An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

We watched the snow line creep up at the beginning of the season and down again at the end. We watched the mountains hide themselves in black lowering clouds, saw them lit up by flashes of lightning, heard them roll back the thunder, saw them repent and hang out a rainbow from the Wetterhorn precipice across the white of the Upper Glacier and down in front of the Mettenberg, the upper peaks shake off their bad humor and emerge from the clouds all wet and shiny, rocks as well as snow, in the happy sunlight. Eiger is the same as ogre, etymologically, I suppose. Anyhow, it means giant, I have somewhere read. But when the wind blew fleecy white clouds across his gray flank and summit, half-hiding, half-revealing, the effect was as alluring as a chiffon veil on a beautiful woman. Then there was the delicate pink Alpenglow to hope for about simultaneously with dessert. Sometimes instead there were eerie green lights among firns and snowfields and white peaks above the Lower Glacier, wherefore one of them is named the Grindelwalder Grünhorn. And later, when the dinner things had been cleared away and the moon came up over the mountain walls of the valley, our world was too beautiful to be true. It was so exquisite that it almost hurt. It induced silence and a sort of swelling of the heart and an overpowering desire to be good....

Grindelwald Valley and Wetterhorn

I did not mean to be betrayed into a rhapsody. Permit me to call attention to the dash of “local color” on our dinner-table furnished by the cow-bell with which we summoned Suzanne from the kitchen. I have that cow-bell still among my most valued possessions. It and the bowl of wild flowers in the center of the table (not to mention the view) quite redeemed the meagerness of the Frau Secundärlehrer’s table linen and our consciousness that there were just exactly enough knives, forks, spoons, cups, saucers, plates and glasses to go around once and that they had to be washed between courses! If I wanted to ask anyone to dinner, I would have to send to the village to buy one more of everything!

I have now confided to you nearly everything I know about our housekeeping arrangements, but I have not even mentioned our good cook, Anna. This is not surprising, for she was the most unobtrusive person I ever met in my life. I secured her through an Interlaken employment agency, but she was not at all like the output of an employment agency in our own glorious land of the free. Her voice was so low and she was so timid and deprecatory that it was sometimes extremely difficult to find out what she was talking about. She was so superlatively meek that she seemed always to be inviting one to ill-treat her. I suppose it was this characteristic which made Suzanne bully her so at first. At Nice we had had a cook who kept Suzanne terrorized, drove her out of the kitchen with a poker and reduced her to daily tears. The joy of emancipation from that servitude, combined with Anna’s meekness, were evidently too much for her. This time it was Anna who wept. She came to me at the end of a fortnight and told me she would have to leave, that she seemed to be able to please Madame well enough, but that it was quite impossible to satisfy Suzanne. I told her to think better of it, reasoned with Suzanne and appealed to her sympathies (she has the best heart in the world), and the two soon became excellent friends.

Dear little mild, meek, faithful Anna, I do hope she is prospering! She was a widow and supported her three little children on the thirty-five francs a month she got from me. I put it up to forty-five, unsolicited, from pure sympathy, but I don’t suppose she could get more than half of that through the winter. She was bilingual,—French and German,—so it was easy for all of us to communicate with her, and she had pretty rosy cheeks and soft, good eyes.

I remember the time I asked her (speaking French) what they called a bureau (commode) in German. “On l’appelle comme ça,” she murmured flutteringly. “Comme ça?” I repeated. “But what do they call it?” “On l’appelle comme ça,” she said again more flutteringly than before. We bandied this back and forth until I thought we had struck an impasse like that of the famous story where the Englishman asks the Scotchman what there is in haggis. The Scotchman begins to enumerate, “There’s leeks intilt,” and the Englishman, not understanding the word, interrupts, “But what’s ‘intilt’?” “I’m telling ye,” says the Scotchman, “there’s leeks intilt.” “But I want to know what’s ‘intilt.’” “If ye’ll only keep quiet ye’ll know what’s intilt. There’s leeks....” And so it goes on forever. Anna and I would probably be doing the same until now, her voice growing more frightened and fluttering each time, had I not lost patience and exclaimed, “Comme QUOI, mon Dieu? Say to me in German, ‘There’s a bureau in my room.’” By which means I discovered that she meant the same word, commode, was used in German as in French.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to tell a little more about our landlord and his family. The Herr Secundärlehrer, as might be inferred, taught in the higher grades at the big school-house, with so many lovely mottoes painted outside, at the edge of the village. He was evidently proud of his learned calling, for his title was inscribed on his cards and letterheads and invariably appended to his signature. But that, of course, is characteristically German. He was a good-looking man of about thirty, his face a trifle heavy in repose and just a little weak, but lighting up charmingly when he smiled. Like most Swiss, he carried himself rather slouchily. I don’t know how strenuously he may have labored during school hours, but he was nearly always resting out of them. Not so his wife. She was a teacher in the primary school, but that was merely an incident in her life. She also kept the store and cared for her three small children and took charge of the family housekeeping (with the aid of the little dienst-mädchen), did washing and sewing, and along in the late twilight would be standing by a table outside the door of the store (ready for a customer if one should come) ironing till the last ray of light faded. Or she and the dienst-mädchen would take hoe and spade and weed the cabbage patch or get the ground ready for planting turnips. While they did that, the masculine head of the family would sit on a bench smoking. They don’t spoil their women in Switzerland.

That reminds me of the local newspaper we subscribed to. It came three times a week and once in a while contained an illustrated supplement, with stories and poems, which were not exciting, but highly moral. The news part contained, besides local items of occasional interest, a quaint little summary of what was going on in the world, from the standpoint of the Grindelwald valley, and delicious editorials on such burning topics of the day as Love, Shakespeare, or the Sphere of Woman.