George. H. Thomson and Gloria Fromm agree that Dorothy Richardson spent two weeks at the Swiss Alpine resort of Adelboden in the Bernese Oberland in 1904. She would have taken the boat train from London to Paris via Brighton and Dieppe, then changed to the overnight train from Paris to Berne. From Berne, she ascended to Spiez and then Frutigen by a smaller Alpine train, and finally to Adelboden by sleigh. In Oberland, Richardson shifts Miriam Henderson’s visit forward to 1905, but the route appears identical.
If Miriam’s Hotel Alpenstock is based on the hotel (or pension) where she stayed, then, according to the Baedeker guide entry for Adelboden, it would have been either the Alpenrose, the Alpenruhe (Alps Rest), or the Alpenblick (Alps View).
In 1924, several years before the publication of Oberland, Richardson published the following article in The Sphere under the odd title of “The Role of the Background: English Visitors to Swiss Resorts During the Winter Sports Season.”
The first time I played golf I discovered what has remained, for me, the underlying secret of the charm of the game. I discovered it the moment I succeeded in bringing off a long drive. The ball, the only ball, disappeared over the edge of the cliff. There could be no more golf that day. But I left the headland a golfer, entranced. And only half of my ‘entrancement was the sense of having learned to drive straight and far. The rest was due to what happened as my club made, perforce, its unexpected sweeping curve upwards through the air, and my body, also perforce and unexpectedly, swung round upon its rooted toes in a complementary spiral. Was due to the sudden lift and sweep, accompanying my own swift movement, of the quiet sky and the motionless wide landscape. Golf is golf. But golf is also the earth and the sky about you, moving with you, quiet in the still moments that precede your stroke, swinging poised on their centre while, poised, you swing. And while it is perhaps golf that most intimately reveals to the player the réle of the background, there is no game, of all those that set earth and sky in movement about you, that can compare, by reason of its setting, with any kind of winter sport, and no proof of the part played in any and every game by its surroundings more convincing than the spectacle of the English coming out in their thousands, in mid-winter, to the Alps.
What, some twenty years ago, would have been the feelings of the average Englishman if asked to renounce any part of his English winter, the amenities of town, his hunting, his country-house Christmas, in favour of exile in a Swiss mountain village? He did not, it is true, know very much about a Swiss mountain village in winter-time. And, but for the pioneers of winter sports, Switzerland would still be, to him, only the summer Alps of the mountaineers, the lake-towns of the holiday-makers, and the places accessible therefrom. And even to-day he would 1 to the be chary of admitting that his love for winter sports is largely aesthetic. For while overtly and without shame the Englishman rejoices, especially when there is the spice of danger, in all tests of skill, to the appeal of beauty he responds shyly. Yet who can deny that the surroundings are at least one-half of the charm of even the fiercest of the games played in mid-winter amongst the snows?
It is certain that if a glorified “Prince’s” were to contrive arrangements for ski-ing and bobbing, those who know their Swiss winter would remain unmoved.
From the groups passing each morning along. the village street it is easy, apart from their speech and bearing, to select the English. They may laugh and make merry. They usually do. The mere going out into the crystalline air whose touch is electric upon the face, the snow mountains all about one, the sunlit diamond-sprent snow over the valley floor and crisp under one’s feet, the frost-bound stillness (broken by the sound of sleigh-bells) that yet is not cold — never the penetrating cold we know in England — and the never-to-be-forgotten characteristic smell of the Swiss village in winter, the smell of burning pine logs . all these things are gladness.
But the English are set gravely upon the business of the day. The skaters walk in a dream. They may be making their morning visit to the small palace of facilities called so modestly Postes et Telegraphes. But their business is at hand. They are already within the spell of the rink. There they will skate all day like souls possessed. As the afternoon wanes they will be skating to music. In the evening some of them will come forth and skate again under the soft brilliance of electric light. The ski-ers clump along with radiant faces. Their bourne is afar, upon the high slopes. They have always, the long-distance ski-ers especially, the look of the chosen. Fine-drawn, tested men are they. ‘The aristocrats of winter sportsmen. It is their achievement that gives its peculiar zest to the freemasonry existing amongst the English out here, the freemasonry of race and of sport, including within its charmed circle the most timid luguese and the most elderly onlooker. Not a small part of the refreshments of a Swiss winter holiday is a sharply-renewed sense of these ancient bonds….
And it is easy, watching these sportsmen, to understand how they have earned their reputation for caring, deeply, for nothing but sport. They will talk their games interminably. They will talk, engrossed, as they lounge, honourably weary, at the end of their day, with the most magnificent afterglow flooding the surrounding scene. But it is noteworthy that the moment the scene is set, before the lawns are flooded or the snow is fit, the English are here. They were here this year at the beginning of December.