An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

After all, this was quite true, and though we had a number of addresses, we had no special reason for going to any of them. She had as honest a face as one could need to see. We had stayed at plenty of places about which we knew absolutely nothing. We did not know less about this good woman’s rooms. Clearly, we risked nothing by going with her. So off we went, her babble of personal and professional reminiscences running on like a brook.

The apartment was in a house not especially attractive from the outside, but once we got within and saw its resplendent cleanliness and almost luxury of furnishing, we knew we should search no farther.

Geneva is what is known as a handsome city. It is clean and modern and tries to be like Paris. It has good hotels and shops and parks and quays and drives and public monuments. We spent that afternoon shopping and sight-seeing, took dinner at an open-air restaurant in the Jardin Anglais, attended an organ recital at the cathedral, which was considerably marred by the non-working of the blowing apparatus, and decided as we walked home that we would have had all we cared for of Geneva by 2 P. M. the following day.

I remember the gentle irony of the pretty waitress at the restaurant in the Jardin Anglais. Frater, who was still feeling under the weather, ordered two soft-boiled eggs and a cup of hot milk. Antonio, who always manifested homesickness by mortification of the flesh, gave an almost equally simple order and said he would drink water. He had read somewhere that Geneva city water was safe. Belle Soeur and I, who were hungry and not homesick, ordered a substantial meal and a small bottle of red wine. Having written this all down, the waitress turned to Antonio and inquired with a demure smile whether the gentleman who drank water would have it hot or plain?

The next morning our landlady brought us a breakfast that was fit for the gods. The café-au-lait was excellent, the little rolls delicious, the fresh butter pats exquisite, and the honey—where shall I find words to describe its perfection? We all did well at that breakfast, but the two boys, who had dined so frugally the night before, appeared to be hollow to their toes. Like magic melted out of sight the heaping plate of rolls, the great pots of coffee and milk, the dainty pats of butter, and only a trace in the bottom was left of the pint jar of honey. Really, it was shocking.

Later, Belle Soeur, Antonio and I, being in the sitting-room, heard strange sounds of blind man’s buff and overturned chairs issuing from the boys’ bedroom. Presently out rushed Frater with an anxious hunted look, closely followed by the daughter of the house, who, her face swollen with tooth-ache and tied up in a handkerchief, was not at the moment of great personal attractiveness. “She wants to tell me something!” groaned Frater. “For heaven’s sake, find out what it is!” Apparently she had felt that her message was of a confidential nature and should be communicated at close range, and Frater, who is shy—at times—had tried to keep the center-table between them, and the strange sounds we had heard were caused by his flight and her pursuit around and around this table till he bolted for the door. At least such is the not very gallant explanation he gave us later.

Balked in her desire to speak quietly to one of the gentlemen of the party (the sterner sex being popularly supposed to be more liberal in money matters), the young-woman-who-spoke-French got out to me with great embarrassment her mother’s message—that she was very glad we had enjoyed the breakfast, and that she was prepared to stand by the price she had quoted to us the day before, but that she had really not looked forward to such wholesale consumption of honey, and would be actually out of pocket unless we would be willing to pay her twenty-five centimes (five cents) apiece more. Of course if we didn’t think it right——But we did, and so assured her!

That morning we called on some friends, a retired Rear Admiral and his family, at one of the hotels, and had the novel sensation of talking “American” for an hour or more, declined their invitation to lunch, got our letters and a hamper of clothes from the post-office, shifted into mountaineering costume again and returned our traveling outfit by the convenient mail to Grindelwald.

Belle Soeur and Antonio had noticed the day before the bill-of-fare of a restaurant outside its door, the prices of which had struck them as the most phenomenally low they had ever seen, and the place looked clean and respectable. It was on the other side of the river, on the way to the train we were to take for Chamonix. So we resolved to get our luncheon there.

It was not till we were inside and giving our order that we woke up to the fact that it was a charitable institution—a sort of soup-kitchen financially backed by a committee of ladies. A quick vote taken showed that we declined to beat a retreat at that late date, so we had a remarkably fine lunch, thanks to the charitable ladies, at the interesting price of ten cents apiece. It included roast beef (a big, tender, juicy slice), five cents, mashed potatoes, two cents, bread, one cent, and seltzer water, two cents. We were later than the conventional lunch hour and had the place to ourselves, so could not judge who or what its usual patrons were; but evidently we were raras aves, to judge by the stir and amusement we created among the employees.