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The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

by Elizabeth Von Arnim · English · Gutenberg #33762 · 433,203 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

Author: Elizabeth Von Arnim


        
Release date: September 19, 2010 [eBook #33762]
                Most recently updated: March 18, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33762

Credits: Produced by Laura McDonald (http://www.girlebooks.com) and Marc D'Hooghe


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RÜGEN ***

THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RÜGEN

BY

THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"


New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.


1904



[Illustration: map of Rügen]


CONTENTS


THE FIRST DAY--From Miltzow to Lauterbach

THE SECOND DAY--Lauterbach and Vilm

THE THIRD DAY--From Lauterbach to Göhren

THE FOURTH DAY--From Göhren to Thiessow

THE FOURTH DAY (continued)--At Thiessow

THE FIFTH DAY--From Thiessow to Sellin

THE FIFTH DAY (continued)--From Sellin to Binz

THE SIXTH DAY--The Jagdschloss

THE SIXTH DAY (continued)--The Granitz Woods, Schwarze See, and Kieköwer

THE SEVENTH DAY--From Binz to Stubbenkammer

THE SEVENTH DAY (continued)--At Stubbenkammer

THE EIGHTH DAY--From Stubbenkammer to Glowe

THE NINTH DAY--From Glowe to Wiek

THE TENTH DAY--From Wiek to Hiddensee

THE ELEVENTH DAY--From Wiek Home





THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RÜGEN




THE FIRST DAY

FROM MILTZOW TO LAUTERBACH


Every one who has been to school and still remembers what he was taught
there, knows that Rügen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and
that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania.

Round this island I wished to walk this summer, but no one would walk
with me. It is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the
life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on
anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a
thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. If you
drive you are bound by a variety of considerations, eight of the most
important being the horses' legs. If you bicycle--but who that loves to
get close to nature would bicycle? And as for motors, the object of a
journey like mine was not the getting to a place but the going there.

Successively did I invite the most likely of my women friends, numbering
at least a dozen, to walk with me. They one and all replied that it
would make them tired and that it would be dull; and when I tried to
remove the first objection by telling them how excellent it would be for
the German nation, especially those portions of it that are still to
come, if its women walked round Rügen more often, they stared and
smiled; and when I tried to remove the second by explaining that by our
own spirits are we deified, they stared and smiled more than ever.

Walking, then, was out of the question, for I could not walk alone. The
grim monster Conventionality whose iron claws are for ever on my
shoulder, for ever pulling me back from the harmless and the wholesome,
put a stop to that even if I had not been afraid of tramps, which I was.
So I drove, and it was round Rügen that I drove because one hot
afternoon when I was idling in the library, not reading but fingering
the books, taking out first one and then another, dipping into them,
deciding which I would read next, I came across Marianne North's
_Recollections of a Happy Life_, and hit upon the page where she begins
to talk of Rügen. Immediately interested--for is not Rügen nearer to me
than any other island?--I became absorbed in her description of the
bathing near a place called Putbus, of the deliciousness of it in a
sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about
on its crystal surface, and beautiful jelly-fish, stars of purest
colours, floated with you. I threw down the book to ransack the shelves
for a guide to Rügen. On the first page of the first one I found was
this remarkable paragraph:--

'Hearest thou the name Rügen, so doth a wondrous spell come over thee.
Before thine eyes it rises as a dream of far-away, beauteous fairylands.
Images and figures of long ago beckon thee across to the marvellous
places where in grey prehistoric times they dwelt, and on which they
have left the shadow of their presence. And in thee stirs a mighty
desire to wander over the glorious, legend-surrounded island. Cord up,
then, thy light bundle, take to heart Shylock's advice to put money in
thy purse, and follow me without fear of the threatening sea-sickness
which may overtake thee on the short crossing, for it has never yet done
any one more harm than imposing on him a rapidly-passing discomfort.'

This seemed to me very irresistible. Surely a place that inspired such a
mingling of the lofty and the homely in its guide-books must be well
worth seeing? There was a drought just then going on at home. My eyes
were hot with watching a garden parch browner day by day beneath a sky
of brass. I felt that it only needed a little energy, and in a few hours
I too might be floating among those jelly-fish, in the shadow of the
cliffs of the legend-surrounded island. And even better than being
surrounded by legends those breathless days would it be to have the sea
all round me. Such a sea too! Did I not know it? Did I not know its
singular limpidity? The divineness of its blue where it was deep, the
clearness of its green where it was shallow, lying tideless along its
amber shores? The very words made me thirsty--amber shores; lazy waves
lapping them slowly; vast spaces for the eye to wander over; rocks, and
seaweed, and cool, gorgeous jelly-fish. The very map at the beginning of
the guide-book made me thirsty, the land was so succulently green, the
sea all round so bland a blue. And what a fascinating island it is on
the map--an island of twists and curves and inland seas called Bodden;
of lakes, and woods, and frequent ferries; with lesser islands dotted
about its coasts; with bays innumerable stretching their arms out into
the water; and with one huge forest, evidently magnificent, running
nearly the whole length of the east coast, following its curves, dipping
down to the sea in places, and in others climbing up chalk cliffs to
crown them with the peculiar splendour of beeches.

It does not take me long to make up my mind, still less to cord up my
light bundle, for somebody else does that; and I think it was only two
days after I first found Marianne North and the guide-book that my maid
Gertrud and I got out of a suffocating train into the freshness that
blows round ryefields near the sea, and began our journey into the
unknown.

It was a little wayside station on the line between Berlin and
Stralsund, called Miltzow, a solitary red building on the edge of a
pine-wood, that witnessed the beginning of our tour. The carriage had
been sent on the day before, and round it, on our arrival, stood the
station authorities in an interested group. The stationmaster,
everywhere in Germany an elaborate, Olympic person in white gloves,
actually helped the porter to cord on my hold-all with his own hands,
and they both lingered over it as if loth to let us go. Evidently the
coachman had told them what I was going to do, and I suppose such an
enterprising woman does not get out at Miltzow every day. They packed us
in with the greatest care, with so much care that I thought they would
never have done. My hold-all was the biggest piece of luggage, and they
corded it on in an upright position at our feet. I had left the choosing
of its contents to Gertrud, only exhorting her, besides my pillow, to
take a sufficiency of soap and dressing-gowns. Gertrud's luggage was
placed by the porter on her lap. It was almost too modest. It was one
small black bag, and a great part of its inside must, I knew, be taken
up by the stockings she had brought to knit and the needles she did it
with; yet she looked quite as respectable the day we came home as she
did the day we started, and every bit as clean. My dressing-case was put
on the box, and on top of it was a brown cardboard hat-box containing
the coachman's wet-weather hat. A thick coat for possible cold days made
a cushion for my back, and Gertrud's waterproof did the same thing for
hers. Wedged in between us was the tea-basket, rattling inharmoniously,
but preventing our slipping together in sloping places. Behind us in the
hood were the umbrellas, rugs, guide-books, and maps, besides one of
those round shiny yellow wooden band-boxes into which every decent
German woman puts her best hat. This luggage, and some mysterious
bundles on the box that the coachman thought were hidden by his legs but
which bulged out unhideable on either side, prevented our looking
elegant; but I did not want to look elegant, and I had gathered from the
remarks of those who had refused to walk that Rügen was not a place
where I should meet any one who did.

Now I suppose I could talk for a week and yet give no idea whatever of
the exultation that filled my soul as I gazed on these arrangements. The
picnic-like simplicity of them was so full of promise. It was as though
I were going back to the very morning of life, to those fresh years when
shepherd boys and others shout round one for no reason except that they
are out of doors and alive. Also, during the years that have come after,
years that may properly be called riper, it has been a conviction of
mine that there is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the
frequent turning of one's back on duties. This was exactly what I was
doing; and oh ye rigid female martyrs on the rack of daily
exemplariness, ye unquestioning patient followers of paths that have
been pointed out, if only you knew the wholesome joys of sometimes being
less good!

The point at which we were is the nearest from which Rügen can be
reached by persons coming up from the south and going to drive. No one
ever gets out there who is bound for Rügen, because no one ever drives
to Rügen. The ordinary tourist, almost exclusively German, goes first to
Stralsund, is taken across the narrow strip of water, train and all, on
the steam ferry, and continues without changing till he reaches the open
sea on the other side of the island at Sassnitz. Or he goes by train
from Berlin to Stettin and then by steamer down the Oder, crosses the
open sea for four hours, and arrives, probably pensive for the boats are
small and the waves are often big, at Göhren, the first stopping-place
on the island's east coast.

We were not ordinary tourists, and having got to Miltzow were to be
independent of all such wearinesses as trains and steamers till the day
we wanted to come back again. From Miltzow we were going to drive to a
ferry three miles off at a place called Stahlbrode, cross the mile of
water, land on the island's south shore, and go on at once that
afternoon to the jelly-fish of Miss North's Putbus, which were beckoning
me across to the legend-surrounded island far more irresistibly than any
of those grey figures the guide-book talked about.

The carriage was a light one of the victoria genus with a hood; the
horses were a pair esteemed at home for their meekness; the coachman,
August, was a youth who had never yet driven straight on for an
indefinite period without turning round once, and he looked as though he
thought he were going to enjoy himself. I was sure I was going to enjoy
myself. Gertrud, I fancy, was without these illusions; but she is old,
and has got out of the habit of being anything but resigned. She was the
sop on this occasion thrown to the Grim One of the iron claws, for I
would far rather have gone alone. But Gertrud is very silent; to go with
her would be as nearly like being alone as it is possible to be when you
are not. She could, I knew, be trusted to sit by my side knitting,
however bumpy the road, and not opening her lips unless asked a
question. Admirable virtue of silence, most precious, because most rare,
jewel in the crown of female excellences, not possessed by a single one
of those who had refused to walk! If either of them had occupied
Gertrud's place and driven with me would she not, after the way of
women, have spent the first half of the time telling me her secrets and
the other half being angry with me because I knew them? And then
Gertrud, after having kept quiet all day, would burst into activities at
night, unpack the hold-all, produce pleasant things like slippers, see
that my bed was as I like it, and end by tucking me up in it and going
away on tiptoe with her customary quaint benediction, bestowed on me
every night at bedtime: 'The dear God protect and bless the gracious
one,' says Gertrud as she blows out the candle.

'And may He also protect and bless thee,' I reply; and could as ill
spare my pillow as her blessing.

It was half-past two in the afternoon of the middle Friday in July when
we left the station officials to go back to their dull work and trotted
round the corner into the wide world. The sky was a hot blue. The road
wound with gentle ups and downs between fields whitening to harvest.
High over our heads the larks quivered in the light, shaking out that
rapturous song that I can never hear without a throb of gratitude for
being alive. There were no woods or hills, and we could see a long way
on either side, see the red roofs of farms clustered wherever there was
a hollow to protect them from the wild winds of winter, see the straight
double line of trees where the high road to Stralsund cut across ours,
see a little village a mile ahead of us with a venerable church on a
mound in the middle of it gravely presiding over the surrounding wide
parish of corn. I think I must have got out at least six times during
the short drive between Miltzow and the ferry pretending I wanted
flowers, but really to enjoy the delight of loitering. The rye was full
of chickory and poppies, the ditches along the road where the spring
dampness still lingered were white with the delicate loveliness of
cow-parsley, that most spiritual of weeds. I picked an armful of it to
hold up against the blue of the sky while we were driving; I gave
Gertrud a bunch of poppies for which she thanked me without enthusiasm;
I put little posies of chickory at the horses' ears; in fact I felt and
behaved as if I were fifteen and out for my first summer holiday. But
what did it matter? There was nobody there to see.

Stahlbrode is the most innocent-looking place--a small cluster of
cottages on grass that goes down to the water. It was quite empty and
silent. It has a long narrow wooden jetty running across the marshy
shore to the ferry, and moored to the end of this jetty lay a big
fishing-smack with furled brown sails. I got out and walked down to it
to see if it were the ferry-boat, and whether the ferryman was in it.
Both August and the horses had an alarmed, pricked-up expression as they
saw me going out into the jaws of the sea. Even the emotionless Gertrud
put away her stocking and stood by the side of the carriage watching me.
The jetty was roughly put together, and so narrow that the carriage
would only just fit in. A slight wooden rail was all the protection
provided; but the water was not deep, and heaved limpidly over the
yellow sand at the bottom. The shore we were on was flat and vividly
green, the shore of Rügen opposite was flat and vividly green; the sea
between was a lovely, sparkling blue; the sky was strewn across with
loose clusters of pearly clouds; the breeze that had played so gently
among the ears of corn round Miltzow danced along the little waves and
splashed them gaily against the wooden posts of the jetty as though the
freshness down there on the water had filled it with new life. I found
the boat empty, a thing of steep sides and curved bottom, a thing that
was surely never intended for the ferrying across of horses and
carriages. No other boat was to be seen. Up the channel and down the
channel there was nothing visible but the flat green shores, the dancing
water, the wide sky, the bland afternoon light.

I turned back thoughtfully to the cottages. Suppose the ferry were only
used for ferrying people? If so, we were in an extremely tiresome fix. A
long way back against the sky I could see the line of trees bordering
the road to Stralsund, and the whole dull, dusty distance would have to
be driven over if the Stahlbrode ferry failed us. August took off his
hat when I came up to him, and said ominously, 'Does the gracious one
permit that I speak a few words?'

'Speak them, August.'

'It is very windy.'

'Not very.'

'It is far to go on water.'

'Not very.'

'Never yet have I been on the sea.'

'Well, you are going on it now.'

With an expression made up of two parts fright and one resignation he
put on his hat again and relapsed into a silence that was grim. I took
Gertrud with me to give me a countenance and walked across to the inn, a
new red-brick house standing out boldly on a bit of rising ground, end
ways on to the sea. The door was open and we went in, knocking with my
sunshade on the floor. We stirred up no life of any sort. Not even a dog
barked at us. The passage was wide and clean with doors on each side of
it and an open door at either end--the one we had come in by followed by
the afternoon sun, and the other framing a picture of sky with the sea
at the bottom, the jetty, the smack with folded sails, and the coast of
Rügen. Seeing a door with _Gaststube_ painted on it I opened it and
peeped in. To my astonishment it was full of men smoking in silence, and
all with their eyes fixed on the opening door. They must have heard us.
They must have seen us passing the window as we came up to the house. I
concluded that the custom of the district requires that strangers shall
in no way be interfered with until they actually ask definite questions;
that it was so became clear by the alacrity with which a yellow-bearded
man jumped up on our asking how we could get across to Rügen, and told
us he was the ferryman and would take us there.

'But there is a carriage--can that go too?' I inquired anxiously,
thinking of the deep bottom and steep sides of the fishing-smack.

'_Alles, Alles_,' he said cheerily; and calling to a boy to come and
help he led the way through the door framing the sea, down a tiny, sandy
garden prickly with gooseberry bushes, to the place where August sat
marvelling on his box.

'Come along!' he shouted as he ran past him.

'What, along that thing of wood?' cried August. 'With my horses? And my
newly-varnished carriage?'

'Come along!' shouted the ferryman, half-way down the jetty.

'Go on, August,' I commanded.

'It can never be accomplished,' said August, visibly breaking out into a
perspiration.

'Go on,' I repeated sternly; but thought it on the whole more discreet
to go on myself on my own feet, and so did Gertrud.

'If the gracious one insists----' faltered August, and began to drive
gingerly down to the jetty with the face of one who thinks his last hour
well on the way.

As I had feared, the carriage was very nearly smashed getting it over
the sides of the smack. I sat up in the bows looking on in terror,
expecting every instant to see the wheels wrenched off, and with their
wrenching the end of our holiday. The optimistic ferryman assured us
that it was going in quite easily--like a lamb, he declared, with great
boldness of imagery. He sloped two ineffectual planks, one for each set
of wheels, up the side of the boat, and he and August, hatless,
coatless, and breathless, lifted the carriage over on to them. It was a
horrid moment. The front wheels twisted right round and were as near
coming off as any wheels I saw in my life. I was afraid to look at
August, so right did he seem to have been when he protested that the
thing could not be accomplished. Yet there was Rügen and here were we,
and we had to get across to it somehow or turn round and do the dreary
journey to Stralsund.

The horses, both exceedingly restive, had been unharnessed and got in
first. They were held in the stern of the boat by two boys, who needed
all their determination to do it. Then it was that I was thankful for
the boat's steep sides, for if they had been lower those horses would
certainly have kicked themselves over into the sea; and what should I
have done then? And how should I have faced him who is in authority over
me if I returned to him without his horses?

'We take them across daily,' the ferryman remarked, airily jerking his
thumb in the direction of the carriage.

