An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

One day Frater and I went to Interlaken for some shopping. He walked both ways, but I went down by train. We were late starting back and wasted a mile or so by attempting a short cut as we left the town. During the summer the long, long twilight had been a noticeable feature. It was still daylight at nine o’clock. But now it got dark by seven or before and the last hour of our walk was in such inky darkness that we could scarcely make out the highroad in front of our feet. We saw the lights of the village glimmering a welcome long before we reached it, and had developed a wonderful appetite for our belated dinner by the time we arrived at the châlet.

Another day we made our long-projected trip to the Lauterbrunnen valley. It was one of those things so perfectly easy to do that all summer long we had not done it. Frater and I walked over the divide by way of the Männlichen, where we ate our lunch and bade an affectionate farewell to that grandest of panoramas, passing down the other side through Byron’s Wengern Alp to the village of Lauterbrunnen, where at tea-time we met the Mother, Belle Soeur and the Elder Babe, who had come by train. The Mother was the only member of the crowd who felt wealthy enough to take the trip to Mürren, a summer resort on a great cliff overlooking the Lauterbrunnen valley on the far side, commanding a fine view of the Jungfrau, with the deep valley well in the foreground. It is reached by a very steep-grade cable and electric railway. The rest of us contented ourselves with walking to the Staubbach Falls.

The waterfalls of the Lauterbrunnen valley have a great reputation, as they drop over a cliff about a thousand feet high and turn to spray long before they reach the bottom. But their volume is so insignificant that they are little more than a silver ribbon, and while interesting, they are certainly not equal to their reputation. The great falls of the Yosemite (to which they are often compared) would dwarf them utterly.

We all walked together down the Interlaken highroad, turning back frequently to watch the sunset lights on the Jungfrau, to the joining of the Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald valleys, where we boarded the train for home.

Lauterbrunnen

This was our very last excursion. There were a few things we had meant to do and hadn’t had time for, chief of them the ascent of the Schwarzhorn, a nine-thousand-foot peak behind us, to the east of the Faulhorn. It might at this time have been more appropriately named Weisshorn, for the autumn snows had covered all its black rock ledges. Belle Soeur and I had a notion we might still do it alone during the week after Frater left. But we didn’t. And there had been a great many things that we had intended to do over again, but found no time for.

Before we knew it, it was October 3rd, and we were seeing off Frater at the station.

I must not forget about the conveyance of his baggage thither. He and Antonio had brought no trunks with them, but each had a large telescope bag, which held as much as a small steamer trunk. When Antonio left, he had hired a lad with a hand cart, who lived in a châlet to the rear of us and was one of a large and impecunious family who liked odd jobs and old clothes and the left-overs from our table, to take it to the station for him. The day before Frater’s departure, we told Anna to engage the lad again. What was our surprise, as the time drew near to leave for the station, when there appeared, instead of the boy and his cart, his fourteen-year-old sister with a rack on her back. She explained that her brother and the cart had an all-day’s job, and she had come in his place to take the gentleman’s valise to the station. The poor girl already had her shoulders curved by the carrying of burdens. It seemed brutal to let her do it, yet even more so to deny her the chance of earning a little money. Besides, it was quite too late to get any one else, and Frater admitted that he was unequal to carrying the thing a mile and a half. So off we trudged in a procession, the young portress bringing up the rear, and we told Frater this little service from a member of the “housely herd” furnished the fitting last touch of “local color” to his Swiss summer.