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.