'Do so many people drive to Rügen?' I asked astonished, for the plank
arrangements were staringly makeshift.

'Many people?' cried the ferryman. 'Rightly speaking, crowds.'

He was trying to make me happy. At least it reassured August to hear it;
but I could not suppress a smile of deprecation at the size of the fib.

By this time we were under weigh, a fair wind sending us merrily over
the water. The ferryman steered; August stood at his horses' heads
talking to them soothingly; the two boys came and sat on some coiled
ropes close to me, leaned their elbows on their knees and their chins on
their hands, and fixing their blue fisher-boy eyes on my face kept them
there with an unwinking interest during the entire crossing. Oh, it was
lovely sitting up there in the sun, safe so far, in the delicious quiet
of sailing. The tawny sail, darned and patched in divers shades of brown
and red and orange, towered above us against the sky. The huge mast
seemed to brush along across the very surface of the little white
clouds. Above the rippling of the water we could hear the distant larks
on either shore. August had put on his scarlet stable-jacket for the
work of lifting the carriage in, and made a beautiful bit of colour
among the browns of the old boat at the stern. The eyes of the ferryman
lost all the alertness they had had on shore, and he stood at the rudder
gazing dreamily out at the afternoon light on the Rügen meadows. How
perfect it was after the train, after the clattering along the dusty
road, and the heat and terror of getting on board. For one exquisite
quarter of an hour we were softly lapped across in the sun, and for all
that beauty we were only asked to pay three marks, which included the
horses and carriage and the labour of getting us in and out. For a
further small sum the ferryman became enthusiastic and begged me to be
sure to come back that way. There was a single house on the Rügen shore
where he lived, he said, and from which he would watch for us. A little
dog came down to welcome us, but we saw no other living creature. The
carriage conducted itself far more like a lamb on this side, and I drove
away well pleased to have got over the chief difficulty of the tour, the
soft-voiced ferryman wishing us Godspeed, and the two boys unwinking to
the last.

So here we were on the legend-surrounded island. 'Hail, thou isle of
fairyland, filled with beckoning figures!' I murmured under my breath,
careful not to appear too unaccountable in Gertrud's eyes. With eager
interest I looked about me, and anything less like fairyland and more
like the coast of Pomerania lately left I have seldom seen. The road, a
continuation of the road on the mainland, was exactly like other roads
that are dull as far as a rambling village three miles farther on called
Garz--persons referring to the map at the beginning of this book will
see with what a melancholy straightness it proceeds to that village--and
after Garz I ceased to care what it was like, for reasons which I will
now set forth.

There was that afternoon in the market-place of Garz, and I know not
why, since it was neither a Sunday nor a holiday, a brass band playing
with a singular sonorousness. The horses having never before been
required to listen to music, their functions at home being solely to
draw me through the solitudes of forests, did not like it. I was
astonished at the vigour of the dislike they showed who were wont to be
so meek. They danced through Garz, pursued by the braying of the
trumpets and the delighted shouts of the crowd, who seemed to bray and
shout the louder the more the horses danced, and I was considering
whether the time had not come for clinging to Gertrud and shutting my
eyes when we turned a corner and got away from the noise on to the
familiar rattle of the hard country road. I gave a sigh of relief and
stretched out my head to see whether it were as straight a bit as the
last. It was quite as straight, and in the distance bearing down on us
was a black speck that swelled at an awful speed into a motor car. Now
the horses had not yet seen a motor car. Their nerves, already shaken by
the brass band, would never stand such a horrid sight I thought, and
prudence urged an immediate getting out and a rushing to their heads.
'Stop, August!' I cried. 'Jump out, Gertrud--there's a dreadful thing
coming--they're sure to bolt----'

August slowed down in apparent obedience to my order, and without
waiting for him to stop entirely, the motor being almost upon us, I
jumped out on one side and Gertrud jumped out on the other. Before I had
time to run to the horses' heads the motor whizzed past. The horses
strange to say hardly cared at all, only mildly shying as August drove
them slowly along without stopping.

'That's all right,' I remarked, greatly relieved, to Gertrud, who still
held her stocking. 'Now we'll get in again.'

But we could not get in again because August did not stop.

'Call to him to stop,' I said to Gertrud, turning aside to pick some
unusually big poppies.

She called, but he did not stop.

'Call louder, Gertrud,' I said impatiently, for we were now a good way
behind.

She called louder, but he did not stop.

Then I called; then she called; then we called together, but he did not
stop. On the contrary, he was driving on now at the usual pace, rattling
noisily over the hard road, getting more and more out of reach.

'Shout, shout, Gertrud!' I cried in a frenzy; but how could any one so
respectable as Gertrud shout? She sent a faint shriek after the
ever-receding August, and when I tried to shout myself I was seized with
such uncontrollable laughter that nothing whatever of the nature of a
noise could be produced.

Meanwhile August was growing very small in the distance. He evidently
did not know we had got out when the motor car appeared, and was under
the pleasing impression that we were sitting behind him being jogged
comfortably towards Putbus. He dwindled and dwindled with a rapidity
distressing to witness. 'Shout, shout,' I gasped, myself contorted with
dreadful laughter, half-wildest mirth and half despair.

She began to trot down the road after him waving her stocking at his
distant back and emitting a series of shrill shrieks, goaded by the
exigencies of the situation.

The last we saw of the carriage was a yellow glint as the sun caught the
shiny surface of my bandbox; immediately afterwards it vanished over the
edge of a far-away dip in the road, and we were alone with Nature.

Gertrud and I stared at each other in speechless dismay. Then she looked
on in silence while I sank on to a milestone and laughed. There was
nothing, her look said, to laugh at, and much to be earnest over in our
tragic predicament, and I knew it but I could not stop. August had had
no instructions as to where he was driving to or where we were going to
put up that night; of Putbus and Marianna North he had never heard. With
the open ordnance map on my lap I had merely called out directions,
since leaving Miltzow, at cross-roads. Therefore in all human
probability he would drive straight on till dark, no doubt in growing
private astonishment at the absence of orders and the length of the way;
then when night came he would, I supposed, want to light his lamps, and
getting down to do so would immediately be frozen with horror at what he
saw, or rather did not see, in the carriage. What he would do after that
I could not conceive. In sheerest despair I laughed till I cried, and
the sight of Gertrud watching me silently from the middle of the
deserted road only made me less able to leave off. Behind us in the
distance, at the end of a vista of _chaussée_ trees, were the houses of
Garz; in front of us, a long way in front of us, rose the red spire of
the church of Casnewitz, a village through which, as I still remembered
from the map now driving along by itself, our road to Putbus lay. Up and
down the whiteness of this road not a living creature, either in a cart
or on its legs, was to be seen. The bald country, here very bald and
desolate, stretched away on either side into nothingness. The wind
sighed about, whisking little puffs of derisive dust into our eyes as it
passed. There was a dreadful absence of anything like sounds.

'No doubt,' said Gertrud, 'August will soon return?'

'He won't,' I said, wiping my eyes; 'he'll go on for ever. He's wound
up. Nothing will stop him.'

'What, then, will the gracious one do?'

'Walk after him, I suppose,' I said, getting up, 'and trust to something
unexpected making him find out he hasn't got us. But I'm afraid nothing
will. Come on, Gertrud,' I continued, feigning briskness while my heart
was as lead, 'it's nearly six already, and the road is long and lonely.'

'_Ach_,' groaned Gertrud, who never walks.

'Perhaps a cart will pass us and give us a lift. If not we'll walk to
that village with the church over there and see if we can get something
on wheels to pursue August with. Come on--I hope your boots are all
right.'

'_Ach_,' groaned Gertrud again, lifting up one foot, as a dog pitifully
lifts up its wounded paw, and showing me a black cashmere boot of the
sort that is soft and pleasant to the feet of servants who are not
required to use them much.

'I'm afraid they're not much good on this hard road,' I said. 'Let us
hope something will catch us up soon.'

'_Ach_,' groaned poor Gertrud, whose feet are very tender.

But nothing did catch us up, and we trudged along in grim silence, the
desire to laugh all gone.

'You must, my dear Gertrud,' I said after a while, seeking to be
cheerful, 'regard this in the light of healthful exercise. You and I are
taking a pleasant afternoon walk together in Rügen.'

Gertrud said nothing; at all times loathing movement out of doors she
felt that this walking was peculiarly hateful because it had no visible
end. And what would become of us if we were forced to spend the night in
some inn without our luggage? The only thing I had with me was my purse,
the presence of which, containing as it did all the money I had brought,
caused me to cast a careful eye at short intervals behind me, less in
the hope of seeing a cart than in the fear of seeing a tramp; and the
only thing Gertrud had was her half-knitted stocking. Also we had had
nothing to eat but a scrappy tea-basket lunch hours before in the train,
and my intention had been to have food at Putbus and then drive down to
a place called Lauterbach, which being on the seashore was more
convenient for the jelly-fish than Putbus, and spend the night there in
an hotel much recommended by the guide-book. By this time according to
my plans we ought to have been sitting in Putbus eating
_Kalbsschnitzel_. 'Gertrud,' I asked rather faintly, my soul drooping
within me at the thought of the _Kalbsschnitzel_, 'are you hungry?'

Gertrud sighed. 'It is long since we ate,' she said.

We trudged on in silence for another five minutes.

'Gertrud,' I asked again, for during those five minutes my thoughts had
dwelt with a shameful persistency on the succulent and the gross, 'are
you _very_ hungry?'

'The gracious one too must be in need of food,' evaded Gertrud, who for
some reason never would admit she wanted feeding.

'Oh she is,' I sighed; and again we trudged on in silence.

It seemed a long while before we reached that edge over which my bandbox
had disappeared flashing farewell as it went, and when we did get to it
and eagerly looked along the fresh stretch of road in hopes of seeing
August miraculously turned back, we gave a simultaneous groan, for it
was as deserted as the one we had just come along. Something lay in the
middle of it a few yards on, a dark object like a little heap of brown
leaves. Thinking it was leaves I saw no reason for comment; but Gertrud,
whose eyes are very sharp, exclaimed.

'What, do you see August?' I cried.

'No, no--but there in the road--the tea-basket!'

It was indeed the tea-basket, shaken out as it naturally would be on the
removal of the bodies that had kept it in its place, come to us like the
ravens of old to give us strength and sustenance.

'It still contains food,' said Gertrud, hurrying towards it.

'Thank heaven,' said I.

We dragged it out of the road to the grass at the side, and Gertrud lit
the spirit-lamp and warmed what was left in the teapot of the tea. It
was of an awful blackness. No water was to be got near, and we dared not
leave the road to look for any in case August should come back. There
were some sorry pieces of cake, one or two chicken sandwiches grown
unaccountably horrible, and all those strawberries we had avoided at
lunch because they were too small or two much squashed. Over these
mournful revels the church spire of Casnewitz, now come much closer,
presided; it was the silent witness of how honourably we shared, and how
Gertrud got the odd sandwich because of her cashmere boots.

Then we buried the tea-basket in a ditch, in a bed of long grass and
cow-parsley, for it was plain that I could not ask Gertrud, who could
hardly walk as it was, to carry it, and it was equally plain that I
could not carry it myself, for it was as mysteriously heavy as other
tea-baskets and in size very nearly as big as I am. So we buried it, not
without some natural regrets and a dim feeling that we were flying in
the face of Providence, and there it is, I suppose, grown very rusty, to
this day.

After that Gertrud got along a little better, and my thoughts being no
longer concentrated on food I could think out what was best to be done.
The result was that on reaching Casnewitz we inquired at once which of
the cottages was an inn, and having found one asked a man who seemed to
belong there to let us have a conveyance with as much speed as possible.

'Where have you come from?' he inquired, staring first at one and then
at the other.

'Oh--from Garz.'

'From Garz? Where do you want to go to?'

'To Putbus.'

'To Putbus? Are you staying there?'

'No--yes--anyhow we wish to drive there. Kindly let us start as soon as
possible.'

'Start! I have no cart.'

'Sir,' said Gertrud with much dignity, 'why did you not say so at once?'

'_Ja, ja, Fräulein_, why did I not?'

We walked out.

'This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,' I remarked, and I wondered what
those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my
driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the
banter of publicans.

'There is a little shop,' said Gertrud. 'Does the gracious one permit
that I make inquiries there?'

We went in and Gertrud did the talking.

'Putbus is not very far from here,' said the old man presiding, who was
at least polite. 'Why do not the ladies walk? My horse has been out all
day, and my son who drives him has other things now to do.'

'Oh we can't walk,' I broke in. 'We must drive because we might want to
go beyond Putbus--we are not sure--it depends----'

The old man looked puzzled. 'Where is it that the ladies wish to go?' he
inquired, trying to be patient.

'To Putbus, anyhow. Perhaps only to Putbus. We can't tell till we get
there. But indeed, indeed you must let us have your horse.'

Still puzzled, the old man went out to consult with his son, and we
waited in profound dejection among candles and coffee. Putbus was not,
as he had said, far, but I remembered how on the map it seemed to be a
very nest of cross-roads, all radiating from a round circus sort of
place in the middle. Which of them would August consider to be the
straight continuation of the road from Garz? Once beyond Putbus he would
be lost to us indeed.

It took about half an hour to persuade the son and to harness the horse;
and while this was going on we stood at the door watching the road and
listening eagerly for sounds of wheels. One cart did pass, going in the
direction of Garz, and when I heard it coming I was so sure that it was
August that I triumphantly called to Gertrud to run and tell the old man
we did not need his son. Gertrud, wiser, waited till she saw what it
was, and after the quenching of that sudden hope we both drooped more
than ever.

'Where am I to drive to?' asked the son, whipping up his horse and
bumping us away over the stones of Casnewitz. He sat huddled up looking
exceedingly sulky, manifestly disgusted at having to go out again at the
end of a day's work. As for the cart, it was a sad contrast to the
cushioned comfort of the vanished victoria. It was very high, very
wooden, very shaky, and we sat on a plank in the middle of so terrible a
noise that when we wanted to say anything we had to shout. 'Where am I
to drive to?' repeated the youth, scowling over his shoulder.

'Please drive straight on until you meet a carriage.'

'A what?'

'A carriage.'

'Whose carriage?'

'My carriage.'

He scowled round again with deepened disgust. 'If you have a carriage,'
he said, looking at us as though he were afraid we were lunatics, 'why
are you in my cart?'

'Oh why, why are we!' I cried wringing my hands, overcome by the
wretchedness of our plight; for we were now beyond Casnewitz, and gazing
anxiously ahead with the strained eyes of Sister Annes we saw the road
as straight and as empty as ever.

The youth drove on in sullen silence, his very ears seeming to flap with
scorn; no more good words would he waste on two mad women. The road now
lay through woods, beautiful beechwoods that belong to Prince Putbus,
not fenced off but invitingly open to every one, with green shimmering
depths and occasional flashes of deer. The tops of the great beeches
shone like gold against the sky. The sea must have been quite close, for
though it was not visible the smell of it was everywhere. The nearer we
got to Putbus the more civilised did the road become. Seats appeared on
either side at intervals that grew more frequent. Instead of the usual
wooden sign-posts, iron ones with tarnished gilt lettering pointed down
the forest lanes; and soon we met the first of the Putbus lamp-posts,
also iron and elaborate, wandered out, as it seemed, beyond the natural
sphere of lamp-posts, to light the innocent country road. All these
signs portended what Germans call _Badegäste_--in English obviously
bath-guests, or, more elegantly, visitors to a bathing resort; and
presently when we were nearer Putbus we began to pass them strolling in
groups and couples and sitting on the seats which were of stone and
could not have been good things for warm bath-guests to sit on.

Wretched as I was I still saw the quaintness and prettiness of Putbus.
There was a notice up that all vehicles must drive through it at a
walking pace, so we crawled along its principal street which, whatever
else it contained, contained no sign of August. This street has Prince
Putbus's grounds on one side and a line of irregular houses, all white,
all old-fashioned, and all charming, on the other. A double row of great
trees forms a shady walk on the edge of the grounds, and it is
bountifully supplied with those stone seats so fatal, I am sure, to many
an honest bath-guest. The grounds, trim and shady, have neat paths
winding into their recesses from the road, with no fence or wall or
obstacle of any sort to be surmounted by the timid tourist; every
tourist may walk in them as long and as often as he likes without the
least preliminary bother of gates and lodges.

