XV

On the 27th of August we started out for our second trip, by rail this

time, looking quite conventional and civilized. The Mother and the

Elder Babe accompanied us as far as Thun.

From Interlaken to Thun we took the lake steamer. It is a pretty enough

trip, but everybody does it, and the presence of a swarming ant-hill

of tourists somehow spoils the pleasure of the Nature-lover, while

affording amusement to the specialist in humanity.

We watched many of our fellow-passengers with more or less interest,

but of them all there lingers in my memory only the old gentleman with

the Santa Claus white beard whose bare feet were encased in Greek

sandals. This with an otherwise entirely conventional get-up. We were

by no means the only ones whose attention was attracted by this devotee

of the barefoot cure. His strength of mind in braving popular curiosity

certainly deserved reward, and I hope he got it.

At Thun there is a castle of considerable external picturesqueness,

a church effectively located, quaint streets with highly elevated

sidewalks, and shops affording ample opportunities to buy the

crumbly Thun pottery. After seeing all these things and eating our

noon sandwiches at a shady little table in what would be accurately

described, I suppose, as a beer garden, whence we had a fine view of a

passing regiment of artillery, we started the Mother and Babe on their

way back to Grindelwald and ourselves boarded a third-class carriage in

the train for Berne.

The brief journey thither was without incident save for the time when

our compartment was snared by two billing and cooing young persons

whose aggressively new clothes as well as their demonstrative affection

proclaimed them a bride and groom. Perhaps it was because we were

foreigners or perhaps only because they were so conscious of being

legally and properly married that they took no more account of our

presence than if we had been signposts.

At Berne we resolved to lodge at a temperance hotel we had heard of,

our idea being that it would be cheap and that the temperance feature

guaranteed respectability. The experiment was reasonably satisfactory,

but not brilliantly so.

Frater called Berne a toy city. The phrase is happy. One feels oneself

in the world of Noah’s ark. The foolish painted fountains one meets

on every hand, above all the one with the ogre devouring the babies,

are surely intended for children and not for grown-ups. And it cannot

be conceived that any but children should take in a spirit of serious

admiration the mechanical toy which dwells in the famous clock tower,

where once an hour Father Time inverts his glass and the giants strike

on the drum, and at noon the procession of Apostles appears from one

open-snapping door above the clock and disappears jerkily into another.

It is an elaborated cuckoo clock on a large scale. And surely the

cuckoo clock also is for children.

Our good star led us to the cathedral late that afternoon just as a

violin and vocal rehearsal was being held. We had the big dim Gothic

church all to ourselves, and out of the choir-loft, from sources

invisible, floated a woman’s voice and the pure tones of a violin. That

was one of the perfect hours that Chance sometimes fashions for us

better than any Epicurean foresight could have planned.

There followed a walk through the town past the bear pits (more of

the provisions for childhood’s amusement surely?) to a height called

the Schänzli, just above the river, where we dined pleasantly at an

out-door table with Berne at our feet, a long stretch of fertile

country on the other side, and the white-capped Bernese Alps we had

just left fringing the horizon. After the sunset tints faded away we

had the stars and the lights of the city till we got tired and returned

to our temperance hotel and the slumbers of the night.

Next morning we visited the federal buildings, old Rathhaus and several

parks and view points, all of very moderate interest, and took a train

about ten o’clock for Freiburg. Here we made our way to the Cathedral

to find out at what time the organ recital was due, and discovered, to

our great disgust, that this was the one day in the week when there

wasn’t any! We had lunch at another open-air restaurant, looked at two

or three things that Baedeker advised us to and took a walk across the

river to see the picturesque remains of the city’s medieval walls and

towers, whereby we just missed our train and had to take a limited an

hour later. We never, except by accident like this, traveled first

class in Switzerland, where even the third is perfectly clean and

comfortable,—far more so than second in Italy or southern France.

Freiburg is on the line between French and German Switzerland, and its

inhabitants, so far as our experience went, seemed to be all bilingual.

Somewhere on this trip we were supposed to get our first glimpse of

Mont Blanc, but we didn’t.

