An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

Nothing, however, in the least degree exciting occurred—not even an attempt to over-charge us! Frater went to bed supperless with his bilious attack, which worried me greatly for fear it might be oncoming typhoid, due to the wayside water he had drunk, when he and Antonio were living on dry bread between Zermatt and Leuk Susten. But it wasn’t.

Belle Soeur, Antonio and I started down for the lake of Geneva, stopping by the way at a baker’s and a delicatessen shop to lay in the wherewithal for a picnic supper. We chartered a row-boat and went out on the lake. It was just past sunset and utterly lovely. We ate our supper and decided we would stay out there a very long time. But pretty soon it got quite rough and choppy, and our light went out, and we found we hadn’t any matches. We made one or two unsuccessful attempts to get some from another boat. Then we began to wonder how poor Frater was faring all alone up there in that place we didn’t like. So we gave it up and paddled ashore and went home.

Next morning, Frater was better, though not quite gay. We got our coffee at a near-by restaurant and visited the castle and the somewhat barren Gothic church, turned Calvinist, and saw a statue of that doubtless gallant, but very injudicious local martyr of patriotism, Major Davos, who tried to free poor Vaud from the grip of Berne before the time was ripe for it, and succeeded only in losing his own life.

We took an inclined railroad that plunged us suddenly to the lake-side again. Here, with a lot of other human cattle, we boarded a lake steamer and set forth for Geneva. It was on this day, from the water, that we got our first view of Mont Blanc, a very faint and distant one.

The steamer stopped at several places on the southern (French) coast of the lake, and though we did not go ashore, Belle Soeur and I went through the form of introducing the young men to the Pleasant Land of France.

There was a little company of Italian musicians on board who seemed to please Antonio in a gently melancholy fashion. Antonio was suffering that day from a slight attack of homesickness.

In the early afternoon we landed at the quay in Geneva and were immediately shanghaied. It was really funny, and turned out extremely well.

We were still hard-jammed in the steamer crowd and barely off the gang-plank, when a stout, motherly-looking, middle-aged woman asked me in German whether we were strangers, and if so, where we were going to lodge? I thought she had just come ashore with us and supposed she was a guileless stranger and didn’t know where to go. So I told her in my labored German that we also were strangers and to our infinite regret were unable to offer her any advice. But that wasn’t what she wanted, and she buzzed on hopefully till by and by I got it through my head that she had two furnished rooms she’d like to rent us and that they were wonderfully clean and pleasant and home-like, and the location central, and she would serve us breakfast and charge us only three francs apiece for it and lodging, and we would really have great difficulty in finding anything else so desirable at anything like the price.

Sandwiched in with all this was a large amount of family history. They were Germans from some Rhine town and had only been in Geneva a few months. Her husband had come here to work. She could not get used to it. Neither could she speak French, but she had a daughter who spoke it very nicely. When her rooms became vacant, she went down to the pier and watched the people come ashore from the boat and spoke to some one who looked likely to understand German. She nearly always guessed right, and they had had such nice people in their rooms! Some such charming Americans! Were we by any chance Americans? Ah, she had thought so as soon as she saw us. She seldom made a mistake.

I told her at first automatically, as a matter of course, that we did not want her rooms, but she was not easily discouraged and prattled artlessly on. Her apartment was very near. It could do us no harm to look at the rooms. We were nowise bound to take them.