As we jolted slowly over the rough stones we were objects of the
liveliest interest to the bath-guests sitting out on the pavement in
front of the inns having supper. No sign whatever of August was to be
seen, not even an ordnance map, as I had half expected, lying in the
road. Our cart made more noise here than ever, it being characteristic
of Putbus that things on wheels are heard for an amazing time before and
after their passing. It is the drowsiest little town. Grass grows
undisturbed between the cobbles of the street, along the gutters, and in
the cracks of the pavement on the sidewalk. One or two shops seem
sufficient for the needs of all the inhabitants, including the boys at
the school here which is a sort of German Eton, and from what I saw in
the windows their needs are chiefly picture-postcards and cakes. There
is a white theatre with a colonnade as quaint as all the rest. The
houses have many windows and balconies hung about with flowers. The
place did not somehow seem real in the bright flood of evening sunlight,
it looked like a place in a picture or a dream; but the bath-guests,
pausing in their eating to stare at us, were enjoying themselves in a
very solid and undreamlike fashion, not in the least in harmony with the
quaint background. In spite of my forlorn condition I could not help
reflecting on its probable charms in winter under the clear green of the
cold sky, with all these people away, when the frosted branches of the
trees stretch across to deserted windows, when the theatre is silent for
months, when the inns only keep as much of themselves open as meets the
requirements of the infrequent commercial traveller, and the cutting
wind blows down the street, empty all day long. Certainly a perfect
place to spend a quiet winter in, to go to when one is tired of noise
and bustle and of a world choked to the point of suffocation with
strenuous persons trying to do each other good. Rooms in one of those
spacious old houses with the large windows facing the sun, and plenty of
books--if I were that abstracted but happy form of reptile called a
bookworm, which I believed I am prevented from being only by my sex, the
genus, I am told, being persistently male, I would take care to spend at
least one of my life's winters in Putbus. How divinely quiet it would
be. What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a
book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with
his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul. And what walks there would
be, to stretch legs and spirits grown stiff, in the crisp wintry woods
where the pale sunshine falls across unspoilt snow. Sitting in my cart
of sorrow in summer sultriness I could feel the ineffable pure cold of
winter strike my face at the mere thought, the ineffable pure cold that
spurs the most languid mind into activity.

Thus far had I got in my reflections, and we had jolted slowly down
about half the length of the street, when a tremendous clatter of hoofs
and wheels coming towards us apparently at a gallop in starkest defiance
of regulations, brought me back with a jerk to the miserable present.

'Bolted,' remarked the surly youth, hastily drawing on one side.

The bath-guests at supper flung down their knives and forks and started
up to look.

'_Halt! Hah!_' cried some of them, '_Es ist verboten! Schritt!
Schritt!_'

'How can he halt?' cried others; 'his horses have bolted.'

'Then why does he beat them?' cried the first.

'It is August!' shrieked Gertrud. 'August! August! We are here! Stop!
Stop!'

For with staring eyes and set mouth August was actually galloping past
us. This time he did hear Gertrud's shriek, acute with anguish, and
pulled the horses on to their haunches. Never have I seen unhappy
coachman with so white a face. He had had, it appeared, the most
stringent private instructions before leaving home to take care of me,
and on the very first day to let me somehow tumble out and lose me! He
was tearing back in the awful conviction that he would find Gertrud and
myself in the form of corpses. 'Thank God!' he cried devoutly on seeing
us, 'Thank God! Is the gracious one unhurt?'

Certainly poor August had had the worst of it.

Now it is most unlikely that the bath-guests of Putbus will ever enjoy
themselves quite so much again. Their suppers all grew cold while they
crowded round to see and listen. August, in his relief, was a changed
creature. He was voluble and loud as I never could have believed.
Jumping off his box to turn the horses round and help me out of the
cart, he explained to me and to all and any who chose to listen how he
had driven on and on through Putbus, straight round the circus to the
continuation of the road on the north side, where sign-posts revealed to
him that he was heading for Bergen, more and more surprised at receiving
no orders, more and more struck by the extreme silence behind him. 'The
gracious one,' he amplified for the benefit of the deeply-interested
tourists, 'exchanges occasional observations with Fräulein'--the
tourists gazed at Gertrud--'and the cessation of these became by degrees
noticeable. Yet it is not permissible that a well-trained coachman
should turn to look, or interfere with a _Herrschaft_ that chooses to be
silent----'

'Let us get on, August,' I interrupted, much embarrassed by all this.

'The luggage must be seen to--the strain of the rapid driving----'

A dozen helpful hands stretched out with offers of string.

'Finally,' continued August, not to be stopped in his excited account,
manipulating the string and my hold-all with shaking fingers--' finally
by the mercy of Providence the map used by the gracious one fell out'--I
knew it would--'as a peasant was passing. He called to me, he pointed to
the road, I pulled up, I turned round, and what did I see? What I then
saw I shall never--no, never forget--no, not if my life should continue
to a hundred.' He put his hand on his heart and gasped. The crowd waited
breathless. 'I turned round,' continued August, 'and I saw nothing.'

'But you said you would never forget what you saw,' objected a
dissatisfied-looking man.

'Never, never shall I forget it.'

'Yet you saw nothing at all.'

'Nothing, nothing. Never will I forget it.'

'If you saw nothing you cannot forget it,' persisted the dissatisfied
man.

'I say I cannot--it is what I say.'

'That will do, August,' I said; 'I wish to drive on.'

The surly youth had been listening with his chin on his hand. He now
removed his chin, stretched his hand across to me sitting safely among
my cushions, and said, 'Pay me.'

'Pay him, Gertrud,' I said; and having been paid he turned his horse and
drove back to Casnewitz scornful to the last.

'Go on, August,' I ordered. 'Go on. We can hold this thing on with our
feet. Get on to your box and go on.'

The energy in my voice penetrated at last through his agitation. He got
up on to his box, settled himself in a flustered sort of fashion, the
tourists fell apart staring their last and hardest at a vision about to
vanish, and we drove away.

'It is impossible to forget that which has not been,' called out the
dissatisfied man as August passed him.

'It is what I say--it is what I say!' cried August, irritated.

Nothing could have kept me in Putbus after this.

Skirting the circus on the south side we turned down a hill to the
right, and immediately were in the country again with cornfields on
either side and the sea like a liquid sapphire beyond them. Gertrud and
I put a coat between us in place of the abandoned tea-basket, and
settled in with an appreciation of our comforts that we had not had
before. Gertrud, indeed, looked positively happy, so thankful was she to
be safely in the carriage again, and joy was written in every line of
August's back. About a mile and a half off lay Lauterbach, a little
straggling group of houses down by the water; and quite by itself, a
mile to the left of Lauterbach, I could see the hotel we were going to,
a long white building something like a Greek temple, with a portico and
a flight of steps the entire length of its façade, conspicuous in its
whiteness against a background of beechwoods. Woods and fields and sea
and a lovely little island a short way from the shore called Vilm, were
bathed in sunset splendour. Lauterbach and not Putbus, then, was the
place of radiant jelly-fish and crystal water and wooded coves. Probably
in those distant years when Marianne North enjoyed them Lauterbach as an
independent village with a name to itself did not exist. A branch
railway goes down now to the very edge of the sea. We crossed the line
and drove between chestnut trees and high grassy banks starry with
flowers to the Greek hotel.

How delightful it looked as we got out of the deep chestnut lane into
the open space in front of it before we were close enough to see that
time had been unkind. The sea was within a stone's throw on the right
beyond a green, marshy, rushy meadow. On the left people were mowing in
a field. Across the field the spire of a little Lutheran church looked
out oddly round the end of the pagan portico. Behind and on either side
were beeches. Not a soul came out as we drew up at the bottom of the
steps. Not a soul was to be seen except the souls with scythes in the
meadow. We waited a moment, thinking to hear a bell rung and to see
flying waiters, but no one came. The scythes in the meadow swished, the
larks called down that it was a fine evening, some fowls came and pecked
about on the sunny steps of the temple, some red sails passed between
the trunks of the willows down near the water.

'Shall I go in?' inquired Gertrud.

She went up the steps and disappeared through glass doors. Grass grew
between the stones of the steps, and the walls of the house were damp
and green. The ceiling of the portico was divided into squares and
painted sky-blue. In one corner paint and plaster had come off together,
probably in wild winter nights, and this and the grass-grown steps and
the silence gave the place a strangely deserted look. I would have
thought it was shut up if there had not been a table in the portico with
a reassuring red-check cloth on it and a coffee-pot.

Gertrud came out again followed by a waiter and a small boy. I was in no
hurry, and could have sat there contentedly for any time in the pleasant
evening sunshine. The waiter assured me there was just one room vacant
for me, and by the luckiest of chances just one other leading out of it
for the Fräulein. I followed him up the steps. The portico, open at
either end, framed in delicious pictures. The waiter led me through a
spacious boarded hall where a narrow table along one side told of recent
supper, through intricate passages, across little inner courts with
shrubs and greenery, and blue sky above, and lilac bushes in tubs
looking as though they had to pretend they were orange trees and that
this was Italy and that the white plaster walls, so mouldy in places,
were the marble walls of some classic baths, up strange stairs that
sloped alarmingly to one side, along more passages, and throwing open
one of the many small white doors, said with pride, 'Here is the
apartment; it is a fine, a big, a splendid apartment.'

The apartment was of the sort that produces an immediate determination
in the breast of him to whom it is offered to die sooner than occupy it.
Sleep in its gloomy recesses and parti-coloured bed I would not. Sooner
would I brave the authorities, and taking my hold-all for a pillow go
out to the grasshoppers for the night. In spite of the waiter's
assertion, made for the glory of the house, that this was the one room
unoccupied, I saw other rooms, perhaps smaller but certainly vacant,
lurking in his eye; therefore I said firmly, 'Show me something else.'

The house was nearly all at my disposal I found. It is roomy, and there
were hardly a dozen people staying in it, I chose a room with windows
opening into the portico, through whose white columns I would be able to
see a series of peaceful country pictures as I lay in bed. The boards
were bare and the bed was covered with another of those parti-coloured
quilts that suggest a desire to dissemble spots rather than wash them
out. The Greek temple was certainly primitive, and would hardly appeal
to any but the simplest, meekest of tourists. I hope I am simple and
meek. I felt as though I must be as I looked round this room and knew
that of my own free will I was going to sleep in it; and not only sleep
in it but be very happy in it. It was the series of pictures between the
columns that had fascinated me.

While Gertrud was downstairs superintending the bringing up of the
luggage, I leaned out of one of my windows and examined the delights. I
was quite close to the blue and white squares of the portico's ceiling;
and looking down I saw its grass-grown pavement, and the head of a
pensive tourist drinking beer just beneath me. Here again big lilac
bushes planted at intervals between the columns did duty for orange
trees. The north end framed the sky and fields and distant church; the
south end had a picture of luminous water shining through beech leaves;
the pair of columns in front enclosed the chestnut-lined road we had
come along and the outermost white houses of Putbus among dark trees
against the sunset on high ground behind; through those on the left was
the sea, hardly sea here at all the bay is so sheltered, and hardly salt
at all, for grass and rushes, touched just then by the splendour of
light into a transient divine brightness, lay all along the shore.
'Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to
behold the sun,' I thought; aloud, I suppose, for Gertrud coming in with
the hold-all said 'Did the gracious one speak?'

Quite unable to repeat this rapturous conviction to Gertrud, I changed
it into a modest request that she should order supper.

How often in these grey autumn days have I turned my face away from the
rain on the window and the mournful mistiness of the November fields, or
my mind from the talk of the person next to me, to think with a smile of
the beauty of that supper. Not that I had beautiful things to eat, for
lengthy consultations with the waiter led only to eggs; but they were
brought down steep steps to a little nook among the beeches at the
water's edge, and this little nook on that particular evening was the
loveliest in the world. Enthusiastically did I eat those eggs and murmur
'Earth has not anything to show more fair'--as much, that is, of it as
could be made to apply. Nobody could see me or hear me down there,
screened at the sides and back and overhead by the beeches, and it is an
immense comfort secretly to quote. What did it matter if the tablecloth
were damp, besides having other imperfections? What if the eggs cooled
down at once, and cool eggs have always been an abomination to me? What
if the waiter forgot the sugar, and I dislike coffee without sugar?
Sooner than go up and search for him and lose one moment of that rosy
splendour on the water I felt that I would go for ever sugarless. My
table was nearly on a level with the sea. A family of ducks were slowly
paddling about in front of me, making little furrows in the quiet water
and giving an occasional placid quack. The ducks, the water, the island
of Vilm opposite, the Lauterbach jetty half a mile off across the little
bay with a crowd of fisher-boats moored near it, all were on fire with
the same red radiance. The sun was just down, and the sky behind the
dark Putbus woods was a marvel of solemn glory. The reflections of the
beech trees I was sitting under lay black along the water. I could hear
the fishermen talking over at the jetty, and a child calling on the
island, so absolute was the stillness. And almost before I knew how
beautiful it was the rosiness faded off the island, lingered a moment
longer on the masts of the fisher-boats, gathered at last only in the
pools among the rushes, died away altogether; the sky paled to green, a
few stars looked out faintly, a light twinkled in the solitary house on
Vilm, and the waiter came down and asked if he should bring a lamp. A
lamp! As though all one ever wanted was to see the tiny circle round
oneself, to be able to read the evening paper, or write postcards to
one's friends, or sew. I have a peculiar capacity for doing nothing and
yet enjoying myself. To sit there and look out into what Whitman calls
the huge and thoughtful night was a comely and sufficient occupation for
the best part of me; and as for the rest, the inferior or domestic part,
the fingers that might have been busy, the tongue that might have
wagged, the superficial bit of brain in daily use for the planning of
trivialities, how good it is that all that should often be idle.

With an impatience that surprised him I refused the waiter's lamp.




THE SECOND DAY

LAUTERBACH AND VILM


A ripe experience of German pillows in country places leads me to urge
the intending traveller to be sure to take his own. The native pillows
are mere bags, in which feathers may have been once. There is no
substance in them at all. They are of a horrid flabbiness. And they
have, of course, the common drawback of all public pillows, they are
haunted by the nightmares of other people. A pillow, it is true, takes
up a great deal of room in one's luggage, but in Rügen however simply
you dress you are better dressed than the others, so that you need take
hardly any clothes. My hold-all, not a specially big one, really did
hold all I wanted. The pillow filled one side of it, and my bathing
things a great part of the other, and I was away eleven days; yet I am
sure I was admirably clean the whole time, and I defy any one to say my
garments were not both appropriate and irreproachable. Towards the end,
it is true, Gertrud had to mend and brush a good deal, but those are two
of the things she is there for; and it is infinitely better to be
comfortable at night than, by leaving the pillow at home and bringing
dresses in its place, be more impressive by day. And let no one visit
Rügen who is not of that meek and lowly character that would always
prefer a good pillow to a diversity of raiment, and has no prejudices
about its food.

Having eased my conscience by these hints, which he will find
invaluable, to the traveller, I can now go on to say that except for the
pillow I would have had if I had not brought my own, for the coloured
quilt, for the water to wash with brought in a very small coffee-pot,
and for the breakfast which was as cold and repellent as in some moods
some persons find the world, my experiences of the hotel were pleasing.
It is true that I spent most of the day, as I shall presently relate,
away from it, and it is also true that in the searching light of morning
I saw much that had been hidden: scraps of paper lying about the grass
near the house, an automatic bon-bon machine in the form of a brooding
hen, and an automatic weighing machine, both at the top of the very
steps leading down to the nook that had been the night before enchanted,
and, worst shock of all, an electric bell piercing the heart of the very
beech tree under which I had sat. But the beauties are so many and so
great that if a few of them are spoilt there are still enough left to
make Lauterbach one of the most delightful places conceivable. The hotel
was admirably quiet; no tourists arrived late, and those already in it
seemed to go to bed extraordinarily early; for when I came up from the
water soon after ten the house was so silent that instinctively I stole
along the passages on the tips of my toes, and for no reason that I
could discover felt conscience-stricken. Gertrud, too, appeared to think
it was unusually late; she was waiting for me at the door with a lamp,
and seemed to expect me to look conscience-stricken. Also, she had
rather the expression of the resigned and forgiving wife of an
incorrigible evil-doer. I went into my room much pleased that I am not a
man and need not have a wife who forgives me.

The windows were left wide open, and all night through my dreams I could
hear the sea gently rippling among the rushes. At six in the morning a
train down at the station hidden behind the chestnuts began to shunt and
to whistle, and as it did not leave off and I could not sleep till it
did, I got up and sat at the window and amused myself watching the
pictures between the columns in the morning sunlight. A solitary mower
in the meadow was very busy with his scythe, but its swishing could not
be heard through the shunting. At last the train steamed away and peace
settled down again over Lauterbach, the scythe swished audibly, the
larks sang rapturously, and I fell to saying my prayers, for indeed it
was a day to be grateful for, and the sea was the deepest, divinest
blue.

