitation to
shelter them—well, it didn’t sound sensible! But the gods who protect
the imprudent were with us.
We started down light-heartedly enough, glad to be on the move again,
scrambling over rocks, swinging across the grassy places as fast as the
clinging mud would let us, counteracting the chill of advancing evening
by the strenuousness of the exercise we were taking. Once we had the
good luck to meet a herd of cows from whose guardians we got a new set
of directions. And again, just at a place where we were badly puzzled,
we saw a lad toiling upward with an empty milk can on his back, whom we
hailed and questioned.
Of course this sort of questioning is not an exact science. It must be
remembered that our German was far from fluent, and that those people
talked a local dialect very considerably different from the language
of Goethe and Schiller, that they belonged to the dull, inarticulate
section of the population and were not over-fond of foreigners.
Moreover, everything in Switzerland has a name of its own, and the
topographical directions of a peasant bristle always with unfamiliar
proper names, which one strains one’s ear to catch, wildly guessing
whether they refer to a forest, a pasturage or a group of châlets. All
distances are given in time, which is vague at best, and may differ
radically as between a Swiss cowherd in training and two American women
with a small boy.
An unusually clear-spoken and intelligent native might discourse as
follows: “In a quarter of an hour you will be at Hinter der Egg. Do not
turn off to the right at Eggboden. Cross the Gundelgraben and continue
down for an hour through the Raufte. When you reach Geyscheur you will
see two paths. You may take either. Both lead to Grund. You are two and
a half hours from Grindelwald.” Usually, it is much more involved. And
remember that you are hearing everyone of those blessed names for the
first time. Two turn out to be cheese huts, one a stream, one a meadow,
one a group of three or four dwelling-houses, and the last the bottom
of the slope where the Lütschine runs through. But you don’t learn that
from the man who is giving you directions.
I never knew such a long seven miles. It seemed as if Grindelwald
receded as fast as we advanced. We tore along the last part of the
time, each taking a hand of the Babe, almost running, to keep the night
from catching us on the mountain-side. It was nearly dark before we got
home, but as the last part of our way was over the familiar highroad,
it did not matter. The Châlet Edelweiss looked like a terrestrial
paradise, and never was there a sensation more luxurious than shedding
our wet, muddy clothes in favor of peignoirs and putting our tired feet
into bedroom slippers, unless it was furnished by the good hot dinner
that followed.
The other Männlichen trip was vastly different. The day was clear as
a bell—radiant, perfect. We walked down to the Grund station and took
the train as far as Alpiglen only, about half way to the Scheidegg.
You see we were learning to climb by then. We took a lovely (though
sometimes unfindable) cross-slanting path from there to the Männlichen,
and all the way kept opening up more and more glorious vistas.
Starting with a backward look into the Grindelwald Valley and at our
own Wetterhorn and Eiger, we uncovered the Mönch first and then the
Jungfrau, with her beautiful shining sub-peaks, the Silberhorn and
Schneehorn, and finally, when we got to the top of the ridge, there
was that surprising hole in the ground, the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with
all its waterfalls tumbling down the rock walls of the opposite side.
Beyond were more snow mountains and to the westward Lake Thun and
Lake Brienz, Interlaken and more snow mountains. I do truly think the
view from the Männlichen is the finest in Switzerland, if not in the
whole world. The view from the Gornergrat is a wilderness of glaciers,
utterly magnificent, but lacking in variety. The view from the Rigi
is a panorama of distant objects and lacks the stupendous foreground
supplied for the Männlichen by that trio of colossi, Eiger, Mönch and
Jungfrau.
Our sandwiches and cake were a feast of the gods that day, with heaven
and earth spread out above, below and all around us—green in the
valley, white on the mountains, blue overhead. We came home by the path
we had followed so sloppily and doubtfully that other day and found it
perfectly plain, much shorter and wonderfully transformed as to looks.
I remember that we carried home armloads of Alpenroses gathered on the
higher slopes.
