THE next eight days we consecrated, none too joyously, to the influenza. Frater and Belle Soeur came down with it almost immediately and simultaneously and were put in quarantine. We were determined, if possible, to protect the Mother from contagion, as a cold is a long and serious matter with her. So the two invalids were shut up in the dining-room with books and easy-chairs and a cribbage-board and had their meals served there till they emerged from the fever and sneezing stage. Just as they were convalescent, the two Babes and the domestic staff got it, but in a very light form. Then Antonio, who had been boasting of his immunity, succumbed and had to postpone his intended departure. At last everybody emerged triumphant from quarantine. And it had been successful. The Mother escaped contagion.
Antonio was to leave for Paris, Liverpool and New York next day, the 14th of September, and we were all very sad at the thought of the first break in our happy family. Also we wanted to make the most of the remaining time, so (it sounds singularly idiotic written down in black and white after this lapse of sobering time) we sat up all night! The Mother retired about midnight. Frater had already done so, but we decided he had better get up.
Then followed an interesting “rough-house” in which the young men took the star rôles and Belle Soeur and I acted as chorus. It would be difficult to give an adequate history of the night, but it involved an exciting amount of lockings out and lockings in, climbing to the second-story balcony, and the smashing of a kitchen window by a group of “outs” who wished to be in. This brought Anna and Suzanne to their windows above in great excitement, followed by some disgust when they learned it was only “Les Messieurs qui s’amusent.”
Between three and four we invaded the kitchen and made coffee and ate up the cake on hand. Then we played cards till breakfast time. Subsequently, most of those concerned took a nap. The housekeeper and mother of a family, however, was unable to.
Belle Soeur also was unable to slumber long, as she had promised to produce a birthday cake before noon. For this same day which was to witness the flitting of Antonio was further made notable as the eighth anniversary of the appearance on this mundane stage of the Elder Babe. It had been arranged that the birthday feast, including ice-cream from the village confectioner’s and the birthday cake with its eight candles, was to occur at midday, so that Antonio might take part in it.
It was not a wonderfully gay little party, though we strove to make it so, for we all felt that this was the beginning of the end of a fairy-story summer, the breaking up of our little band of Arcadians.
It was raining in doleful sympathy as we walked down to the station with the departing Antonio and stood on the platform watching the chunky little train that bore him away to the every-day workaday world outside of Switzerland.
We missed him very much. The “tropical bird,” as we had occasionally called him, had certainly brought an element of color and brilliancy into our gray Anglo-Saxon lives.
The next day we had a diversion in the shape of an entirely unexpected call from an American friend, who stayed to dinner and spent the evening with us, but flitted away by an early train the following morning.
It was a very blue and brilliant morning (the rainclouds all dissolved and scattered), and we set forth on the Elder Babe’s real birthday party, which the weather and Antonio’s departure had made impossible on the day itself. It was to be a glacier party and involve a guide and roping!
We picked out the guide haphazard from the little group we passed just before reaching the Upper Glacier. He was a heavily-bearded, short, but powerfully built man of between forty-five and fifty, and his name was Fritz Biner. We were destined to know him much better a little later.
The Mother started out with us, but decided she was not equal to the trip, so we left her with her share of the lunch at the Châlet Milchbach on the lateral moraine, from the veranda of which she could watch our progress.
We turned over the small boy to the special care of the guide, who fastened their two waists together with his rope. Then, for nearly a thousand feet, we scrambled up the right bank of the glacier, with the occasional aid of ladders fastened to the rock, till we reached the level part above the ice-fall, where the trail crosses to the Gleckstein Club hut and the summit of the Wetterhorn. Here, on the edge of the glacier, we sat down and ate our luncheon.
Then we were all roped together and proceeded to the opposite side of the hummocky, but not perilous, glacier, whence, leaving the trail to the summit, we followed a narrow goat path on a horizontal ledge of the Wetterhorn cliff known as the Enge. It was nothing that presented any terrors to the older members of the party, who by this time had their heads pretty well seasoned against dizziness, but it would have made the writer extremely nervous to conduct her small son along such a ledge, in view of the (probably) thousand-foot drop at our left, had he not been securely roped fore and aft.
The young person in question, though enjoying himself greatly, was clearly troubled by a little doubt whether this highly delectable roping had not been gotten up as part of the stage-setting to amuse him and not because it was necessary. He had imbibed a fine scorn for the tourists who rope themselves to a guide while ascending the pleasant path to the Châlet Milchbach, just so as to say they have done it, and he clearly did not wish to belong to any such tribe himself. However, when we had gotten almost to the end of the ledge and were just about to unfasten the ropes, the sheer drop beneath us having decreased to perhaps fifty feet, the Babe, growing careless, twisted his feet somehow, slipped and slid straight out in the air and was brought up sharply by the rope. This happy incident removed all doubt from his mind and persuaded him, as nothing else could have done, that the roping had been a genuine mountaineering necessity!
Down among the grassy pastures at the end of the Enge we found the Mother waiting for us (who fortunately for her peace of mind had not seen the falling incident), and the united family tramped home together in great content.
Not, however, till we had made a partial engagement with Fritz Biner. We asked him whether the end of the following week would be too late in the season to go over the Strahlegg; for we had developed an ambition to wind up our last long pedestrian trip, which we were about to start on, with a bit of genuine mountaineering. He assured us it would not be and expressed a desire to act as our guide. We politely voiced the pleasure it would give us to have him, but indicated that it would seem simpler to take a guide from the Grimsel than to have him come over to meet us there. He replied justly that if a Grimsel guide should accompany us to Grindelwald, he would have to go back again, which would be just as far as for him to go over after us. He further suggested that at the Grimsel they would decline to take us over without two guides, or at all events a guide and a porter, whereas he, having seen what expert climbers we were (!), would gladly undertake to bring us over single-handed. This argument appealed to us, though we left the matter open that day in order to make inquiries concerning Biner’s reputation. The result being favorable, we arranged to telegraph him from Andermatt what day he was to meet us at the Grimsel.