The bathing at Lauterbach is certainly perfect. You walk along a
footpath on the edge of low cliffs, shaded all the way from the door of
the hotel to the bathing-huts by the beechwood, the water heaving and
shining just below you, the island of Vilm opposite, the distant
headland of Thiessow a hazy violet line between the misty blues of sea
and sky in front, and at your feet moss and grass and dear common
flowers flecked with the dancing lights and shadows of a beechwood when
the sun is shining.

'Oh this is perfect!' I exclaimed to Gertrud; for on a fine fresh
morning one must exclaim to somebody. She was behind me on the narrow
path, her arms full of towels and bathing things. 'Won't you bathe too,
afterwards, Gertrud? Can you resist it?'

But Gertrud evidently could resist it very well. She glanced at the
living loveliness of the sea with an eye that clearly saw in it only a
thing that made dry people wet. If she had been Dr. Johnson she would
boldly have answered, 'Madam, I hate immersion.' Being Gertrud, she
pretended that she had a cold.

'Well, to-morrow then,' I said hopefully; but she said colds hung about
her for days.

'Well, as soon as you have got over it,' I said, persistently and
odiously hopeful; but she became prophetic and said she would never get
over it.

The bathing-huts are in a row far enough away from the shore to be in
deep water. You walk out to them along a little footbridge of planks and
find a sunburnt woman, amiable as all the people seem to be who have
their business in deep waters, and she takes care of your things and
dries them for you and provides you with anything you have forgotten and
charges you twenty _pfennings_ at the end for all her attentions as well
as the bathe. The farthest hut is the one to get if you can--another
invaluable hint. It is very roomy, and has a sofa, a table, and a big
looking-glass, and one window opening to the south and one to the east.
Through the east window you see the line of low cliffs with the woods
above till they melt into a green plain that stretches off into
vagueness towards the haze of Thiessow. Through the south window you see
the little island of Vilm, with its one house set about with cornfields,
and its woods on the high ground at the back.

Gertrud sat on the steps knitting while I swam round among the
jelly-fish and thought of Marianne North. How right she was about the
bathing, and the colours, and the crystal clearness of the water in that
sandy cove! The bathing woman leaned over the hand-rail watching me with
a sympathetic smile. She wore a white sun-bonnet, and it looked so well
against the sky that I wished Gertrud could be persuaded to put one on
too in place of her uninteresting and eminently respectable black
bonnet. I could have stayed there for hours, perfectly happy, floating
on the sparkling stuff, and I did stay there for nearly one, with the
result that I climbed up the cliff a chilled and saddened woman, and sat
contemplating the blue tips of my fingers while the waiter brought
breakfast, and thought what a pitiful thing it was to have blue finger
tips, instead of rejoicing as I would have done after a ten minutes'
swim in the glorious fact that I was alive at all on such a morning.

The cold tea, cold eggs, and hard rolls did not make me more cheerful. I
sat under the beeches where I had had supper the night before and
shivered in my thickest coat, with the July sun blazing on the water and
striking brilliant colours out of the sails of the passing fisher-boats.
The hotel dog came along the shingle with his tongue out, and lay down
near me in the shade. Visitors from Putbus, arriving in an omnibus for
their morning bathe, passed by fanning themselves with their hats.

The Putbus visitors come down every morning in a sort of waggonette to
bathe and walk back slowly up the hill to dinner. After this exertion
they think they have done enough for their health, and spend the rest of
the day sleeping, or sitting out of doors drinking beer and coffee. I
think this is quite a good way of spending a holiday if you have worked
hard all the rest of the year; and the tourists I saw looked as if they
had. More of them stay at Putbus than at Lauterbach, although it is so
much farther from the sea, because the hotel I was at was slightly
dearer than--I ought rather to say, judging from the guide-book, not
quite so cheap as--the Putbus hotels. I suppose it was less full than it
might be because of this slight difference, or perhaps there was the
slight difference because it was less full--who shall solve such
mysteries? Anyhow the traveller need not be afraid of the bill, for when
I engaged our rooms the waiter was surprised that I refused to put
myself _en pension_, and explained in quite an aggrieved voice that all
the _Herrschaften_ put themselves _en pension_, and he hoped I did not
think five marks a day for everything a too expensive arrangement. I
praised the arrangement as just and excellent, but said that, being a
bird of passage, I would prefer not to make it.

After breakfast I set out to explore the Goor, the lovely beechwood
stretching along the coast from the very doors of the hotel. I started
so briskly down the footpath on the edge of the cliffs in the hope of
getting warm, that tourists who were warm already and were sitting under
the trees gasping, stared at me reproachfully as I hurried past.

The Goor is beautiful. The path I took runs through thick shade with
many windings, and presently comes out at the edge of the wood down by
the sea in a very hot, sheltered corner, where the sun beats all day
long on the shingle and coarse grass. A solitary oak tree, old and
storm-beaten, stands by itself near the water; across the water is the
wooded side of Vilm; and if you continue along the shingle a few yards
you are away from the trees and out on a grassy plain, where lilac
scabious bend their delicate stalks in the wind. An old black
fishing-smack lay on its side on the shingle, its boards blistered by
the sun. Its blackness and the dark lines of the solitary oak sharply
cleft the flood of brilliant light. What a hot, happy corner to lie in
all day with a book! No tourists go to it, for the path leads to
nowhere, ending abruptly just there in coarse grass and shingle--a
mixture grievous to the feet of the easily tired. The usual walk for
those who have enough energy--it is not a very long one, and does not
need much--is through the Goor to the north side, where the path takes
you to the edge of a clover field across which you see the little
village of Vilmnitz nestling among its trees and rye, and then brings
you back gently and comfortably and shadily to the hotel; but this
turning to the right only goes down to the shingle, the old boat, and
the lonely oak. The first thing to do in that hot corner is to pull off
your coat, which I did; and if you like heat and dislike blue finger
tips and chilled marrows, lie down on the shingle, draw your hat over
your eyes, and bake luxuriously, which I did also. In the pocket of my
coat was _The Prelude_, the only book I had brought. I brought it
because I know of no other book that is at the same time so slender and
so satisfying. It slips even into a woman's pocket, and has an
extraordinarily filling effect on the mind. Its green limp covers are
quite worn with the journeys it has been with me. I take it wherever I
go; and I have read it and read it for many summers without yet having
entirely assimilated its adorable stodginess. Oh shade of Wordsworth, to
think that so unutterable a grub and groveller as I am should dare call
anything of thine Stodgy! But it is this very stodginess that makes it,
if you love Wordsworth, the perfect book where there can be only one.
You must, to enjoy it, be first a lover of Wordsworth. You must love the
uninspired poems for the sake of the divineness of the inspired poems.
You must be able to be interested in the description of Simon Lee's
personal appearance, and not mind his wife, an aged woman, being made to
rhyme with the Village Common. Even the Idiot Boy should not be a
stumbling-block to you; and your having learned The Pet Lamb in the
nursery is no reason why you should dislike it now. They all have their
beauties; there is always some gem, more or less bright, to be found in
them; and the pages of _The Prelude_ are strewn with precious jewels. I
have had it with me so often in happy country places that merely to open
it and read that first cry of relief and delight--'Oh there is blessing
in this gentle breeze!'--brings back the dearest remembrances of fresh
and joyous hours. And how wholesome to be reminded when the days are
rainy and things look blank of the many joyous hours one has had. Every
instant of happiness is a priceless possession for ever.

That morning my _Prelude_ fell open at the Residence in London, a part
where the gems are not very thick, and the satisfying properties
extremely developed. My eye lighted on the bit where he goes for a walk
in the London streets, and besides a Nurse, a Bachelor, a Military
Idler, and a Dame with Decent Steps--figures with which I too am
familiar--he sees--

            ... with basket at his breast
     The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk
     With freight of slipper piled beneath his arm....
     The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south
     The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
     America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,
     Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
     And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns

--figures which are not, at any rate, to be met in the streets of
Berlin. I am afraid to say that this is not poetry, for perhaps it is
only I do not know it; but after all one can only judge according to
one's lights, and no degree of faintness and imperfection in the lights
will ever stop any one from judging; therefore I will have the courage
of my opinions, and express my firm conviction that it is not poetry at
all. But the passage set me off musing. That is the pleasant property of
_The Prelude_, it makes one at the end of every few lines pause and
muse. And presently the image of the Negro Ladies in their white muslin
gowns faded, and those other lines, children of the self-same spirit but
conceived in the mood when it was divine, stood out in shining letters--

     Not in entire forgetfulness.
     And not in utter nakedness....

I need not go on; it is sacrilege to write them down in such a setting
of commonplaceness; I could not say them aloud to my closest friend with
a steady voice; they are lines that seem to come fresh from God.

And now I know that the Negro Ladies, whatever their exact poetic value
may be, have become a very real blessing to an obscure inhabitant of
Prussia, for in the future I shall only need to see the passage to be
back instantaneously on the hot shingle, with the tarred edge of the old
boat above me against the sky, the blue water curling along the shore at
my feet, and the pale lilac flowers on the delicate stalks bending their
heads in the wind.

About twelve the sun drove me away. The backs of my hands began to feel
as though they proposed to go into blisters. I could not lie there and
deliberately be blistered, so I got up and wandered back to the hotel to
prepare Gertrud for a probably prolonged absence, as I intended to get
across somehow to the island of Vilm. Having begged her to keep calm if
I did not appear again till bedtime I took the guide-book and set out.
The way to the jetty is down a path through the meadow close to the
water, with willows on one side of it and rushes on the other. In ten
minutes you have reached Lauterbach, seen some ugly little new houses
where tourists lodge, seen some delightful little old houses where
fishermen live, paid ten _pfennings_ toll to a smiling woman at the
entrance to the jetty, on whom it is useless to waste amiabilities, she
being absolutely deaf, and having walked out to the end begin to wonder
how you are to get across. There were fishing-smacks at anchor on one
side, and a brig from Sweden was being unloaded. A small steamer lay at
the end, looking as though it meant to start soon for somewhere; but on
my asking an official who was sitting on a coil of ropes staring at
nothing if it would take me to Vilm, he replied that he did not go to
Vilm but would be pleased to take me to Baabe. Never having heard of
Baabe I had no desire to go to it. He then suggested Greifswald, and
said he went there the next day; and when I declined to be taken to
Greifswald the next day instead of to Vilm that day he looked as though
he thought me unreasonable, and relapsed into his first abstraction.

A fisherman was lounging near, leaning against one of the posts and also
staring straight into space, and when I turned away he roused himself
enough to ask if I would use his smack. He pointed to it where it lay a
little way out--a big boat with the bright brown sails that make such
brilliant splashes of colour in the surrounding blues and whites. There
was only a faint breeze, but he said he could get me across in twenty
minutes and would wait for me all day if I liked, and would only charge
three marks. Three marks for a whole fishing-smack with golden sails,
and a fisherman with a golden beard, blue eyes, stalwart body, and whose
remote grandparents had certainly been Vikings! I got into his dinghy
without further argument, and was rowed across to the smack. A small
Viking, appropriately beardless, he being only ten, but with freckles,
put his head out of the cabin as we drew alongside, and was presented to
me as the eldest of five sons. Father and son made a comfortable place
for me in a not too fishy part of the boat, hauled up the huge poetic
sail, and we glided out beyond the jetty. This is the proper way, the
only right way, to visit Vilm, the most romantic of tiny islands. Who
would go to it any other way but with a Viking and a golden sail? Yet
there is another way, I found out, and it is the one most used. It is a
small launch plying between Lauterbach and Vilm, worked by a machine
that smells very nasty and makes a great noise; and as it is a long
narrow boat. If there are even small waves it rolls so much that the
female passengers, and sometimes even the male, scream. Also the spray
flies over it and drenches you. In calm weather it crosses swiftly,
doing the distance in ten minutes. My smack took twenty to get there and
much longer to get back, but what a difference in the joy! The puffing
little launch rushed past us when we were midway, when I should not have
known that we were moving but for the slight shining ripple across the
bows, and the thud of its machine and the smell of its benzine were
noticeable for a long time after it had dwindled to a dot. The people in
it certainly got to their destination quickly, but Vilm is not a place
to hurry to. There is nothing whatever on it to attract the hurried. To
rush across the sea to it and back again to one's train at Lauterbach is
not to have felt its singular charm. It is a place to dream away a
summer in; but the wide-awake tourist visiting it between two trains
would hardly know how to fill up the three hours allotted him. You can
walk right round it in three-quarters of an hour. In three-quarters of
an hour you can have seen each of the views considered fine and
accordingly provided with a seat, have said 'Oh there is Thiessow
again,' on looking over the sea to the east; and 'Oh there is Putbus
again,' on looking over the sea to the west; and 'Oh that must be
Greifswald,' on remarking far away in the south the spires of churches
rising up out of the water; you will have had ample time to smile at the
primitiveness of the bathing-hut on the east shore, to study the names
of past bathers scribbled over it, besides poems, valedictory addresses,
and quotations from the German classics; to sit for a little on the
rocks thinking how hard rocks are; and at length to wander round, in
sheer inability to fill up the last hour, to the inn, the only house on
the island, where at one of the tables under the chestnuts before the
door you would probably drink beer till the launch starts.

But that is not the way to enjoy Vilm. If you love out-of-door beauty,
wide stretches of sea and sky, mighty beeches, dense bracken, meadows
radiant with flowers, chalky levels purple with gentians, solitude, and
economy, go and spend a summer at Vilm. The inn is kept by one of Prince
Putbus's foresters, or rather by his amiable and obliging wife, the
forester's functions being apparently restricted to standing
picturesquely propped against a tree in front of the house in a nice
green shooting suit, with a telescope at his eye through which he
studies the approaching or departing launch. His wife does the rest. I
sat at one of the tables beneath the chestnuts waiting for my food--I
had to wait a very long while--and she came out and talked. The season,
she explained, was short, lasting two months, July and August, at the
longest, so that her prices were necessarily high. I inquired what they
were, and she said five marks a day for a front room looking over the
sea, and four marks and a half for a back room looking over the forest,
the price including four meals. Out of the season her charges were
lower. She said most of her visitors were painters, and she could put up
four-and-twenty with their wives. My luncheon came while she was still
trying to find out if I were a female painter, and if not why I was
there alone instead of being one of a batch, after the manner of the
circumspect-petticoated, and I will only say of the luncheon that it was
abundant. Its quality, after all, did not matter much. The rye grew up
to within a yard of my table and made a quivering golden line of light
against the blue sparkle of the sea. White butterflies danced above it.
The breeze coming over it blew sweet country smells in my face. The
chestnut leaves shading me rustled and whispered. All the world was gay
and fresh and scented, and if the traveller does not think these
delights make up for doubtful cookery, why does he travel?

The _Frau Förster_ insisted on showing me the bedrooms. They are simple
and very clean, each one with a beautiful view. The rest of the house,
including the dining-room, does not lend itself to enthusiastic
description. I saw the long table at which the four-and-twenty painters
eat. They were doing it when I looked in, and had been doing it the
whole time I was under the chestnuts. It was not because of the many
dishes that they sat there so long, but because of the few waiters.
There were at least forty people learning to be patient, and one waiter
and a boy to drive the lesson home. The bathing, too, at Vilm cannot be
mentioned in the same breath with the glorious bathing at Lauterbach.
There is no smiling attendant in a white sunbonnet waiting to take your
things and dry them, to rub you down when you come out shivering, and if
needful jump in and pull you out when you begin to drown. At Vilm the
bathing-hut lies on the east shore, and you go to it across a
meadow--the divinest strip of meadow, it is true, with sea behind you
and sea before you, and cattle pasturing, and a general radiant air
about it as though at any moment the daughters of the gods might come
over the buttercups to bleach their garments whiter in the sun. But
beautiful as it is, it is a very hot walk, and there is no path. Except
the path through the rye from the landing-stage up to the inn there is
not a regular path on the island--only a few tracks here and there where
the cows are driven home in the evening; and to reach the bathing-hut
you must plunge straight through meadow-grass, and not mind grasshoppers
hopping into your clothes. Then the water is so shallow just there that
you must wade quite a dangerous-looking distance before, lying down, it
will cover you; and while you are wading, altogether unable, as he who
has waded knows, to hurry your steps, however urgent the need, you blush
to think that some or all of the four-and-twenty painters are probably
sitting on rocks observing you. Wading back, of course, you blush still
more. I never saw so frank a bathing-place. It is beautiful--in a lovely
curve, cliffs clothed with beeches on one side, and the radiant meadow
along the back of the rocks on the other; but the whole island can see
you if you go out far enough to be able to swim, and if you do not you
are still a conspicuous object and a very miserable one, bound to catch
any wandering eye as you stand there alone, towering out of water that
washes just over your ankles.