Of our tramp to the Grosse Scheidegg, the most striking feature was the
attack of “mountain sickness” Belle Soeur had just before reaching the
summit. It is an unpleasant sort of thing consisting of palpitation of
the heart, faintness, nausea, and turning a greenish white. The proper
treatment is to lie down till it passes off and take some cognac. We
hadn’t any cognac along that day, so poor Belle Soeur could only lie
down and wait till it got ready to go away. The Scheidegg is only 6400
feet high. She never felt it again at any such level as that, but
encountered it on the Gries Pass at about 8000 feet and going over the
Strahlegg at somewhere near 10,000. We always made a practice after
the first time of carrying a small cognac flask along whenever we were
making an ascent.
The view from the Scheidegg is interesting, but not at all in the same
class as the Männlichen outlook.
We came home by way of the Grindel Alp pastures and encountered great
herds of cattle, and wondered whether it was our duty to be afraid of
them, but decided it wasn’t. We lost our path and tried to cut across
the meadows without one. It looked very easy. We could see the roof of
our own house plainly several miles distant, but the streams we had to
cross, which ran often through deep ravines, made it hard and sometimes
a little risky. There was one beautiful spot on a crag overhanging a
stream where we fully intended to return some day to picnic, but we
never could find it again!
That was the day we learned the wonderfully resting effect on tired and
swollen feet of bathing them in the ice-cold water of a mountain stream.
In those early days, before the Transatlantics arrived, the Chronicler
used to put in several hours a day in the polishing of her new novel,
the Elder Babe used to have lessons, Belle Soeur had an attack of
sewing and turned out wonderful confections for her wardrobe, and we
all improved our minds with Swiss history. I say “improved our minds”
advisedly, for it certainly did not amuse us. Why is it that, with
all the dramatic material at hand, some one doesn’t write a history
of Switzerland that the ordinary reader can peruse without going to
sleep? Something must be allowed of course for the fact that we were
not living in the history-hallowed part of Switzerland. Nothing ever
happened in the Grindelwald Valley except a battle in 1191, between the
Duke of Zaeringen and some recalcitrant nobles who did not like his
populistic tendencies. The Duke won the battle and straightway founded
Berne and endowed its burghers with all sorts of privileges, the more
to annoy the nobles. Or perhaps his motives were really high and
altruistic and he would have been glad if he could have foreseen that
the Bernese burghers would eventually down nobles and sovereign too.
But I really don’t think that we were so lacking in imagination that
we could not have been interested in the doings of the Eidgenossen in
the Forest Cantons, over the Brünig to the eastward, only a few miles
after all, if the histories, French and English alike, had not been so
deadly dull.
It is not only the histories either. There is something very
unsatisfactory about _all_ the literature concerning Switzerland. Much
of it is painstakingly constructed out of guide-books like Rollo’s
Adventures. Some of the things that are best as literature were written
by men who got their impressions at second hand. Schiller wrote Tell
and Scott wrote Anne of Geierstein without ever having set foot on
Swiss soil. The Swissness of both reminds one of Dr. Johnson’s remark
about women’s writing poetry and dogs walking on their hind legs. It is
not to be expected that they should do it _well_, but the surprising
thing is that they should be able to do it at all!
Now Byron did live up at Wengern Alp just over the Kleine Scheidegg
while he was writing Manfred, and the other day I read it over,
anticipating much. Time was when I thought Manfred one of the greatest
dramatic poems ever written. It gave me all sort of thrills and creeps.
But this rereading was a grievous disappointment. There are a few fine
lines, but most of the descriptions are cheap, tawdry and conventional,
fit accompaniments to a third-rate melodramatic attempt at clothing in
false sentiment a theme essentially rotten.
Hyperion is another old-time favorite that I have just reread with
a chill of disappointment. The dear poet was obviously bored by a
solitary tramp he took to the Grimsel. He got the blues in Interlaken
when it rained (which was not surprising), he saw the Jungfrau from
the hotel piazza, took a drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and for
the rest had no eyes for anything except that uninteresting girl, Mary
Ashburton. The Swiss color of it all is distinctly thin.
