An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

Who’s arunning this show!

Is it me or Emilio Aguinaldo?”

It was the first time Belle Soeur and I had heard this beautiful ditty, as we had been out of the country for a year or more. I think it must have been the first time the people on the wharf and steamer had heard it, too, for they looked at the stalwart performers in some surprise. But the Mother, who had spent the previous winter in Ithaca and helped the boys graduate the month before, was thoroughly accustomed to it and would doubtless have had her feelings hurt if she had been greeted in any other way.

It was at this point that Frater committed the crime of lèse majesté, infanticide and arson all rolled into one. As the little steamer came up near the wharf he stepped across the foot or so of intervening water onto the lower deck with the sinful intention of greeting his mother two minutes sooner and carrying her satchel ashore. As his foot touched the deck, he was seized by two employees of the steamer in a state of excitement bordering on apoplexy. It was against the rules—against all the rules! No one was allowed on the steamer until all the passengers had come ashore by the gang-plank. “Oh, all right,” said Frater good-naturedly, “I’ll go back on the wharf if it worries you,” and he started to step back. At that they became still more excited and held him tighter than ever. That also was against the rules. No one could go ashore except over the gang-plank. Also nobody could go ashore without giving up his ticket. Frater had no ticket, of course. What were they going to do about it? They did not know. They would see. Such an emergency had never occurred before and there were no precedents. He was to wait till all the passengers had gone off, and then they would decide. All this was said in wild and very imperfectly comprehended German. There was no one around who spoke either French or English. Frater had joined the Mother, who waited with him for the passengers to go ashore, in some perturbation of spirit as to what was to be done to her son. Of course nothing was done. They walked ashore after the others. But the double line of uniformed employees through whom they passed were still barely able to repress their excitement, and their lowering brows would have struck terror to more timorous hearts. It was really as though some form of sacrilege had been committed, which they had decided to overlook in the interests of international comity. This was the only time we ever ran up against any of the Powers that Be in our wanderings, which, everything considered, was, I think, doing uncommonly well.

Frater and the Mother being safely restored to us, the late exciting incident became one thing more to laugh about, and it was a very merry party who sat down to eat a picnic lunch in a secluded spot beside the Aar, and washed it down, subsequently, with Munich beer on draft at a near-by out-door restaurant, and caught the Grindelwald train, and were met at the station by Suzanne and the Younger Babe, running down the road hand in hand, a trifle late and greatly out of breath. The Mother, her baggage, and the Babes were piled into the Red-headed Man’s carriage, and the rest of us marched behind singing the Aguinaldo chorus. You see we were already beginning to thaw out. The Chronicler, no longer Senior Officer Present, felt that her extreme dignity could now be safely relaxed. Frater never was very shy, and Antonio was getting acquainted.

I think, at the risk of being considered a gossip, I shall have to tell how those two young men got to us, because it was so thoroughly characteristic. They hadn’t either of them the money to spend on a European trip and had intended going to work at their respective professions of electrical and mechanical engineering as soon as they left college: but what I had written of our location in Switzerland, the Mother’s intention of spending the summer with us, and my entirely sincere, but also entirely unexpecting suggestion that they should “come along too” set them to thinking and planning. They went down to New York, shipped on a cattle steamer and worked their way to Antwerp, walked across Belgium, came up the Rhine by boat (third class) and across by rail, also third class, from Basel. It had taken them about a month from New York, and they had seen a great many interesting things and places and had spent, as I remember, in the neighborhood of twenty dollars apiece!

VI

The next week was devoted to introducing the Mother to her new surroundings. Our trips were limited by her tendency to get asthma when climbing and her inability to go anywhere near the edge of a precipice. Even when the path was several feet wide, as on the way to the Bäregg, the consciousness of a down-drop made her “dizzy in the knees.” But there were plenty of beautiful walks to take within these limits. And her enthusiasm over the life and the land would have inspired the rest of us if we had not been already profoundly convinced of the blessedness of our lot.

We did one thing during this interval which I don’t doubt would brand us as proper inmates for a lunatic asylum in the esteem of all the good respectable conventional people in the world. We spent a night on the Männlichen rolled up in steamer rugs watching the moon! Frater proposed it first to me. He and I have a fondness for the Voices of the Night and have roughed it enough together to know we can sleep on the ground now and then without catching cold or feeling cross next morning. Belle Soeur and Antonio decided that they wanted to come too, and the noble spirit in which they bore the hardships of the occasion proved that they were qualified for admission to the Inner Circle.