I sat in the shadow of the cliffs and watched two girls who came down to
bathe. They did not seem to feel their position at all, and splashed
into the water with shrieks and laughter that rang through the mellow
afternoon air. So it was that I saw how shallow it is, and how
embarrassing it would be to the dignified to bathe there. The girls had
no dignity, and were not embarrassed. Probably one, or two, of the
four-and-twenty were their fathers, and that made them feel at home. Or
perhaps--and watching them I began to think that this was so--they would
rather have liked to be looked at by those of the painters who were not
their fathers. Anyhow, they danced and laughed and called to each other,
often glancing back inquiringly at the cliffs; and indeed they were very
pretty in their little scarlet suits in the sapphire frame of the sea.

I sat there long after the girls were clothed and transformed into quite
uninteresting young women, and had gone their way noisily up the grass
slope into the shadows of the beeches. The afternoon stillness was left
to itself again, undisturbed by anything louder than the slow ripple of
the water round the base of the rocks. Sometimes a rabbit scuttled up
the side of the cliff, and once a hawk cried somewhere up among the
little clouds. The shadows grew very long; the shadows of the rocks on
the water looked as though they would stretch across to Thiessow before
the sun had done with them. Out at sea, far away beyond the hazy
headland, a long streak of smoke hung above the track where a steamer
had passed on the way to Russia. I wish I could fill my soul with enough
of the serenity of such afternoons to keep it sweet for ever.

Vilm consists of two wooded hills joined together by a long, narrow,
flat strip of land. This strip, beyond the meadow and its fringing
trees, is covered with coarse grass and stones and little shells. Clumps
of wild fruit trees scattered about it here and there look as if they
knew what roughing it is like. The sea washes over it in winter when the
wind is strong from the east, and among the trees are frequent
skeletons, dead fruit trees these many seasons past, with the tortured
look peculiar to blasted trees, menacing the sky with gaunt, impotent
arms. After struggling along this bit, stopping every few minutes to
shake the shells out of my shoes, I came to uneven ground, soft green
grass, and beautiful trees--a truly lovely part at the foot of the
southern hill. Here I sat down for a moment to take the last shells out
of my shoes and to drink things in. I had not seen a soul since the
bathing girls, and supposed that most of the people staying at the inn
would not care on hot afternoons to walk over the prickly grass and
shells that must be walked over before reaching the green coolness of
the end. And while I was comfortably supposing this and shaking my shoe
slowly up and down and thinking how delightful it was to have the
charming place to myself, I saw a young man standing on a rock under the
east cliff of the hill in the very act of photographing the curving
strip of land, with the sea each side of it, and myself in the middle.

Now I am not of those who like being photographed much and often. At
intervals that grow longer I go through the process at the instant
prayers of my nearest and dearest; but never other than deliberately,
after due choice of fitting attitude and garments. The kodak and the
instantaneous photograph taken before one has had time to arrange one's
smile are things to be regarded with abhorrence by every woman whose
faith in her attractions is not unshakeable. Movements so graceful that
the Early Victorians would have described them as swan-like--those Early
Victorians who wore ringlets, curled their upper lips, had marble brows,
and were called Georgiana--movements, I say, originally swan-like in
grace, are translated by the irreverent snap-shot into a caricature that
to the photographed appears not even remotely like, and fills the
photographed's friends with an awful secret joy. 'What manner of young
man is this?' I asked myself, examining him with indignation. He stood
on the rock a moment, looking about as if for another good subject, and
finally his eye alighted on me. Then he got off his rock and came
towards me. 'What manner of young man is this?' I again asked myself,
putting on my shoe in haste and wrath. He was coming to apologise, I
supposed, having secured his photograph.

He was. I sat gazing severely at Thiessow, There is no running away from
vain words or from anything else on an island. He was a tall young man,
and there was something indefinable and reassuring about his collar.

'I am so sorry,' he said with great politeness. 'I did not notice you.
Of course I did not intend to photograph you. I shall destroy the film.'

At this I felt hurt. Being photographed without permission is bad, but
being told your photograph is not wanted and will be destroyed is worse.
He was a very personable young man, and I like personable young men;
from the way he spoke German and from his collar I judged him English,
and I like Englishmen; and he had addressed me as _gnädiges Fräulein_,
and what mother of a growing family does not like that?

'I did not see you,' I said, not without blandness, touched by his youth
and innocence, 'or I should have got out of your way.'

'I shall destroy the film,' he again assured me; and lifted his cap and
went back to the rocks.

Now if I stayed where I was he could not photograph the strip again, for
it was so narrow that I would have been again included, and he was
evidently bent on getting a picture of it, and fidgeted about among the
rocks waiting for me to go. So I went; and as I climbed up the south
hill under the trees I mused on the pleasant slow manners of Englishmen,
who talk and move as though life were very spacious and time may as well
wait. Also I wondered how he had found this remote island. I was
inclined to wonder that I had found it myself; but how much more did I
wonder that he had found it.

There are many rabbit-holes under the trees at the south end of Vilm,
and I disturbed no fewer than three snakes one after the other in the
long grass. They were of the harmless kind, but each in turn made me
jump and shiver, and after the third I had had enough, and clambered
down the cliff on the west side and went along at the foot of it towards
the farthest point of the island, with the innocent intention of seeing
what was round the corner. The young man was round the corner, and I
walked straight into another photograph; I heard the camera snap at the
very instant that I turned the bend.

This time he looked at me with something of a grave inquiry in his eye.

'I assure you I do not _want_ to be photographed,' I said hastily.

'I hope you believe that I did not intend to do it again,' he replied.

'I am very sorry,' said I.

'I shall destroy the film,' said he.

'It seems a great waste of films,' said I.

The young man lifted his cap; I continued my way among the rocks
eastward; he went steadily in the opposite direction; round the other
side of the hill we met again.

'Oh,' I cried, genuinely disturbed, 'have I spoilt another?'

The young man smiled--certainly a very personable young man--and
explained that the light was no longer strong enough to do any more.
Again in this explanation did he call me gnädiges Fräulein, and again
was I touched by so much innocence. And his German, too, was touching;
it was so conscientiously grammatical, so laboriously put together, so
like pieces of Goethe learned by heart.

By this time the sun hung low over the houses of Putbus, and the strip
of sand with its coarse grass and weatherbeaten trees was turned by the
golden flush into a fairy bridge, spanning a mystic sea, joining two
wonderful, shining islands. We walked along with all the radiance in our
faces. It is, as I have observed, impossible to get away from any one on
an island that is small enough. We were both going back to the inn, and
the strip of land is narrow. Therefore we went together, and what that
young man talked about the whole way in the most ponderous German was
the Absolute.

I can't think what I have done that I should be talked to for twenty
minutes by a nice young man who mistook me for a Fräulein about the
Absolute. He evidently thought--the innocence of him!--that being German
I must, whatever my sex and the shape of my head, be interested. I don't
know how it began. It was certainly not my fault, for till that day I
had had no definite attitude in regard to it. Of course I did not tell
him that. Age has at least made me artful. A real Fräulein would have
looked as vacant as she felt, and have said, 'What is the Absolute?'
Being a matron and artful, I simply looked thoughtful--quite an easy
thing to do--and said, 'How do you define it?'

He said he defined it as a negation of the conceivable. Continuing in my
artfulness I said that there was much to be said for that view of it,
and asked how he had reached his conclusions. He explained elaborately.
Clearly he took me to be an intelligent Fräulein, and indeed I gave
myself great pains to look like one.

It appeared that he had a vast admiration for everything German, and
especially for German erudition. Well, we are very erudite in places.
Unfortunately no erudition comes up my way.

My acquaintances do not ask the erudite to dinner, one of the reasons,
as insufficient as the rest, being that they either wear day clothes in
the evening, or, if worldly enough to dress, mar the effect by white
satin ties with horse-shoe pins in them; and another is that they are
Liberals, and therefore uninvitable. When the unknown youth, passing
naturally from Kant and the older philosophers to the great Germans now
living, enthusiastically mentioned the leading lights in science and art
and asked if I knew them or had ever seen them--the mere seeing of them
he seemed to think would be a privilege--I could only murmur no. How
impossible to explain to this scion of an unprejudiced race the
limitless objection of the class called _Junker_--I am a female
_Junker_--to mix on equal terms with the class that wears white satin
ties in the evening. But it is obvious that a man who can speak with the
tongue of angels, who has put his seal on his century, and who will be
remembered when we have returned, forgotten, to the Prussian dust from
which we came--or rather not forgotten because we were at no time
remembered, but simply ignored--it is obvious that such a man may wear
what tie he pleases when he comes to dine, and still ought to be
received on metaphorical knees of reverence and gratitude. Probably,
however, if we who live in the country and think no end of ourselves did
invite such a one, and whether there were hostesses on knees waiting for
him or not, he would not come. How bored he would be if he did. He would
find us full of those excellences Pater calls the more obvious parochial
virtues, jealous to madness of the sensitive and bloodthirsty appendage
known as our honour, exact in the observance of minor conventionalities,
correct in our apparel, rigid in our views, and in our effect
uninterruptedly soporific. The man who had succeeded in pushing his
thoughts farther into the region of the hitherto unthought than any of
his contemporaries would not, I think, if he came once, come again. But
it is supposing the impossible, after all, to suppose him invited, for
all the great ones of whom the unknown youth talked are Liberals, and
all the _Junkers_ are Conservatives; and how shall a German Conservative
be the friend of a German Liberal? The thing is unthinkable. Like the
young man's own definition of the Absolute, it is a negation of the
conceivable.

By the time we had reached the chestnut grove in front of the inn I had
said so little that my companion was sure I was one of the most
intelligent women he had ever met. I know he thought so, for he turned
suddenly to me as we were walking past the Frau Förster's wash-house and
rose-garden up to the chestnuts, and said, 'How is it that German women
are so infinitely more intellectual than English women?'

Intellectual! How nice. And all the result of keeping quiet in the right
places.

'I did not know they were,' I said modestly; which was true.

'Oh but they are,' he assured me with great positiveness; and added,
'Perhaps you have noticed that I am English?'

Noticed that he was English? From the moment I first saw his collar I
suspected it; from the moment he opened his mouth and spoke I knew it;
and so did everybody else under the chestnuts who heard him speaking as
he passed. But why not please this artless young man? So I looked at him
with the raised eyebrows of intense surprise and said, 'Oh, are you
English?'

'I have been a good deal in Germany,' he said, looking happy.

'But it is extraordinary,' I said.

'It is not so very difficult,' he said, looking more and more happy.

'But really not German? _Fabelhaft_.'

The young man's belief in my intelligence was now unshakeable. The Frau
Förster, who had seen me disembark and set out for my walk alone, and
who saw me now returning with a companion of the other sex, greeted me
coldly. Her coldness, I felt, was not unjustifiable. It is not my
practice to set out by myself and come back telling youths I have never
seen before that their accomplishments are _fabelhaft_. I began to feel
coldly towards myself, and turning to the young man said good-bye with
some abruptness.

'Are you going in?' he asked.

'I am not staying here.'

'But the launch does not start for an hour. I go across too, then.'

'I am not crossing in the launch. I came over in a fishing-smack.'

'Oh really?' He seemed to meditate. 'How delightfully independent,' he
added.

'Have you not observed that the German Fräulein is as independent as she
is intellectual?'

'No, I have not. That is just where I think the Germans are so far
behind us. Their women have nothing like the freedom ours have.'

'What, not when they sail about all alone in fishing-smacks?'

'That certainly is unusually enterprising. May I see you safely into
it?'

The Frau Förster came towards us and told him that the food he had
ordered for eight o'clock was ready.

'No, thank you,' I said, 'don't bother. There is a fisherman and a boy
to help me in. It is quite easy.'

'Oh but it is no bother----'

'I will not take you away from your supper.'

'Are you not going to have supper here?'

'I lunched here to-day. So I will not sup.'

'Is the reason a good one?'

'You will see. Good-bye.'

I went away down the path to the beach. The path is steep, and the corn
on either side stands thick and high, and a few steps took me out of
sight of the house, the chestnuts, and the young man. The smack was
lying some distance out, and the dinghy was tied to her stern. The
fisherman's son's head was visible in a peaceful position on a heap of
ropes. It is difficult as well as embarrassing to shout, as I well knew,
but somebody would have to, and as nobody was there but myself I was
plainly the one to do it, I put my hands to my mouth, and not knowing
the fisherman's name called out _Sie_. It sounded not only feeble but
rude. When I remembered the appearance of the golden-bearded Viking, his
majestic presence and dreamy dignity, I was ashamed to find myself
standing on a rock and calling him as loud as I could _Sie_.

The head on the ropes did not stir. I waved my handkerchief. The boy's
eyes were shut. Again I called out _Sie_, and thought it the most
offensive of pronouns. The boy was asleep, and my plaintive cry went
past him over the golden ripples towards Lauterbach.

Then the Englishman appeared against the sky, up on the ridge of the
cornfield. He saw my dilemma, and taking his hands out of his pockets
ran down. '_Gnädiges Fräulein_ is in a fix,' he observed in his
admirably correct and yet so painful German.

'She is,' I said.

'Shall I shout?'

'Please.'

He shouted. The boy started up in alarm. The fisherman's huge body
reared up from the depths of the boat. In two minutes the dinghy was at
the little plank jetty, and I was in it.

'It was a very good idea to charter one of those romantic smacks to come
over in,' said the young man on the jetty wistfully.

'They're rather fishy,' I replied, smiling, as we pushed off.

'But so very romantic.'

'Have you not observed that the German Fräulein is a romantic
creature,'--the dinghy began to move--'a beautiful mixture of
intelligence, independence, and romance?'

'Are you staying at Putbus?'

'No. Good-bye. Thanks for coming down and shouting. You know your food
will be quite cold and uneatable.'

'I gathered from what you said before that it will be uneatable anyhow.'

The dinghy was moving fast. There was a rapidly-widening strip of golden
water between myself and the young man on the jetty.

'Not all of it,' I said, raising my voice. 'Try the compote. It is
lovely compote. It is what you would call in England glorified
gooseberry jam.'

'Glorified gooseberry jam?' echoed the young man, apparently much struck
by these three English words. 'Why,' he added, speaking louder, for the
golden strip had grown very wide, 'you said that without the ghost of a
foreign accent!'

'Did I?'

The dinghy shot into the shadow of the fishing-smack. The Viking and the
boy shipped their oars, helped me in, tied the dinghy to the stern,
hoisted the sail, and we dropped away into the sunset.

The young man on the distant jetty raised his cap. He might have been a
young archangel, standing there the centre of so much glory. Certainly a
very personable young man.




THE THIRD DAY

FROM LAUTERBACH TO GÖHREN


The official on the steamer at the Lauterbach jetty had offered to take
me to Baabe when I said I wanted to go to Vilm, and I had naturally
refused the offer. Afterwards, on looking at the map, I found that Baabe
is a place I would have to pass anyhow, if I carried out my plan of
driving right round Rügen. The guide-book is enthusiastic about Baabe,
and says--after explaining its rather odd name as meaning _Die Einsame_,
the Lonely One--that it has a pine forest, a pure sea air with ozone in
it, a climate both mild and salubrious, and that it works wonders on
people who have anything the matter with their chests. Then it says that
to lie at Baabe embedded in soft dry sand, allowing one's glance to rove
about the broad sea with its foam-crested waves, and the rest of one to
rejoice in the strong air, is an enviable thing to do. Then it bursts
into poetry that goes on for a page about the feelings of him who is
embedded, written by one who has been it. And then comes the practical
information that you can live at Baabe _en pension_ for four marks a
day, and that dinner costs one mark twenty _pfennings_. Never was there
a more irrepressibly poetic guide-book. What tourist wants to be told
first how he will feel when he has embedded himself in sand? Pleasures
of a subtle nature have no attraction for him who has not dined. Before
everything, the arriving tourist wants to know where he will get the
best dinner and what it will cost; and not until that has been settled
will there be, if ever, raptures. The guide-book's raptures about Baabe
rang hollow. The relief chest-sufferers would find there if they could
be induced to go, and the poem of the embedded one, would not, I felt,
have been put in if there had been anything really solid to praise.
Still, a place in a forest near the sea called _Die Einsame_ was to me,
at least, attractive; and I said good-bye to the Lauterbach I knew and
loved, and started, full of hope, for the Baabe I was all ready to love.

