Part 2

I must not forget the salt, nor the long morning spent in hunting for that useful staple. I ordered it the first day from our basement grocery. It didn’t come, and I repeated the order. I was told the Frau had none. I supposed she was just out of it and asked Belle Soeur, who was going into the village, to get some at any grocer’s. She went dutifully to every grocer in the village and grew more and more puzzled at being everywhere told they didn’t keep it. She knew the Swiss used the condiment, for she had been eating it. She inquired and was told to go to the post-office. This sounded so perfectly foolish that she paid no attention to it and inquired elsewhere. She received the same answer. After she had been told three times to go the post-office, she went there, feeling distinctly idiotic as she asked the old man behind the stamp window if he sold salt. To her astonishment, the reply was affirmative. Salt, it appears, is a government monopoly in Switzerland, and, in Grindelwald at least, the postmaster had the exclusive right to sell it. In time it became perfectly natural to say, “Give me five postage stamps and a kilo of salt,” but it required practice.

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....

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.

IV

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.