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.
The boys made no special preparation for the trip except to have the soles of their boots well studded with nails and to invest each in a soft felt Swiss hat, warranted to stand any weather, and to stick fast in any wind. Each of us had strapped over the shoulders a light canvas Rückensack, containing the absolutely essential (reduced to the last irreducible minimum) for a week. We had planned to have clean clothes meet us by mail at Zermatt at the end of that time. The Swiss mailing arrangements are ideal, and one can send a good-sized hamper anywhere for a few cents. In the same manner we got rid of our soiled clothes by mailing them home. Belle Soeur and I carried alpenstocks, having found them a real help in climbing steep paths and even more so in coming down. The boys despised them as tourist-like and amateurish and would have nothing to do with them. When we took off our jackets we put them through the straps across our shoulders so that our hands (barring the friendly alpenstocks) were always free. We didn’t bother with umbrellas or raincoats, none of us being liable to colds.
We ate our luncheon soon after we dropped over the Scheidegg into the Rosenlaui Valley. The character of the landscape had changed already. We sat on a slope adorned by a group of Christmas trees and a highly decorative herd of cattle and saw our old friend the Wetterhorn in an entirely unfamiliar shape and looked with interest at the queer rock wings of the Engelhörner.
Having consumed our last reminder of Home and Mother, we pushed on, presently finding ourselves racing for the Rosenlaui hotel against up-piling clouds that obviously held rain. The clouds beat, but we got there in time to save ourselves from an absolute drenching and sat in a summer-house for some time, drinking a form of fizzy water which had evidently (from its price) been diluted with liquid gold.
If a baptism of fire is the critical moment in the life of a young soldier, I take it that the baptism of rain is the touchstone for the inexperienced pedestrian. If you preserve the Smile-that-won’t-come-off when your shoes are soaked through and the water goes chunk-chunk inside of them, and the mud clings to the outside, and the rain trickles down your neck—inside the collar, and your wet skirts flap about your ankles (if you’re a man you’re spared that), and the thick clouds shut out all the mountains you came to see,—why then you’ve won your spurs.
When the serious part of the rain was over and we felt that we could afford no more gold-flavored Apollinaris and had no other excuse for lingering, we continued down that water-logged valley. Frater and I kept up our spirits by singing everything we knew, from Suwannee River to Anheuser Busch, but it really wasn’t fair, because Antonio has a musical ear and must have suffered a lot. We saw some waterfalls, but were too wet ourselves to be much cheered by them.
We did get some amusement, though, out of a solitary French pedestrian who asked us if we had encountered any rain. The question was so absurdly superfluous in view of the rain-soaked condition of ourselves and the whole world, that we made him repeat it several times before we gave him a grave and final affirmative. I think he felt lonely and thought he would like to join our party, but we choked off his little attempts at conversation and shook him without compunction. One has to draw the line somewhere, and we drew it at making acquaintances with any one except the native peasants, and they usually drew the line on us!
Emerging into the Meiringen Valley into which the Rosenlaui opens, we quickly decided against Meiringen as too large and sophisticated a place to be interesting, and, moreover, several miles out of our way. There was a village almost straight in front of us which rejoiced in two names, Innertkirchen and Imhof. This was unfortunate, as whatever native we asked the road of always seemed to know it only by the other name. It proved an elusive place. We took the wrong turn several times, and it was beginning to get dark, and it was a long time since lunch, and this was our first night as tramps.
We were not made happier by catching up with the principal inn at last and finding it full. The other one, on the extreme edge of the village, seemed hardly more promising at first, for the landlady said she had just two rooms left, one with one bed and the other with three. However, a little persuasion reminded her that there was another little single room in the third story, if one of the young gentlemen didn’t mind. We were not disposed to be critical. They matched pennies for it, and Antonio was relegated to the loft.
This inn, with the all-but-universal name of Alpenrose, proved a good specimen of the plain, clean, honest and inexpensive Swiss type. We encountered for the first time a system of two-priced table d’hôte, of which we were given our choice, the difference being not in the quality of the food, but in the number of courses. Thus: Will you have soup and one kind of meat with vegetables, followed by fruit, at one franc fifty, or soup, two kinds of meat with vegetables, and salad before the fruit, at two fifty? We chose the cheaper and had plenty, in spite of our fine appetites. Belle Soeur and I were also indulging in one-franc-fifty lodgings for the first time. The boys knew all about them from their experience between Antwerp and Grindelwald.
The dining-room had various Schützenfest prizes hung up around the walls, and we had our ideas of these functions broadened and our appreciation of our own Herr Secundärlehrer’s first prize achievement quickened, when we found that one was labeled the fifty-seventh and another the eighty-first prize!
When we emerged on the dusky balcony after dinner, two mysterious figures were sitting there whom we took to be nuns in some form of religious habit. This theory was shaken when we observed a lighted pipe in the mouth of one, and closer scrutiny developed a moustache on the upper lip of the other. We finally learned from the hotel register that they were German students on a pedestrian trip, the nun-like effect being given by voluminous cloaks with peaked hoods drawn over their heads. They must have been joyous things to carry on a walking trip—worse than the steamer rugs we dragged up the Männlichen!
To our surprise, as soon as it was dark, bonfires began to break forth from surrounding mountain-tops. We asked if this illumination was the regular thing in the Meiringen Valley and learned that the first of August is the Swiss form of Fourth of July and that they were celebrating the oath of the Eidgenossen on the heights of Rütli. They were doing the same thing in Grindelwald and indeed all over the republic.
We wandered into the village to see if any other form of celebration was going on, but it was all as quiet as a Presbyterian Sunday. The only noisy thing we could find was the “Infant Aar” brawling foamily down under a covered wooden bridge. We hung over its parapets for some time, listening to the racket it made and watching the blazing fires along the mountain-tops, while Belle Soeur and I tried to impart such knowledge as we had been able to gather concerning the worthy representatives of the Forest Cantons, Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden, who bound themselves by oath somewhere back in the twelve hundreds, to drive out the Austrians and make their country free. Frater and Antonio did not mind being told, in small doses, but after a brief glance at our improving assortment of Swiss histories, they had politely and firmly declined to read them.