It was a merry day of bright sun and busy breeze. Everything was moving
and glancing and fluttering. I felt cheerful to hilarity when we were
fairly out in the fields that lie between the Greek temple and the
village of Vilmnitz--privately hilarious, of course, for I could not be
openly so in the sober presence of Gertrud. I have observed that sweet
smells, and clear light, and the piping of birds, all the things that
make life lovely have no effect whatever on Gertruds. They apparently
neither smell, nor see, nor hear them. They are not merely unable to
appreciate them, they actually do not know that they are there. This
complete unconsciousness of the presence of beauty is always a wonder to
me. No change of weather changes my Gertrud's settled solemnity. She
wears the same face among the roses of June that she does in the nipping
winds of March. The heart of May, with which every beast keeps holiday,
never occupies her respectable interior. She is not more solemn on a
blank February afternoon, when the world outside in its cold wrapping of
mist shudders through the sodden hours, than she is on such a day of
living radiance as this third one of our journey. The industrious breeze
lifted up the stray hairs from her forehead and gave it little pats and
kisses that seemed audaciously familiar applied to a brow of such
decorum; the restless poplar leaves whispered all the secrets of life in
her unhearing ears; the cottage gardens of Vilmnitz, ablaze that day
with the white flame of lilies, poured their stream of scent into the
road, and the wind caught it up and flung it across her sober nostrils,
and she could not breathe without drawing in the divineness of it, yet
her face wore exactly the same expression that it does when we are
passing pigs. Are the Gertruds of this world, then, unable to
distinguish between pigs and lilies? Do they, as they toss on its
troublesome waves, smell perpetual pigs? The question interested me for
at least three miles; and so much did I want to talk it over that I
nearly began talking it over with Gertrud herself, but was restrained by
the dread of offending her; for to drive round Rügen side by side with
an offended Gertrud would be more than my fortitude could endure.

Vilmnitz is a pretty little village, and the guide-book praises both its
inns; but then the guide-book praises every place it mentions. I would
not, myself, make use of Vilmnitz except as a village to be driven
through on the way to somewhere else. For this purpose it is quite
satisfactory though its roads might be less sandy, for it is a flowery
place with picturesque, prosperous-looking cottages, and high up on a
mound the oldest church in the island. This church dates from the
twelfth century, and I would have liked to go into it; but it was locked
and the parson had the key, and it was the hour in the afternoon when
parsons sleep, and wisdom dictates that while they are doing it they
shall be left alone. So we drove through Vilmnitz in all the dignity
that asks no favours and wants nothing from anybody.

The road is ugly from there to a place called Stresow, but I do not mind
an ugly road if the sun will only shine, and the ugly ones are useful
for making one see the beauty of the pretty ones. There are many Hun
graves, big mounds with trees growing on them, and I suppose Huns inside
them, round Stresow, and a monument reminding the passer-by of a battle
fought there between the Prussians under the old Dessauer and the
Swedes. We won. It was my duty as a good German to swell with patriotic
pride on beholding this memorial, and I did so. As a nation, the least
thing sets us swelling with this particular sort of pride. We acquire
the habit in our childhood when we imitate our parents, and on any fine
Sunday afternoon you may see whole families standing round the victory
column and the statues in the _Sieges Allee_ in Berlin engaged in doing
it. The old Dessauer is not very sharply outlined in a mind that easily
forgets, and I am afraid to say how little I know of him except that he
was old and a Dessauer; yet I felt extremely proud of him, and proud of
Germany, and proud of myself as I saw the place where we fought under
him and won. 'Oh blood and iron!' I cried, 'Glorious and potent mixture!
Do you see that monument, Gertrud? It marks the spot where we Prussians
won a mighty battle, led by the old, the heroic Dessauer.' And though
Gertrud, I am positive, is even more vague about him than I am, at the
mention of a Prussian victory her face immediately and mechanically took
on the familiar expression of him who is secretly swelling.

Beyond Stresow the road was hilly and charming, with woods drawing
sometimes to the edge of it and shading us, and sometimes drawing back
to the other side of meadows; and there were the first fields of yellow
lupins in flower, and I had the delight to which I look forward each
year as July approaches of smelling that peculiarly exquisite scent. And
so we came to the region of Baabe, passing first round the outskirts of
Sellin, a place of villas built in the woods on the east coast of Rügen
with the sea on one side and a big lake called the Selliner See on the
other; and driving round the north end of this lake we got on to the
dullest bit of road we had yet had, running beside a railway line and
roughly paved with stones, pine-woods on our left shutting out the sea,
and on our right across a marshy flat the lake, and bare and dreary
hills.

These, then, were the woods of Baabe. Down the straight road, unpleasing
even in the distance, I could see new houses standing aimlessly about,
lodging-houses out of sight and sound of the sea waiting for
chest-sufferers, the lodging-houses of the Lonely One. 'I will not stay
at Baabe,' I called energetically to August, who had been told we were
to stop there that night, 'go on to the next place.'

The next place is Göhren, and the guide-book's praise of it is
hysterical. Filled with distrust of the guide-book I could only hope it
would be possible to sleep in it, for the shadows had grown very long
and there is nowhere to stop at beyond Göhren except Thiessow, the
farthest southern point on the island. Accordingly we drove past the two
Baabe hotels, little wooden houses built on the roadside facing the
line, with the station immediately opposite their windows. A train was
nearly due, and intending passengers were sitting in front of the hotels
drinking beer while they waited, and various conveyances had stopped
there on their way to Göhren or Sellin, and the Lonely One seemed a very
noisy, busy one to me as we rattled by over the stones, and I was glad
to turn off to the left at a sign-post pointing towards Göhren and get
on to the deep, sandy, silent forest roads.

The forest, at first only pines and rather scrubby ones, stretches the
whole way from Baabe to Göhren and grows more and more beautiful. We had
to drive at a walking-pace because of the deep sand; but these sandy
roads have the advantage of being so quiet that you can hear something
besides the noise of wheels and hoofs. Not till we got to Göhren did we
see the sea, but I heard it all the way, for outside the forest the
breeze had freshened into a wind, and though we hardly felt it I could
see it passing over the pine-tops and hear how they sighed. I suppose we
must have been driving an hour among the pines before we got into a
region of mixed forest--beeches and oaks and an undergrowth of
whortleberries; and then tourists began to flutter among the trees,
tourists with baskets searching for berries, so that it was certain
Göhren could not be far off. We came quite suddenly upon its railway
station, a small building alone in the woods, the terminus of the line
whose other end is Putbus. Across the line were white dunes with young
beeches bending in the wind, and beyond these dunes the sea roared.
Beeches and dunes were in the full glow of the sunset. We, skirting the
forest on the other side, were in deep shadow. The air was so fresh that
it was almost cold. I stopped August and got out and crossed the
deserted line and climbed up the dunes, and oh the glorious sight on the
other side--the glorious, dashing, roaring sea! What was pale Lauterbach
compared to this? A mere lake, a crystal pool, a looking-glass, a place
in which to lie by the side of still waters and dream over your own and
heaven's reflection. But here one could not dream; here was life,
vigorous, stinging, blustering life; and standing on the top of the dune
holding my hat on with both hands, banged and battered by the salt wind,
my clothes flapping and straining like a flag in a gale on a swaying
flagstaff, the weight of a generation was blown off my shoulders, and I
was seized by a craving as unsuitable as it was terrific to run and
fetch a spade and a bucket, and dig and dig till it was too dark to dig
any longer, and then go indoors tired and joyful and have periwinkles or
shrimps for tea. And behold Gertrud, cold reminder of realities, beside
me cloak in hand; and she told me it was chilly, and she put the cloak
round my unresisting shoulders, and it was heavy with the weight of
hours and custom; and the sun dropped at that moment behind the forest,
and all the radiance and colour went out together. 'Thank you, Gertrud,'
I said as she wrapped me up; but though I shivered I was not grateful.

It was certainly not the moment to loiter on dunes. The horses had done
enough for one day, nearly half their work having been over heavy sand,
and we still had to look for our night quarters. Lauterbach had been
empty; therefore, with the illuminating logic of women, I was sure
Göhren would have plenty of room for us. It had not. The holidays had
just begun, and the place swarmed with prudent families who had taken
their rooms weeks before. Göhren is built on a very steep hill that
drops straight down on to the sands. The hill is so steep that we got
out, and August led or rather pulled the horses up it. Luckily the
forest road we came by runs along the bottom of the hill, and when we
came out of the trees and found ourselves without the least warning of
stray houses or lamp-posts in the heart of Göhren, we had to climb up
the road and not drive down it. Driving down it must be impossible,
especially for horses which, like mine, never see a hill in their own
home. When we had got safely to the top we left August and the horses to
get their wind and set out to engage rooms in the hotel the guide-book
says is the best. There is practically only that one street in Göhren,
and it is lined with hotels and lodging-houses, and down at the bottom,
between the over-arching trees, the leaden waves were dashing on the
deserted sands. People were having supper. Whatever place we passed, at
whatever hour during the entire tour, people were always having
something. The hotel I had chosen was in a garden, and the windows
evidently had lovely views over the green carpet of the level tree-tops.
As I walked up to the door I pointed to the windows of the bedroom I
thought must be the nicest, and told Gertrud it was the one I should
take. It was a cold evening, and the bath-guests were supping indoors.
There was no hall-porter or any one else whom I could ask for what I
wanted, so we had to go into the restaurant, where the whole strength of
the establishment was apparently concentrated. The room was crowded, and
misty with the fumes of suppers. All the children of Germany seemed to
be gathered in this one spot, putting knives into their artless mouths
even when it was only sauce they wanted to eat, and devouring their soup
with a passionate enthusiasm. I explained my wishes, grown suddenly less
ardent, rather falteringly to the nearest waiter. All the children of
Germany lifted their heads out of their soup-plates to listen. The
waiter referred me to the head waiter. Embarrassed, I repeated my
wishes, cooled down to the point where they almost cease to be wishes,
to this person, and all the children of Germany sat with their knives
suspended in the air and their mouths open while I did it. The head
waiter told me I could have the rooms on the 15th of August--it was then
the 17th of July--at which date the holidays ended and the families went
home. 'Oh, thank you, thank you; that will do beautifully!' I cried,
only too grateful that the families had left no corner unoccupied into
which I might have felt obliged, by the lateness of the hour, to force
my shrinking limbs; and hurrying to the door I could hear how all the
children of Germany's heads seemed to splash back again into their
soup-plates.

But my pleasure at not being doomed to stay there was foolish, as I
quickly perceived, for stay somewhere I must, and the guide-book was
right when it said this was the best hotel. Outside in the windy street
August and the horses were waiting patiently. The stars were coming out
in the pale green of the sky over Göhren, but from the east the night
was dragging up a great curtain of chill black cloud. For the best part
of an hour Gertrud and I went from one hotel to another, from one
lodging-house to another. The hotels all promised rooms if I would call
again in four weeks' time. The lodging-houses only laughed at our
request for a night's shelter; they said they never took in people who
were not going to stay the entire season, and who did not bring their
own bedding. Their own bedding! What a complication of burdens to lay on
the back of the patient father of a family. Did a holiday-maker with a
wife and, say, four children have to bring six sets of bedding with him?
Six sets of Teutonic bedding, stuffed with feathers? Six pillows, six of
those wedge-like things to put under pillows called _Kielkissen_, and
six quilted coverlets with insides of eider-down if there was a position
to keep up, and of wadding if public opinion could afford to be defied?
Yet the lodging-houses were full; and that there were small children in
them was evident from the frequency with which the sounds that accompany
the act of correction floated out into the street.

We found a room at last in the gloomiest hotel in the place. Only one
room, under the roof in a kind of tower, with eight beds in it, and no
space for anything else. August had no room at all, and slept with his
horses in the stable. There was one small iron wash-stand, a thing of
tiers with a basin at the top, a soap-dish beneath it, underneath that a
water-bottle, and not an inch more space in which to put a sponge or a
nail-brush. In the passage outside the door was a chest of drawers
reserved for the use of the occupiers of this room. It was by the merest
chance that we got even this, the arrival of the family who had taken it
for six weeks having been delayed for a day or two. They were coming the
very next day, eight of them, and were all going to spend six weeks in
that one room. 'Which,' said the landlord, 'explains the presence of so
many beds.'

'But it does not explain the presence of so many beds in one room,' I
objected, gazing at them resentfully from the only corner where there
were none.

'The _Herrschaften_ are content,' he said shortly. 'They return every
year.'

'And they are content, too, with only one of these?' I inquired,
pointing to the extremely condensed wash-stand.

The landlord stared. 'There is the sea,' he said, not without impatience
at being forced to state the obvious; and disliking, I suppose, the tone
of my remarks, he hurried downstairs.

Now it is useless for me to describe Göhren for the benefit of possible
travellers, because I am prejudiced. I was cold there, and hungry, and
tired, and I lived in a garret. To me it will always be a place where
there is a penetrating wind, a steep hill, and an iron wash-stand in
tiers. Some day when the distinct vision of these things is blurred, I
will order the best rooms in the best hotel several months beforehand to
be kept for me till I come, wait for fair, windless weather and the
passing of the holidays, and then go once more to Göhren. The place
itself is, I believe, beautiful. No place with so much sea and forest
could help being beautiful. That evening the beauties were hidden; and I
abruptly left the table beneath some shabby little chestnuts in front of
the hotel where I was trying, in gloom and wind, not to notice the
wetness of the table-napkin, the stains on the cloth, and the mark on
the edge of the plates where an unspeakable waiter had put his thumb,
and went out into the street. At a baker's I bought some rusks--dry
things that show no marks--and continued down the hill to the sea. There
is no cold with quite so forlorn a chill in it as a sudden interruption
of July heats; and there is no place with quite so forlorn a feeling
about it as deserted sands on a leaden evening. Was it only the evening
before that I had sailed away from Vilm in glory and in joy, leaving the
form of the abstruse but beautiful youth standing in such a golden
radiance that it was as the form of an angel? Down among the dunes,
where the grey ribbons of the sea-grass were violently fluttering and
indigo clouds lay in an unbroken level over leaden waves, I sat and ate
my rusks and was wretched. My soul rebelled both at the wretchedness and
at the rusks. Not for these had I come to Rügen. I looked at the waves
and shuddered. I looked at the dunes and disliked them. I was haunted by
the image of the eight beds waiting in my garret for me, and of certain
portions of the wall from which the paper was torn--the summer before,
probably, by one or more of the eight struggling in the first onslaughts
of asphyxia--and had not been gummed on again. My thoughts drifted
miserably into solemn channels, in the direction of what Carlyle calls
the Immensities. I remembered how I was only a speck after all in
uncomfortably limitless space, of no account whatever in the general
scheme of things, but with a horrid private capacity for being often and
easily hurt; and how specks have a trick of dying, which I in my turn
would presently do, and a fresh speck, not nearly so nice, as I hoped
and believed, would immediately start up and fill my vacancy, perhaps so
exactly my vacancy that it would even wear my gloves and stockings. The
last rusk, drier and drearier than any that had gone before, was being
eaten by the time my thoughts emerged from the gloom that hangs about
eternal verities to the desirable concreteness of gloves and stockings.
What, I wondered, became of the gloves and stockings of the recently
extinguished female speck? Its Gertrud would, I supposed, take
possession of its dresses; but my Gertrud, for instance, could not wear
my gloves, and I know believes only in those stockings she has knitted
herself. Still, she has nieces, and I believe aunts. She would send them
all the things she could not use herself, which would not be nice of
Gertrud. It would not matter, I supposed, but it would not be nice. She
would be letting herself down to being a kind of ghoul. I started up
with the feeling that I must go and remonstrate with her before it was
too late; and there, struggling in the wind and deep sand towards me,
her arms full of warm things and her face of anxious solicitude, was the
good Gertrud herself. 'I have prepared the gracious one's bed,' she
called out breathlessly; 'will she not soon enter it?'

'Oh Gertrud,' I cried, remembering the garret and forgetting the ghoul,
'which bed?'

'With the aid of the chambermaid I have removed two of them into the
passage,' said Gertrud, buttoning me into my coat.

'And the wash-stand?'

She shook her head. 'That I could not remove, for there is no other to
be had in its place. The chambermaid said that in four weeks' time'
--she stopped and scanned my face. 'The gracious one looks put out,' she
said. 'Has anything happened?'

'Put out? My dear Gertrud, I have been thinking of very serious things.
You cannot expect me to frolic along paths of thought that lead to
mighty and unpleasant truths. Why should I always smile? I am not a
Cheshire cat.'

'I trust the gracious one will come in now and enter her bed,' said
Gertrud decidedly, who had never heard of Cheshire cats, and was sure
that the mention of them indicated a brain in need of repose.

'Oh Gertrud,' I cried, intolerably stirred by the bare mention of that
bed, 'this is a bleak and mischievous world, isn't it? Do you think we
shall ever be warm and comfortable and happy again?'