The tales of high climbing are often thrilling as adventures, but are
usually written by people who don’t know how to write. And one who
has not been bitten by the Alpinist mania can not help feeling that
so much daring and energy might have been better expended than in
breaking records and necks. It is really a species of insanity, this
high-climbing passion. The world and its standards must be curiously
out of focus to its victims. They don’t even pay any attention to
scenery. Much of their climbing is done in the dark (between two A.
M. and day-break) and they are always too pressed for time to stop to
look at a view, their brief rests being scientifically calculated to
restore their exhausted mind and muscles. Tyndall’s books are extremely
satisfactory in their way. He was an enthusiastic climber, without
being a crank on the subject, had a scientific object in his trips and
a considerable literary gift in describing them.
In general, I suppose it is true that where nature is so overpoweringly
magnificent, art is dwarfed. Those who deeply feel the sublimity of it
all hold their peace, and it is only the superficial who go home and
slop over in printed twaddle. Of whose number the present Chronicler,
thus self-confessedly, is one.
V
On the epoch-making twenty-first day of July, Frater and Antonio
tramped into our lives with knapsacks on their backs. We were not
expecting them till the next day. Frater had written from somewhere
up the Rhine that they would strike us about the 22nd. In a small
parenthesis he had added that they _might_ arrive by the 21st, but
Frater’s hand-writing, being of the kind sacred to genius, I had not
read this part. They had come up on the train from Interlaken, but of
course we had not met them at the station, and no one could tell them
where we lived. They wandered out the highroad to the Upper Glacier,
and as it appeared quite evident we did not live on the ice-fall or
the Wetterhorn cliffs, they turned back again. Some one told them our
châlet was on the mountain-side, and they started up a path, but met a
peasant of whom they inquired again. This individual, after stroking
his chin in silent rumination for some time, suddenly shot out his
forefinger in the direction of the Châlet Edelweiss and said “Dort!”
with such convincing emphasis that they started down again across the
fields. Thus it happened that our first glimpse of them was from a most
unexpected direction, dropping out of the clouds as it were, or, to be
accurate, climbing over one of the rare fences behind and above us. We
were not sure of their identity at first, but the long legs and Cornell
sweaters looked familiar, and Belle Soeur on the balcony ventured to
wave a greeting which was enthusiastically returned.
We had been just about sitting down to tea, and I remember the singular
inadequacy of the biscuit supply. Retiring to the kitchen I hastily
sent off Anna to the village for more of everything for dinner, and
it was well that I did so. I had been catering for a family of women
and children so long that it took some days to get adjusted to the new
circumstances, and we were perpetually running up against unexpected
vacuums. Anna and Suzanne were as much distressed over the increased
expenditures as if they had been personally footing the bills and
often cut us short on things that we really had plenty of just from
their instinct of thriftiness.
We spent the four intervening days before the Mother’s arrival in
showing the boys the immediate neighborhood of Grindelwald. They were
still a little quiet and shy, especially Antonio, and the process of
transforming the Young Ladies’ Boarding School into the Private Lunatic
Asylum was not yet in visible operation.
The Mother had been entirely explicit as to the time of _her_ arrival,
and we walked down to Interlaken to meet her—Belle Soeur, Frater,
Antonio, the Elder Babe and I. It was fourteen miles, and although it
was down grade on a fine highroad, as we had to arrive at noon, we made
an early start. Even so, we had to move at so lively a pace that the
poor Babe with his short legs was kept on a trot. The Babe, however,
is game, and he had no notion in the world of letting his grandmother
arrive, unmet by him.
We lined up on the pier, dusty and thirsty, a bare five minutes ahead
of the Lake Brienz steamer——. There it comes, puffing along, tourists
thronging the decks! Where is she? Has she missed connections after
all? If we have come all this way, and she isn’t there—Ah! But she _is_
there!
