An Oberland Châlet

At a period when everybody travels, and the yearly number of English-speaking visitors in Switzerland is counted by the hundred thousand, the writer who presumes to offer the long-suffering public a book of Swiss impressions would seem to be courting the yawn reserved for the Nth repetition of the Utterly Familiar. But the discoverer of a new country still has, I believe, some privileges. It might even be considered selfish of one who had found the way back to Arcadia to keep the sailing directions secret. And though there are countless tourists who know the Swiss hotels and mountain railroads, numerous villa people well versed in the tennis and golf facilities of Montreux or Lucerne, and a goodly company of Alpinists who can tell you all about guides and ropes and the ascent of the Matterhorn, there never was anybody who got out of a Swiss summer precisely what we did, or who, in fact, knows our own particular private Switzerland at all.


In the beginning, there were but four—no, five—of us,—Belle Soeur and my two Babes and I and our good French Suzanne, who, besides looking out for the Younger Babe, performed various useful functions about the house. After some six weeks Frater and his college chum, Antonio, dropped in on us from their commencement across the sea, and a few days later the Mother.

Now the Husband-and-Father, who is also the brother of Belle Soeur, and incidentally a naval officer, had been ordered from the Mediterranean, where he had been cruising, to the Philippines, which are not so nice, especially for Babes, particularly in summer. So, instead of following him when we gave up our little villa on the hills above Nice the first of June, we moved into Switzerland. None of us had ever been there before except the Chronicler and the Mother, who had spent the usual sort of summer there when the Chronicler was a small child. We knew we wanted to be high enough for bracing air, as far as possible from tourist centers and among the really and truly great and lofty mountains. So we went to Interlaken for a start and hunted around among the neighboring mountain villages till we found what we were after. And on the tenth day we moved into the Châlet Edelweiss, which lies about a mile and a half from the Grindelwald station on the road to the Upper Glacier, and started housekeeping.

It did not seem very propitious that first day. It was raining dismally when we got off the train; the roads were full of mud, and the clouds had rolled down over the mountains, so that nothing could be seen but the big brick Bear Hotel and the ugly village street lined with shops and restaurants. I tried to remember how beautiful it had been the day I was in Grindelwald house-hunting, and the others tried to act as if they believed what I was telling them about it, but I knew they didn’t, and they knew I knew they didn’t. When we got to the house, it, too, was depressing. On the bright sunshiny day when I had seen it before, it had looked primitive enough, but now it seemed aggressively barren and comfortless. Was it possible that we could live in this barn for four months? I could see the effort the family were making to act as if they liked it—all but the Younger Babe, who made no effort at all, but got frankly quivery about the lower lip and begged to be taken back to the Villetta Valentine at Nice or even to the hotel in Interlaken. “I don’t like this house!” he said. “It’s an ugly house. It’s not a happy little home. It’s ugly. It hasn’t got any ‘fings’ in it. It hasn’t even got any paper on the wall!”