THE FOURTH DAY

FROM GÖHREN TO THIESSOW


We left Göhren at seven the next morning and breakfasted outside it
where the lodging-houses end and the woods begin. Gertrud had bought
bread, and butter, and a bottle of milk, and we sat among the
nightshades, whose flowers were everywhere, and ate in purity and
cleanliness while August waited in the road. The charming little flowers
with their one-half purple and other half yellow are those that have red
berries later in the year and are called by Keats ruby grapes of
Proserpine. Yet they are not poisonous, and there is no reason why you
should not suffer your pale forehead to be kissed by them if you want
to. They are as innocent as they are pretty, and the wood was full of
them. Poison, death, and Proserpine seemed far enough away from that
leafy place and the rude honesty of bread and butter. Still, lest I
should feel too happy, and therefore be less able to bear any shocks
that might be awaiting me at Thiessow, I repeated the melancholy and
beautiful ode for my admonishment under my breath. It had no effect.
Usually it is an unfailing antidote in its extraordinary depression to
any excess of cheerfulness; but the wood and the morning sun and the
bread and butter were more than a match for it. No incantation of verse
could make me believe that Joy's hand was for ever at his lips bidding
adieu. Joy seemed to be sitting contentedly beside me sharing my bread
and butter; and when I drove away towards Thiessow he got into the
carriage with me, and whispered that I was going to be very happy there.

Outside the wood the sandy road lay between cornfields gay with
corncockles, bright reminders that the coming harvest will be poor. From
here to Thiessow there are no trees except round the cottages of
Philippshagen, a pretty village with a hoary church, beyond which the
road became pure sand, dribbling off into mere uncertain tracks over the
flat pasture land that stretches all the way to Thiessow.

The guide-book warmly recommends the seashore when the wind is in the
east (which it was) as the quickest and firmest route from Göhren to
Thiessow; but I chose rather to take the road over the plain because
there was a poem in the guide-book about the way along the shore, and
the guide-book said it described it extremely well, and I was sure that
if that were so I would do better to go the other way. This is the
poem--the translation is exact, the original being unrhymed, and the
punctuation is the poet's--

     Splashing waves
     Rocking boat
     Dipping gulls--
     Dunes.

     Raging winds
     Floating froth.
     Flashing lightning
     Moon!

     Fearful hearts
     Morning grey--
     Stormy nights
     Faith!

I read it, marvelled, and went the other way.

Thiessow is a place that has to be gone to for its sake alone, as a
glance at the map will show. If you make up your mind to journey the
entire length of the plain that separates it from everywhere else you
must also make up your mind to journey the entire length back again, to
see Göhren once more, to pass through Baabe, and to make a closer
acquaintance with Sellin which is on the way to the yet unvisited
villages going north. It is a singular drive down to Thiessow, singular
because it seems as though it would never leave off. You see the place
far away in the distance the whole time, and you jolt on and on at a
walking pace towards it, in and out of ruts, over grass-mounds, the sun
beating on your head, sea on your left rolling up the beach in long
waves, more sea on your right across the undulating greenness, a distant
hill with a village by the water to the west, sails of fisher-boats,
people in a curious costume mowing in a meadow a great way off, and
tethered all over the plain solitary sheep and cows, whose nervousness
at your approach is the nervousness begotten of a retired life. There
are no trees; and if we had not seen Thiessow all the time we should
have lost our way, for there is no road. As it is, you go on till you
are stopped by the land coming to an end, and there you are at Thiessow.
I believe in the summer you can get there by steamer from Göhren or
Baabe; but if it is windy and the waves are too big for the boats that
land you to put off, the steamer does not stop; so that the only way is
over the plain or along the shore. I walked nearly all the time, the
jolting was so intolerable. It was heavy work for the horses, and
straining work for the carriage. Gertrud sat gripping the bandbox, for
with every lurch it tried to roll out. August looked unhappy. His
experiences at Göhren had been worse than ours, and Thiessow was right
down at the end of all things, and had the drawback, obvious even to
August, that whatever it was like we would have to endure it, for
swelter back again over the broiling plain only to stay a second night
at Göhren was as much out of the question for the horses as for
ourselves. As for me, I was absolutely happy. The wide plain, the wide
sea, the wide sky were so gloriously full of light and life. The very
turf beneath my feet had an eager spring in it; the very daisies
covering it looked sprightlier than anywhere else; and up among the
great piled clouds the blessed little larks were fairly drunk with
delight. I walked some way ahead of the carriage so as to feel alone. I
could have walked for ever in that radiance and freshness. The
black-faced sheep ran wildly round and round as I passed, tugging at
their chains in frantic agitation. Even the cows seemed uneasy if I came
too close; and in the far-off meadow the mowers stopped mowing to watch
us dwindle into dots. In this part of Rügen the natives wear a
peculiarly hideous dress, or rather the men do--the women's costume is
not so ugly--and looking through my glasses to my astonishment I saw
that the male mowers had on long baggy white things that were like
nothing so much as a woman's white petticoat on either leg. But the
mowers and their trousers were soon left far behind. The sun had climbed
very high, was pouring down almost straight on to our heads, and still
Thiessow seemed no nearer. Well, it did not matter. That is the chief
beauty of a tour like mine, that nothing matters. As soon as there are
no trains to catch a journey becomes magnificently simple. We might
loiter as long as we liked on the road if only we got to some place, any
place, by nightfall. This, of course, was my buoyant midday mood, before
fatigue had weighed down my limbs and hunger gnawed holes in my
cheerfulness. The wind, smelling of sea and freshly-cut grass, had quite
blown away the memory of how tragic life had looked the night before
when set about by too many beds and not enough wash-stand; and I walked
along with what felt like all the brightness of heaven in my heart.

The end of this walk--I think of it as one of the happiest and most
beautiful I have had--came about one o'clock. At that dull hour, when
the glory of morning is gone and the serenity of afternoon has not
begun, we arrived at a small grey wooden hotel, separated from the east
sea by a belt of fir-wood, facing a common to the south, and about
twenty minutes' walk from Thiessow proper, which lies on the sea on the
western and southern shore of the point. It looked clean, and I went in.
August and Gertrud sat broiling in the sun of the shelterless sandy road
in front of the lily-grown garden. Somehow I had no doubts about being
taken in here, and I was at once shown a spotless little bedroom by a
spotless landlady. It was a corner room in the south-west corner of the
house, and one window looked south on to the common and the other west
on to the plain. The bed was drawn across this window, and lying on it I
could see the western sea, the distant hill on the shore with its
village, and grass, grass, nothing but grass, rolling away from the very
wall of the house to infinity and the sunset. The room was tiny. If I
had had more than a hold-all I should not have been able to get into it.
It had a locked door leading into another bedroom which was occupied,
said the chambermaid, by a quiet lady who would make no noise. Gertrud's
room was opposite mine. August cheered up when I went out and told him
he could go to the stables and put up, and Gertrud was visibly agreeably
surprised by the cleanliness of both our rooms.

I lunched on a verandah overlooking the common, with the Madonna lilies
of the little garden within reach of my hand; and the tablecloth and the
spoons and the waiter were all in keeping with the clean landlady. The
inn being small the visitors were few, and those I saw dining at the
other little tables on the verandah appeared to be quiet, inoffensive
people such as one would expect to find in a quiet, out-of-the-way
place. The sea was not visible, but I could hear it on the other side of
the belt of firs; and the verandah facing south and being hot and
airless, a longing to get into the cool water took hold of me. The
waiter said the bathing-huts were open in the afternoon from four to
five, and I went upstairs to tell Gertrud to bring my things down to the
beach at four, when she would find me lying in the sand. While I was
talking, the quiet lady in the next room began to talk too, apparently
to the chambermaid, for she talked of hot water. I broke off my own talk
short. It was not that the partition was so thin that it seemed as if
she were in the same room as myself, though that was sufficiently
disturbing--it was that I thought for a moment I knew the voice. I
looked at Gertrud. Gertrud's face was empty of all expression. The quiet
lady, continuing, told the chambermaid to let down the sun-blinds, and
the note in her voice that had struck me was no longer there. Feeling
relieved, for I did not want to come across acquaintances, I put _The
Prelude_ in my pocket and went out. The fir-wood was stuffy, and
suggested mosquitoes, but several bath-guests had slung up hammocks and
were lying in them dozing, so that there could not have been mosquitoes;
and coming suddenly out on to the sands all idea of stuffiness vanished,
for there was the same glorious, heaving, sparkling, splashing blue that
I had seen from the dunes of Göhren the evening before at sunset. The
bathing-house, a modest place with only two cells and a long plank
bridge running into deep water, was just opposite the end of the path
through the firs. It was locked up and deserted. The sands were deserted
too, for the tourists were all dozing in hammocks or in beds. I made a
hollow in the clean dry sand beneath the last of the fir trees, and
settled down to enjoy myself till Gertrud came. Oh, I was happy!
Thiessow was so quiet and primitive, the afternoon so radiant, the
colours of the sea and of the long line of silver sand, and of the soft
green gloom of the background of firs so beautiful. Commendably far away
to the north I saw the coastguard hill belonging to Göhren. On my right
the woods turned into beechwoods, and scrambled up high cliffs that
seemed to form the end of the peninsula. I would go and look at all that
later on after my bathe. If there is a thing I love it is exploring the
little paths of an unknown wood, finding out the corners where it keeps
its periwinkles and anemones, discovering its birds' nests, waiting
motionless for its hedgehogs and squirrels, and even searching out those
luscious recesses, oozy and green, where it keeps its happy slugs. They
tell me slugs are not really happy, that Nature is cruel, and that you
only have to scratch the pleasant surface of things to get at once to
blood-curdling brutalities. Perhaps if you were to go on scratching you
might get to consolations and beneficiencies again; but why scratch at
all? Why not take the beauty and be grateful? I will not scratch. I will
not criticise my own mother who has sheltered me so long in her broad
bosom, and been so long my surest guide to all that is gentle and
lovely. Whatever she does, from thunderbolts to headaches, I will not
criticise; for if she gives me a headache, is there not pleasure when it
leaves off? And if she hurls a thunderbolt at me and I am unexpectedly
exterminated, my body shall serve as a basis for fresh life and growth,
and shall blossom out presently into an immortality of daisies.

I think I must have slept, for the sound of the waves grew very far
away, and I only seemed to have been watching the sun on them for a few
minutes, when Gertrud's voice floated across space to my ears; and she
was saying it was past four, and that one lady had already gone down to
bathe, and that, as there were only two cells, if I did not go soon I
might not get a bathe at all. I sat up in my hollow and looked across to
the huts. The bathing woman in the usual white calico sunbonnet was
there, waiting on the plank bridge. No one was in the sea yet. It was a
great bore that there should be any one else bathing just then, for
German female tourists are apt to be extraordinarily cordial in the
water. On land, laced into suppressive whalebone, dressed, and with
their hair dry and curled, they cannot but keep within the limits set by
convention; but the more clothes they take off the more do they seem to
consider the last barrier between human creature and human creature
broken down, and they will behave towards you, meeting you on this
common ground of wateriness, as though they had known you and
extravagantly esteemed you for years. Their cordiality, too, becomes
more pronounced in proportion to the coldness and roughness of the
water; and the water that day looked cold and was certainly rough, and I
felt that there being only two of us in it it would be impossible to
escape the advances of the other one. Still, as the cells were shut at
five, I could not wait till she had done, so I went down and began to
undress.

While I was doing it I heard her leave her cell and anxiously ask the
woman if the sea were very cold. Then she apparently put in one foot,
for I heard her shriek. Then she apparently bent down, and scooping up
water in her hand splashed her face with it, for I heard her gasp. Then
she tried the other foot, and shrieked again. And then the bathing
woman, fearful lest five o'clock should still find her on duty, began
mellifluously to persuade. By this time I was ready, but I did not
choose to meet the unknown emotional one on the plank bridge because the
garments in which one bathes in German waters are regrettably scanty; so
I waited, peeping through the little window. After much talk the
eloquence of the bathing woman had its effect, and the bather with one
wild scream leapt into the foam, which immediately engulfed her, and
when she emerged the first thing she did on getting her breath was to
clutch hold of the rope and shriek without stopping for at least a
minute. 'Unwürdiges Benehmen,' I observed to Gertrud with a shrug. 'It
must be very cold,' I added to myself, not without a secret shrinking.
But to my surprise, when I ran along the planks above where the
unfortunate clutched and shrieked, she looked up at me with a wet but
beaming countenance, and interrupted her shrieks to gasp out,
'_Prachtvoll!_'

'Really these bath-guests in the water----' I thought indignantly. What
right had this one, only because my apparel was scanty, to smile at me
and say _prachtvoll_? I was so much startled by the unexpected
exclamation from a person who had the minute before been rending the air
with her laments, that my foot slipped on the wet planks, I just heard
the bathing woman advising me to take care, just had time to comment to
myself on the foolishness of such advice to one already hurling through
space, and then came a shock of all-engulfing coldness and wetness and
suffocation, and the next moment there I was gasping and spluttering
exactly as the other bath-guest had gasped and spluttered, but with this
difference, that she had clutched the rope and shrieked, and I, with all
the convulsive energy of panic, was shrieking and clutching the
bath-guest.

'_Prachtvoll_, nicht?' I heard her say with an odious jollity through
the singing in my ears. Every wave lifted me a little off my feet. My
mouth was full of water. My eyes were blinded with spray. I continued to
cling to her with one hand, miserably conscious that after this there
would be no shaking her off, and rubbing my eyes with the other looked
at her. My shrieks froze on my lips. Where had I seen her face before?
Surely I knew it? She wore one of those grey india-rubber caps, drawn
tightly down to her eyes, that keep the water out so well and are so
hopelessly hideous. She smiled back at me with the utmost friendliness,
and asked me again whether I did not think it glorious.

'_Ach ja-ja_,' I panted, letting her go and groping blindly for the
rope. 'Thank you, thank you; pray pardon me for having seized you so
rudely.'

'_Bitte, bitte_,' she cried, beginning to jump up and down again.

'Who in the world is she?' I asked myself, getting away as fast as I
could. 'Where have I seen her before?'

Probably she was an undesirable acquaintance. Perhaps she was my
dressmaker. I had not paid her last absurd bill, and that and a certain
faint resemblance to what my dressmaker would look like in an
india-rubber cap was what put her into my head; and no sooner had I
thought it than I was sure of it, and the conviction was one of quite
unprecedented disagreeableness. How profoundly unpleasant to meet this
person in the water, to have come all the way to Rügen, to have suffered
at Göhren, to have walked miles in the heat of the day to Thiessow, for
the sole purpose of bathing tête-à-tête with my dressmaker. And to have
tumbled in on top of her and clung about her neck! I climbed out and ran
into my cell. My idea was to get dressed and away as speedily as
possible; yet with all Gertrud's haste, just as I came out of my cell
the other woman came out of hers in her clothes, and we met face to
face. With one accord we stopped dead and our mouths fell open, 'What,'
she cried, 'it is _you_?'

'What,' I cried, 'it is _you_?'

It was my cousin Charlotte whom I had not seen for ten years.




THE FOURTH DAY--_Continued_

AT THIESSOW


My cousin Charlotte was twenty when I saw her last. Now she was thirty,
besides having had an india-rubber cap on. Both these things make a
difference to a woman, though she did not seem aware of it, and was lost
in amazement that I should not have recognised her at once. I told her
it was because of the cap. Then I expressed the astonishment I felt that
she had not at once recognised me, and after hesitating a moment she
said that I had been making too many faces; and so with infinite
delicacy did we avoid all allusion to those ten unhideable years.

Charlotte had had a chequered career; at least, beside my placid life it
seemed to have bristled with events. In her early youth, and to the
dismay of her parents, she insisted on being educated at one of the
English colleges for women--it was at Oxford, but I forget its name--a
most unusual course for a young German girl of her class to take. She
was so determined, and made her relations so uncomfortable during their
period of opposition, that they gave in with what appeared to more
distant relatives who were not with Charlotte all day long a criminal
weakness. At Oxford she took everything there was to take in the way of
honours and prizes, and was the joy and pride of her college. In her
last year, a German savant of sixty, an exceedingly bright light in the
firmament of European learning, came to Oxford and was fêted. When
Charlotte saw the great local beings she was accustomed to look upon as
the most marvellous men of the age--the heads of colleges, professors,
and other celebrities--vying with each other in honouring her
countryman, her admiration for him was such that it took her breath
away. At some function she was brought to his notice, and her family
being well known in Germany and she herself then in the freshness of
twenty-one, besides being very pretty, the great man was much
interested, and beamed benevolently upon her, and chucked her under the
chin. The head in whose house he was staying, a person equally exquisite
in appearance and manners, who had had much to forgive that was less
excellent in his guest and had done so freely for the sake of the known
profundity of his knowledge, could not but remark this interest in
Charlotte, and told him pleasantly of her promising career. The
professor appeared to listen with attention, and looked pleased and
approving; but when the head ceased, instead of commenting on her
talents or the creditable manner in which she had developed them, what
he said was, 'A nice, round little girl. A very nice, round little girl.
_Colossal appetitlich_.' And this he repeated emphatically several
times, to the distinct discomfort of the head, while his eyes followed
her benignly into the distant corner placed at the disposal of the
obscure.