It is Antonio who has spied her. Wildly waving their hats, he and
Frater lift up the strains of the Aguinaldo chorus:
“Well, am I the boss or am I the show?
Am I the Governor General or a ho-o-bo?
Well, I’d like to know
Who’s arunning this show!
Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo?”
It was the first time Belle Soeur and I had heard this beautiful ditty,
as we had been out of the country for a year or more. I think it must
have been the first time the people on the wharf and steamer had heard
it, too, for they looked at the stalwart performers in some surprise.
But the Mother, who had spent the previous winter in Ithaca and helped
the boys graduate the month before, was thoroughly accustomed to it and
would doubtless have had her feelings hurt if she had been greeted in
any other way.
It was at this point that Frater committed the crime of _lèse majesté_,
infanticide and arson all rolled into one. As the little steamer came
up near the wharf he stepped across the foot or so of intervening water
onto the lower deck with the sinful intention of greeting his mother
two minutes sooner and carrying her satchel ashore. As his foot touched
the deck, he was seized by two employees of the steamer in a state of
excitement bordering on apoplexy. It was against the rules—against
_all_ the rules! No one was allowed on the steamer until all the
passengers had come ashore by the gang-plank. “Oh, all right,” said
Frater good-naturedly, “I’ll go back on the wharf if it worries you,”
and he started to step back. At that they became still more excited
and held him tighter than ever. That also was against the rules. No
one could go ashore except over the gang-plank. Also nobody could go
ashore without giving up his ticket. Frater had no ticket, of course.
What were they going to do about it? They did not know. They would
see. Such an emergency had never occurred before and there were no
precedents. He was to wait till all the passengers had gone off, and
then they would decide. All this was said in wild and very imperfectly
comprehended German. There was no one around who spoke either French
or English. Frater had joined the Mother, who waited with him for the
passengers to go ashore, in some perturbation of spirit as to what
was to be done to her son. Of course _nothing_ was done. They walked
ashore after the others. But the double line of uniformed employees
through whom they passed were still barely able to repress their
excitement, and their lowering brows would have struck terror to more
timorous hearts. It was really as though some form of sacrilege had
been committed, which they had decided to overlook in the interests of
international comity. This was the only time we ever ran up against any
of the Powers that Be in our wanderings, which, everything considered,
was, I think, doing uncommonly well.
Frater and the Mother being safely restored to us, the late exciting
incident became one thing more to laugh about, and it was a very merry
party who sat down to eat a picnic lunch in a secluded spot beside
the Aar, and washed it down, subsequently, with Munich beer on draft
at a near-by out-door restaurant, and caught the Grindelwald train,
and were met at the station by Suzanne and the Younger Babe, running
down the road hand in hand, a trifle late and greatly out of breath.
The Mother, her baggage, and the Babes were piled into the Red-headed
Man’s carriage, and the rest of us marched behind singing the Aguinaldo
chorus. You see we were already beginning to thaw out. The Chronicler,
no longer Senior Officer Present, felt that her extreme dignity could
now be safely relaxed. Frater never _was very_ shy, and Antonio was
getting acquainted.
I think, at the risk of being considered a gossip, I shall have to
tell how those two young men got to us, because it was so thoroughly
characteristic. They hadn’t either of them the money to spend on a
European trip and had intended going to work at their respective
professions of electrical and mechanical engineering as soon as they
left college: but what I had written of our location in Switzerland,
the Mother’s intention of spending the summer with us, and my entirely
sincere, but also entirely unexpecting suggestion that they should
“come along too” set them to thinking and planning. They went down to
New York, shipped on a cattle steamer and worked their way to Antwerp,
walked across Belgium, came up the Rhine by boat (third class) and
across by rail, also third class, from Basel. It had taken them about a
month from New York, and they had seen a great many interesting things
and places and had spent, as I remember, in the neighborhood of twenty
dollars apiece!