Part 3

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!

VI

The next week was devoted to introducing the Mother to her new surroundings. Our trips were limited by her tendency to get asthma when climbing and her inability to go anywhere near the edge of a precipice. Even when the path was several feet wide, as on the way to the Bäregg, the consciousness of a down-drop made her “dizzy in the knees.” But there were plenty of beautiful walks to take within these limits. And her enthusiasm over the life and the land would have inspired the rest of us if we had not been already profoundly convinced of the blessedness of our lot.

We did one thing during this interval which I don’t doubt would brand us as proper inmates for a lunatic asylum in the esteem of all the good respectable conventional people in the world. We spent a night on the Männlichen rolled up in steamer rugs watching the moon! Frater proposed it first to me. He and I have a fondness for the Voices of the Night and have roughed it enough together to know we can sleep on the ground now and then without catching cold or feeling cross next morning. Belle Soeur and Antonio decided that they wanted to come too, and the noble spirit in which they bore the hardships of the occasion proved that they were qualified for admission to the Inner Circle.

We left in the afternoon, a little later than we should have done, for we were rather heavily loaded down with jackets and rugs and our prospective supper, and we were going all the way on foot this time by the direct Männlichen path, which we had only come down before, and it takes longer to go up than to come down! However, by pressing our steps to a slightly uncomfortable degree, we got to the summit _just_ in time for sunset.

The scene of the next few minutes before the blood red had faded from the west, is one of the pictures indelibly burned into my memory. We stood there silently drinking it in, the boys for the first time, Belle Soeur and I loving it the more for having known it before. For a while we watched the details blurring under the on-stealing twilight. Then hunger asserted itself, and we found a place below the summit, somewhat sheltered from the biting winds, where we perched ourselves on a ridge like crows and did ample justice to the contents of the paper parcels that the boys drew from their knapsacks.

Then it occurred to us that we had better use the small remaining aftermath of daylight to find some spots sheltered from the wind and level enough to sleep on. It seems absurd to say that on the whole mountain-side there was no place level enough to lie down on without slipping off. Yet it was very nearly true. The summit was swept by a blast of icy wind. The snow-drifts had disappeared since we were there a month before, but it was still very cold after the warming sun had retired for the night. On the Lauterbrunnen side there was just plain precipice, on the Grindelwald side a very steep descent divided between stones and grass. After much searching we established ourselves on a little shelf, barely wide enough for a person to lie on and sloping down just enough for one to feel as if one was about to roll off. There was nothing to hold on to, so we dug our feet into the ground in a more or less futile attempt to secure what Frater described as a “toe-grip.” There was a low growth of thistles in our neighborhood, too, which drove their prickles through our steamer rugs in a rather unpleasant fashion.

Soon the weather began to behave badly. Great banks of clouds came up out of the depths and covered the region where the moon was due to rise. The stars twinkled brightly overhead, but, barring a sudden change in cloud conditions, it was evident that no moon would be visible before the middle of the night. We hoped against hope so long as we could, keeping up a desultory talk and a little soft-pedal singing. Then each rolled up in his or her steamer rug, sought six feet of shelf room, and—eventually—fell asleep.

I was awakened by a very penetrating chill in the marrow of my spinal column, and opening my eyes, saw that there was a dim pale radiance over the universe that had been lacking when I went to sleep. I spoke very low. Frater answered. We crawled out of our rugs and clambered up to the Männlichen summit.

I wonder if human eyes ever rested on a scene of more eerie loveliness? The moon struggled through and upward at last into the open sky, and the clouds broke away enough so that great masses of the Eiger-Mönch-Jungfrau group came into sight, looking even more stupendously huge from being partly hidden. The valleys seemed bottomless abysses—their floors four thousand feet below being utterly lost in blackness. And on the other side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley the billowy snow peaks, quite free from clouds, rolled away, all silver in the moonlight.

What a scene for some stupendous cosmic drama with spirits of the earth and air for actors! How did we dare to intrude on their vigils—mere prying interlopers that we were?

Every once in a while we had to stamp around violently and swing our arms to get warm. Otherwise we sat quite still and almost silent, feeling the way one ought to feel in church, but mostly doesn’t.

At last the clouds caught up with the moon and hid it, and we stumbled sleepily down and found our rugs and sections of ledge again.

Just before sunrise it was Antonio who was awake and ready to accompany me to the summit. The others were sleeping the sleep of the just and declined to be aroused. It was wonderfully beautiful again—the rebirth of the hidden world, the mountains thrusting up their mighty shoulders above the foamy cloud-sea that filled the valleys into the faint pink glow which was gone almost as soon as seen. As soon as the glamour of the sunrise had faded we knew that we were ravenously hungry, and shaking the sleepers into a similar conviction, we started for the Männlichen Inn and hot coffee and rolls and honey.

I do not know where the people at the Inn supposed we had dropped from at that hour. No questions were asked and no information volunteered. The breakfast was excellent and we set out for home much refreshed. Little by little, as we walked, our cramped muscles limbered and our chilled blood warmed—warmed too much, in fact, before we reached the Châlet at midday with those ton-a-piece steamer rugs over our shoulders.

The moon had not done all we had expected of it. But we felt it was proved that the quartette was of the “right stuff” and could safely venture on a fortnight’s pedestrian trip.

VII

The morning we started out on our first memorable pedestrian tour, the Mother and the Elder Babe accompanied us to where the Grosse Scheidegg path turns off from the highroad, Suzanne, Anna and the Younger Babe having previously waved us out of sight from the balcony of the Châlet.

I felt some qualms of prospective homesickness as I left them and a twinge of conscience lest one of the Babes might get sick or the Mother have trouble with the housekeeping, but by the time we had dropped over on the other side of the Scheidegg ridge and could no longer see the red roof of our Châlet, I had lost my misgivings and began to enjoy my vacation. I had not felt so completely free from the harness for Heaven knows how long, and as I walked along I could feel the years sliding off of me and hear them thud as they struck the ground. I think I must have halted somewhere about the sixteen-year-old point. That’s the way I felt, at least. And it is an interesting fact that I was addressed uniformly as Fräulein or Mademoiselle by strangers all the rest of the season. The short skirt may have had something to do with it, but the Swiss are entirely used to even elderly ladies in short dresses.

Perhaps our outfit may be of some interest. My own skirt and jacket were of corduroy, and I don’t think the material could be improved upon. Nothing else will stand so much sun and rain and dust and mud and still look decent. With this, downward, gaiters of the same and heavy-soled hob-nailed boots. Upward, a dark linen shirt waist and a feather-weight Swiss straw hat, with a brim broad enough to protect from the sun. One should have the trimmings of one’s hat of a warranted-fast color. I did not and suffered accordingly. The hat I started out with was trimmed with a garland of red poppies, and the effect of the first heavy rain was fearful and wonderful to behold. The next was trimmed with ribbon and suffered almost as badly. The third was adorned with a Scotch plaid that really rose superior to weather.