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.
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.