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