Arrived at Lausanne, we walked and walked and walked, looking for a

place to lodge. Frater had been feeling badly all day and was utterly

miserable by now, and we seemed to have wandered completely out of the

hotel region. I do not remember whether some one directed us to the

house we finally reached or whether a sign in the window proclaimed

that furnished rooms were let. Anyhow we found two vacant, reasonably

habitable rooms, and, under the circumstances, took them. They were not

especially attractive, but there was really nothing tangible, as I look

back at it, to indicate that the place was not perfectly respectable,

and I am at a loss to say why we were all so firmly convinced that it

was not. Possibly it was the undisguised astonishment with which the

maid-servant regarded us. Possibly.... No, I can’t define it. But I

know we were all on pins and needles till we got away next morning, and

the way Belle Soeur and I barricaded our door that night was a caution!

Nothing, however, in the least degree exciting occurred—not even an

attempt to over-charge us! Frater went to bed supperless with his

bilious attack, which worried me greatly for fear it might be oncoming

typhoid, due to the wayside water he had drunk, when he and Antonio

were living on dry bread between Zermatt and Leuk Susten. But it wasn’t.

Belle Soeur, Antonio and I started down for the lake of Geneva,

stopping by the way at a baker’s and a delicatessen shop to lay in the

wherewithal for a picnic supper. We chartered a row-boat and went out

on the lake. It was just past sunset and utterly lovely. We ate our

supper and decided we would stay out there a very long time. But pretty

soon it got quite rough and choppy, and our light went out, and we

found we hadn’t any matches. We made one or two unsuccessful attempts

to get some from another boat. Then we began to wonder how poor Frater

was faring all alone up there in that place we didn’t like. So we gave

it up and paddled ashore and went home.

Next morning, Frater was better, though not quite gay. We got our

coffee at a near-by restaurant and visited the castle and the somewhat

barren Gothic church, turned Calvinist, and saw a statue of that

doubtless gallant, but very injudicious local martyr of patriotism,

Major Davos, who tried to free poor Vaud from the grip of Berne before

the time was ripe for it, and succeeded only in losing his own life.

We took an inclined railroad that plunged us suddenly to the lake-side

again. Here, with a lot of other human cattle, we boarded a lake

steamer and set forth for Geneva. It was on this day, from the water,

that we got our first view of Mont Blanc, a very faint and distant one.

The steamer stopped at several places on the southern (French) coast

of the lake, and though we did not go ashore, Belle Soeur and I went

through the form of introducing the young men to the Pleasant Land of

France.

There was a little company of Italian musicians on board who seemed to

please Antonio in a gently melancholy fashion. Antonio was suffering

that day from a slight attack of homesickness.

In the early afternoon we landed at the quay in Geneva and were

immediately shanghaied. It was really funny, and turned out extremely

well.

We were still hard-jammed in the steamer crowd and barely off the

gang-plank, when a stout, motherly-looking, middle-aged woman asked me

in German whether we were strangers, and if so, where we were going to

lodge? I thought she had just come ashore with us and supposed she

was a guileless stranger and didn’t know where to go. So I told her

in my labored German that we also were strangers and to our infinite

regret were unable to offer her any advice. But _that_ wasn’t what she

wanted, and she buzzed on hopefully till by and by I got it through

my head that she had two furnished rooms she’d like to rent us and

that they were wonderfully clean and pleasant and home-like, and the

location central, and she would serve us breakfast and charge us only

three francs apiece for it and lodging, and we would really have great

difficulty in finding anything else so desirable at anything like the

price.

Sandwiched in with all this was a large amount of family history. They

were Germans from some Rhine town and had only been in Geneva a few

months. Her husband had come here to work. She could not get used to

it. Neither could she speak French, but she had a daughter who spoke it

very nicely. When her rooms became vacant, she went down to the pier

and watched the people come ashore from the boat and spoke to some one

who looked likely to understand German. She nearly always guessed

right, and they had had _such_ nice people in their rooms! Some such

charming Americans! Were _we_ by any chance Americans? Ah, she had

thought so as soon as she saw us. She seldom made a mistake.

I told her at first automatically, as a matter of course, that we did

not want her rooms, but she was not easily discouraged and prattled

artlessly on. Her apartment was very near. It could do us no harm to

_look_ at the rooms. We were nowise bound to take them.

After all, this was quite true, and though we had a number of

addresses, we had no special reason for going to any of them. She had

as honest a face as one could need to see. We had stayed at plenty of

places about which we knew absolutely nothing. We did not know less

about this good woman’s rooms. Clearly, we risked nothing by going

with her. So off we went, her babble of personal and professional

reminiscences running on like a brook.

