An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

Our last week was given over to packing and paying bills and cleaning house and all sorts of prosaic last things. I do not remember that we went anywhere except to the Upper Glacier and the village. I do remember the snow though. We had said many times during the season that we wished we could see our beloved Grindelwald valley in its winter dress, but we hardly expected our wish to be granted. It was, though, most fully, and with effects unspeakably beautiful. We had a regular roaring blizzard for about three days, during which we kept the cylinder stove in the lower hall burning furiously, and abandoned the second story as uninhabitable. I fancy the owners do the same in the winter. The little hall stove and the kitchen stove can hardly be said to have kept the lower story comfortable. We could still see our frosted breath. But they made life endurable.

When it cleared off, we looked out at a veritable fairyland. All the world was buried under at least a foot of the purest white snow imaginable. Every tree was bending its branches beneath the burden of it. The mountains were dazzling. Even the rocky cliffs of Wetterhorn and Mettenberg had the soft white powder adhering to their perpendicular surfaces. If we had had any way of keeping ourselves even half-way comfortable indoors, I do not see how we could have torn ourselves away from it!

I regret to have to chronicle that our last hours were marred, beyond the inevitable sadness of parting and the inevitable fatigue of packing, by the inexplicable conduct of the Herr Secundärlehrer and his Frau. It is the well-known habit of landlords on the continent to run up a bill on their tenants for breakage, wear and tear, and “extras” limited only by their idea of the workableness of the persons they are dealing with. But the Herr Secundärlehrer and his wife had seemed so utterly honest and straightforward, so trusting and unmercenary, that I had no anticipation of anything of the sort from them. They had not wanted a lease or an inventory or their money in advance or any of the things the typical landlord looks out for. They had declined payment for ever so many things that they might legitimately have taken it for. So it was a shock when the bill came in.

I had had great difficulty in getting it. They were evidently saving it for the last moment. Finally, after repeated requests and messages on my part, it was handed through the kitchen window by the Frau to the cook late Saturday evening, the Frau immediately vanishing into the darkness.

The Mother, Belle Soeur and the Elder Babe were leaving Sunday morning early with most of the baggage. Suzanne, the Younger Babe, and I, after the last house-cleaning, were to leave by the same early train Monday, rejoining the others at Lucerne. All day Sunday I tried to get hold of either the Secundärlehrer or his wife. I was told that he was sick—that he was asleep—that his wife was busy. Finally, after an especially emphatic message, late in the afternoon, the Secundärlehrer appeared, looking very much the worse for wear (as was sometimes the case with him on Sunday, I regret to say, after a convivial Saturday evening with cronies in the village) and in a very bearish humor.

I have always been of the opinion that his wife did not approve of the bill and kept away because she was ashamed. Certainly she never appeared again on our horizon to say good-bye, and I had to send the keys to her by Anna when we left. I am also of the opinion that the Secundärlehrer had been put up to that bill by some of his worldly-wise friends in the village and coached what to say when I objected.

The bill was about three-quarters of a yard long, and though it was not very enormous in its sum total (the extras were inside of a hundred francs), many of the items were so preposterously unjust that one could hardly accept them meekly.

One of the foremost was the bath tub. I think it was twenty francs that was put down for the use of it. The bath tub was a full-sized porcelain-lined one which the Herr had ordered in a spasm of modernness before he rented the house to us, but which arrived only after our installation. They put it down outside the house and left it there for some days till I made inquiries. The Herr explained to me that he thought every progressive family should own a bath tub and that he had intended putting it in the little room opening off the kitchen. This was the only place we had to keep provisions in, the kitchen itself being quite too tiny, and I really couldn’t give it up, but my soul yearned for that bath tub. The Herr then suggested that it could be put up on the porch (the one we did not take our meals on), connected with the water faucet in the kitchen by a length of garden hose, and surrounded by curtains. He said his wife would see to the curtain part if we would permit them to bring their children over once a week for a bath. It was so arranged, and a very funny out-door bathroom it was. The children of the neighborhood were so much interested in its workings that one felt little privacy inside, even after having sent Anna out to shoo them away and expended a paper of safety pins on the blowing curtains. When I objected to being charged for this luxury, the Herr informed me that at a hotel we would have had to pay a franc apiece for every bath we took, at which rate it would have amounted, in the course of the season, to much more than twenty francs. He knew this was so, because he had once taken a bath at a hotel and been charged a franc.

The item of cellar rent was another which I objected to. There was a small cellar under the rear part of our house which I had said I must have the use of when negotiating. It was much encumbered with many things which they said they could not move out, but we were quite welcome to use it too. After about a month they told Anna that this joint use was inconvenient to them and that they would give us a cellar room to ourselves under the neighboring school-house. It gave Anna a great many extra steps going over there for milk and other supplies, but she bore it patiently in order to be obliging. But to be charged extra for the discomfort was trying!

When I voiced this sentiment, the Herr Secundärlehrer launched forth into a most extraordinary tirade about having lost several hundred francs from the wine he had bought to sell to me, which I had not purchased, and his great magnanimity in not putting this on the bill. This was so unaccountable that I could hardly believe my ears. “But I never authorized you to buy any wine for me,” I naturally protested. “Of course you didn’t,” was his astounding reply, “you were entirely too clever to do that.” Considering that this was the first time the subject of his selling wine to me had ever been broached, this was to say the least puzzling. Was it just plain bluff and bluster to divert attention from the items on the bill, or is there some unwritten law in the Oberland that you buy wine from your landlord when you rent a house?