An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

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!