The apartment was in a house not especially attractive from the

outside, but once we got within and saw its resplendent cleanliness

and almost luxury of furnishing, we knew we should search no farther.

Geneva is what is known as a handsome city. It is clean and modern

and tries to be like Paris. It has good hotels and shops and parks

and quays and drives and public monuments. We spent that afternoon

shopping and sight-seeing, took dinner at an open-air restaurant in the

Jardin Anglais, attended an organ recital at the cathedral, which was

considerably marred by the non-working of the blowing apparatus, and

decided as we walked home that we would have had all we cared for of

Geneva by 2 P. M. the following day.

I remember the gentle irony of the pretty waitress at the restaurant in

the Jardin Anglais. Frater, who was still feeling under the weather,

ordered two soft-boiled eggs and a cup of hot milk. Antonio, who

always manifested homesickness by mortification of the flesh, gave an

almost equally simple order and said he would drink _water_. He had

read somewhere that Geneva city water was safe. Belle Soeur and I, who

were hungry and _not_ homesick, ordered a substantial meal and a small

bottle of red wine. Having written this all down, the waitress turned

to Antonio and inquired with a demure smile whether the gentleman who

drank water would have it _hot_ or _plain_?

The next morning our landlady brought us a breakfast that was fit for

the gods. The _café-au-lait_ was excellent, the little rolls delicious,

the fresh butter pats exquisite, and the honey—where shall I find words

to describe its perfection? We all did well at that breakfast, but the

two boys, who had dined so frugally the night before, appeared to be

hollow to their toes. Like magic melted out of sight the heaping plate

of rolls, the great pots of coffee and milk, the dainty pats of butter,

and only a trace in the bottom was left of the pint jar of honey.

Really, it was shocking.

Later, Belle Soeur, Antonio and I, being in the sitting-room, heard

strange sounds of blind man’s buff and overturned chairs issuing

from the boys’ bedroom. Presently out rushed Frater with an anxious

hunted look, closely followed by the daughter of the house, who, her

face swollen with tooth-ache and tied up in a handkerchief, was not

at the moment of great personal attractiveness. “She wants to tell

me something!” groaned Frater. “For heaven’s sake, find out what it

is!” Apparently she had felt that her message was of a confidential

nature and should be communicated at close range, and Frater, who is

shy—at _times_—had tried to keep the center-table between them, and the

strange sounds we had heard were caused by his flight and her pursuit

around and around this table till he bolted for the door. At least such

is the not very gallant explanation he gave us later.

Balked in her desire to speak quietly to one of the gentlemen of the

party (the sterner sex being popularly supposed to be more liberal

in money matters), the young-woman-who-spoke-French got out to me

with great embarrassment her mother’s message—that she was _very_

glad we had enjoyed the breakfast, and that she was prepared to stand

by the price she had quoted to us the day before, but that she had

really not looked forward to such wholesale consumption of honey, and

would be actually out of pocket unless we would be willing to pay her

twenty-five centimes (five cents) apiece more. Of course if we didn’t

think it right——But we _did_, and so assured her!

That morning we called on some friends, a retired Rear Admiral and his

family, at one of the hotels, and had the novel sensation of talking

“American” for an hour or more, declined their invitation to lunch, got

our letters and a hamper of clothes from the post-office, shifted into

mountaineering costume again and returned our traveling outfit by the

convenient mail to Grindelwald.

Belle Soeur and Antonio had noticed the day before the bill-of-fare

of a restaurant outside its door, the prices of which had struck them

as the most phenomenally low they had ever seen, and the place looked

clean and respectable. It was on the other side of the river, on the

way to the train we were to take for Chamonix. So we resolved to get

our luncheon there.

It was not till we were inside and giving our order that we woke up to

the fact that it was a charitable institution—a sort of soup-kitchen

financially backed by a committee of ladies. A quick vote taken

showed that we declined to beat a retreat at that late date, so we

had a remarkably fine lunch, thanks to the charitable ladies, at the

interesting price of ten cents apiece. It included roast beef (a

big, tender, juicy slice), five cents, mashed potatoes, two cents,

bread, one cent, and seltzer water, two cents. We were later than the

conventional lunch hour and had the place to ourselves, so could not

judge who or what its usual patrons were; but evidently _we_ were

_raras aves_, to judge by the stir and amusement we created among the

employees.