Six months later she married the professor. Her family wept and implored
in vain; told her in vain of the terrificness of marrying a widower with
seven children all older than herself. Charlotte was blinded by the
glory of having been chosen by the greatest man Oxford had ever seen.
Oxford was everything to her. Her distant German home and its spiritless
inhabitants were objects only of her good-natured shrugs. She wrote to
me saying she was going to be the life companion of the finest thinker
of the age; her people, so illiterate and so full of prejudices, could
not, she supposed, be expected to appreciate the splendour of her
prospects; she thanked heaven that her own education had saved her from
such a laughable blindness; she could conceive nothing more glorious
than marrying the man in all the world whom you most reverently admire,
than being chosen as the sharer of his thoughts, and the partner of his
intellectual joys. After that I seldom heard from her. She lived in the
south of Germany, and her professor's fame waxed vaster every year.
Every year, too, she brought a potential professor into a world already
so full of them, and every year death cut short its career after a
period varying from ten days to a fortnight, and the _Kreuzzeitung_
seemed perpetually to be announcing that _Heute früh ist meine liebe
Frau Charlotte von einem strammen Jungen leicht und glücklich entbunden
worden_, and _Heute starb unser Sohn Bernhard im zarten Alter von zwei
Wochen_. None of the children lived long enough to meet the next
brother, and they were steadily christened Bernhard, after a father
apparently thirsting to perpetuate his name. It became at last quite
uncomfortable. Charlotte seemed never to be out of the _Kreuzzeitung_.
For six years she and the poor little Bernhards went on in this manner,
haunting its birth and death columns, and then abruptly disappeared from
them; and the next I heard of her was that she was in England,--in
London, Oxford, and other intellectual centres, lecturing in the cause
of Woman. The _Kreuzzeitung_ began about her again, but on another page.
The _Kreuzzeitung_ was shocked; for Charlotte was emancipated.
Charlotte's family was so much shocked that it was hysterical.
Charlotte, not content with lecturing, wrote pamphlets,--lofty documents
of a deadly earnestness, in German and English, and they might be seen
any day in the bookshop windows _Unter den Linden_. Charlotte's family
nearly fainted when it had to walk _Unter den Linden_. The Radical
papers, which were only read by Charlotte's family when nobody was
looking and were never allowed openly to darken their doors, took her
under their wing and wrote articles in her praise. It was, they said,
surprising and refreshing to find views and intelligence of the sort
emerging from the suffocating ancestral atmosphere that hangs about the
_Landadel_. The paralysing effect of too many ancestors was not as a
rule to be lightly shaken off, especially by the female descendants.
When it did get shaken off, as in this instance, it should be the
subject of rejoicing to every person who had the advancement of
civilisation at heart. The civilisation of a state could never be great
so long as its women, etc. etc.

My uncle and aunt nearly died of this praise. Her brothers and sisters
stayed in the country and refused invitations. Only the professor seemed
as pleased as ever. 'Charlotte is my cousin,' I said to him at a party
in Berlin where he was being lionised. 'How proud you must be of such a
clever wife!' I had not met him before, and a more pleasant, rosy, nice
little old man I have never seen.

He beamed at me through his spectacles. Almost could I see the narrow
line that separated me from a chin-chucking. 'Yes, yes,' he said, 'so
they all tell me. The little Lotte is making a noise. Empty vessels do.
But I daresay what she tells them is a very pretty little nonsense. One
must not be too critical in these cases.' And, seizing upon the
cousinship, he began to call me _Du_.

I inquired how it was she was wandering about the world alone. He said
he could not imagine. I asked him what he thought of the pamphlets. He
said he had no time for light reading. I was so unfortunate as to
remark, no doubt with enthusiasm, that I had read some of his simpler
works to my great benefit and unbounded admiration. He looked more
benign than ever, and said he had had no idea that anything of his was
taught in elementary schools.

In a word, I was routed by the professor. I withdrew, feeling crushed,
and wondering if I had deserved it. He came after me, called me his
_liebe kleine Cousine_, and sitting down beside me patted my hand and
inquired with solicitude how it was he had never seen me before. Renewed
attempts on my part to feed like a bee on the honey of his learning were
met only by pats. He would pat, but he would not impart wisdom; and the
longer he patted the more perfect did his serenity seem to become. When
people approached us and showed a tendency to hang on the great man's
lips, he looked up with a happy smile and said, 'This is my little
cousin--we have much to say to each other,' and turned his back on them.
And when I was asked whether I had not spent a memorable, an elevating
evening, being talked to so much by the famous Nieberlein, I could only
put on a solemn face and say that I should not soon forget it. 'It will
be something to tell your children of, in the days to come when he is a
splendid memory,' said the enthusiast.

'Oh won't it!' I ejaculated, with the turned-up eyes of rapture.

'Tell me one thing,' I said to Charlotte as we walked slowly along the
sands towards the cliff and the beechwood; 'why, since you took me for a
stranger, were you so--well, so gracious to me in the water?'

Gertrud had gone back to the hotel laden with both our bathing-things.
'She may as well take mine up at the same time,' Charlotte had remarked,
piling them on Gertrud's passive arms. Undeniably she might; and
accordingly she did. But her face was wry, and so had been the smile
with which she returned Charlotte's careless greetings. 'You still keep
that old fool, I see,' said Charlotte. 'It would send me mad to have a
person of inferior intellect for ever fussing round me.'

'It would send me much madder to have a person of superior intellect
buttoning my boots and scorning me while she does it,' I replied.

'Why was I so gracious to you in the water?' repeated Charlotte in
answer to my inquiry, made not without anxiousness, for one likes to
know one's own cousin above the practices of ordinary bath-guests. 'I'll
tell you why. I detest the stiff, icy way women have of turning their
backs if they don't know each other.'

'Oh they're not very stiff,' I remarked, thinking of past bathing
experiences, 'and besides, in the water----'

'It is not only unkind, it is simply wicked. For how shall we ever be
anything but tools and drudges if we don't co-operate, if we don't stand
shoulder to shoulder? Oh my heart goes out to all women! I never see one
without feeling I must do all in my power to get to know her, to help
her, to show her what she must do, so that when her youth is gone there
will still be something left, a so much nobler happiness, a so much
truer joy.'

'Than what?' I asked, puzzled.

Charlotte was looking into my eyes as though she were reading my soul.
She wasn't, whatever she might have thought she was doing. 'Than what
she had before, of course,' she said with some asperity.

'But perhaps what she had before was just what she liked best.'

'But if it was only the sort of joy every woman who is young and pretty
gets heaped on her, does it not take wings and fly away the moment she
happens to look haggard, or is low-spirited, or ill?'

It was as I had feared. Charlotte was strenuous. There was not a doubt
of it. And the strenuous woman is a form of the sex out of whose way I
have hitherto kept. Of course I knew from the pamphlets and the lectures
that she was not one to stay at home and see the point of purring over
her husband's socks; but I had supposed one might lecture and write
things without bringing the pamphlet manner to bear on one's own blood
relations.

'You were very jolly in the water,' I said. 'Why are you suddenly so
serious?'

'The water,' replied Charlotte, 'is the only place I am ever what you
call jolly in. It is the only place where I can ever forget how terribly
earnest life is.'

'My dear Charlotte, shall we sit down? The bathing has made me tired.'

We did sit down, and leaning my back against a rock, and pulling my hat
over my eyes, I gazed out at the sunlit sea and at the flocks of little
white clouds hanging over it to the point where they met the water,
while Charlotte talked. Yes, she was right, nearly always right, in
everything she said, and it was certainly meritorious to use one's
strength, and health, and talents as she was doing, trying to get rid of
mouldy prejudices. I gathered that what she was fighting for were equal
rights and equal privileges for women and men alike. It is a story I
have heard before, and up to now it has not had a satisfactory ending.
And Charlotte was so small, and the world she defied was so big and so
indifferent and had such an inconsequent habit of associating all such
efforts--in themselves nothing less than heroic--with the
ridiculousness of cropped hair and extremities clothed in bloomers. I
protest that the thought of this brick wall of indifference with
Charlotte hurling herself against it during all the years that might
have been pleasant was so tragic to me that I was nearly tempted to try
to please her by offering to come and hurl myself too. But I have no
heroism. The hardness and coldness of bricks terrifies me. What, I
wondered, could her experiences with her great thinker have been, to
make her turn her back so absolutely on the fair and sheltered land of
matrimony? I could not but agree with much that she was saying. That
women, if they chose, need not do or endure any of the things against
which those of them who find their voice cry out has long been clear to
me. That they are, on the whole, not well-disposed towards each other is
also a fact frequently to be observed. And that this secret antagonism
must be got over before there can be any real co-operation may, I
suppose, be regarded as certain. But when Charlotte spoke of
co-operation she was apparently thinking only of the co-operation of
those whom years, in place of the might of youth, have provided with the
sad sensibleness that comes of repeated disappointments--the
co-operation, that is, of the elderly; and the German elderly in the
immense majority of cases remains obscurely in her kitchen and does not
dream of co-operating. Has she not got over the conjugal quarrels of the
first married years? Has she not filled her nurseries and become
indefinite in outline? And do not these things make for content? If
thoughts of rebellion enter her head, she need only look honestly at her
image in the glass to be aware that it is not her kind that will ever
wring concessions from the other sex. She is a _brave Frau_, and a
_brave Frau_ who should try to do anything beyond keeping her home tidy
and feeding its inmates would be almost pathetically ridiculous.

'You shouldn't bother about the old ones,' I murmured, watching a little
white steamer rounding the Göhren headland. 'Get the young to
co-operate, my dear Charlotte. The young inherit the earth--Teutonic
earth certainly they do. If you got all the pretty women between twenty
and thirty on your side the thing's done. No wringing would be required.
The concessions would simply shower down.'

'I detest the word concession,' said Charlotte.

'Do you? But there it is. We live on the concessions made us by those
beings you would probably call the enemy. And, after all, most of us
live fairly comfortably.'

'By the way,' she said, turning her head suddenly and looking at me,
'what have you been doing all these years?'

'Doing?' I repeated in some confusion. I don't know why there should
have been any confusion, unless it was a note in Charlotte's voice that
made her question sound like a stern inquiry after that one talent which
is death to hide lodged with me useless. 'Now, as though you didn't very
well know what I have been doing. I have had a row of babies and brought
it up quite nicely.'

'_That_ isn't anything to be proud of.'

'I didn't say it was.'

'Your cat achieves precisely the same thing.'

'My dear Charlotte, I haven't got a cat.'

'And now--what are you doing now?'

'You see what I am doing. Apparently exactly what you are.'

'I don't mean that. Of course you know I don't mean that. What are you
doing now with your life?'

I turned my head and gazed reproachfully at Charlotte. How pretty she
used to be. How prettily the corners of her mouth used to turn up, as
though her soul were always smiling. And she had had the dearest chin
with a dimple in it, and she had had clear, hopeful eyes, and all the
lines of her body had been comely and gracious. These are solid
advantages that should not lightly be allowed to go. Not a trace of them
was left. Her face was thin, and its expression of determination made it
look hard. There was a deep line straight down between her eyebrows, as
though she frowned at life more than is needful. Angles had everywhere
taken the place of curves. Her eyes were as bright and intelligent as
ever, but seemed to have grown larger. Something had completely done for
Charlotte as far as beauty of person goes; whether it was the six
Bernhards, or her actual enthusiasms, or the unusual mixture of both, I
could not at this stage discover; nor could I yet see if her soul had
gained the beauty that her body had lost, which is undoubtedly what the
rightly cared-for soul does do. Meanwhile anything more utterly unlike
the wife of a famous professor I have never seen. The wife of an aged
German celebrity should be, and is, calm, comfortable, large, and slow.
She must be, and is, proud of her great man. She attends to his bodily
wants, and does not presume to share his spiritual excitements. In their
common life he is the brain, she the willing hands and feet. It is
perfectly fair. If there are to be great men some one must be found to
look after them--some one who shall be more patient, faithful, and
admiring than a servant, and unable like a servant to throw up the
situation on the least provocation. A wife is an admirable institution.
She is the hedge set between the precious flowers of the male intellect
and the sun and dust of sordid worries. She is the flannel that protects
when the winds of routine are cold. She is the sheltering jam that makes
the pills of life possible. She is buffer, comforter, and cook. And so
long as she enjoys these various roles the arrangement is perfect. The
difficulties begin when, defying Nature's teaching, which on this point
is luminous, she refuses to be the hedge, flannel, jam, buffer,
comforter, and cook; and when she goes so far on the sulphuric path of
rebellion as to insist on being clever on her own account and publicly,
she has, in Germany at least, set every law of religion and decency at
defiance. Charlotte had been doing this, if all I had heard was true,
for the last three years; therefore her stern inquiry addressed to a
wife of my sobriety struck me as singularly out of place. What had I
been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it
seemed very spacious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it,
and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I
had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures,
neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows.

'It is very odd,' Charlotte went on, as I sat silent, 'our meeting like
this. I was on the verge of writing to ask if I might come and stay with
you.'

'Oh were you?'

'So often lately I have thought just you might be such a help to me if
only I could wake you up.'

'Wake me up, my dear Charlotte?'

'Oh, I've heard about you. I know you live stuffed away in the country
in a sort of dream. You needn't try to answer my question about what you
have done. You can't answer it. You have lived in a dream, entirely
wrapped up in your family and your plants.'

'Plants, my dear Charlotte?'

'You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of
your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world
where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer,
where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer
experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your
existence--no one could call it life--is quite negative and unemotional.
It is as negative and as unemotional as----' She paused and looked at me
with a faint, compassionate smile.

'As what?' I asked, anxious to hear the worst.

'Frankly, as an oyster's.'

'Really, my dear Charlotte,' I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very
unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Göhren. Why had I not
stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such
a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I
were an oyster--curious how much the word disconcerted me--at least I
was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not
an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than
happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes,
nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I
be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a
ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a
sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this
beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I
must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was
dark; so I got up, cleared my throat, and said in the balmy tone in
which people on platforms begin their orations, '_Geehrte Anwesende_.'

'Are you going to give me a lecture?' she inquired with a surprised
smile.

'In return for yours.'

'My dear soul, may I not talk to you about anything except plants?'

'I really don't know why you should think plants are the only things
that interest me. I have not yet mentioned them. And, as a matter of
fact, you are the last person with whom I would share my vegetable
griefs. But that isn't what I wished to say. I was going to offer you,
_geehrte Anwesende_, a few remarks about husbands.'

Charlotte frowned.

'About husbands,' I repeated blandly, in a voice of milk and honey.
'_Geehrte Anwesende_, in the course of an uneventful existence I have
had much leisure for reflection, and my reflections have led me to the
conclusion, erroneous perhaps, but fixed, that having got a husband,
taken him of one's own free will, taken him sometimes even in the face
of opposition, the least one can do is to stick to him. Now, Charlotte,
where is yours? What have you done with him? Is he here? And if not, why
is he not here, and where is he?'

Charlotte got up hastily and brushed the sand out of the folds of her
dress. 'You haven't changed a bit,' she said with a slight laugh. 'You
are just as----'

'Silly?' I suggested.

'Oh, I didn't say that. And as for Bernhard, he is where he always was,
marching triumphantly along the road to undying fame. But you know that.
You only ask because your ideas of the duties of woman are medieval, and
you are shocked. Well, I'm afraid you must be shocked then. I haven't
seen him for a whole year.'

Luckily at this moment, for I think we were going to quarrel, Gertrud
came heaving through the sand towards us with a packet of letters. She
had been to the post, and knowing I loved getting letters came out to
look for me so that I might have them at once; and as I eagerly opened
them and buried myself in them, Charlotte confined her occasional
interjections to deprecating the obviously inferior shape of Gertrud's
head.




THE FIFTH DAY

FROM THIESSOW TO SELLIN


Many a time have I wondered at the unworthy ways of Fate, at the
pettiness of the pleasure it takes in frustrating plans that are small
and innocent, at its entire want of dignity, at its singular
spitefulness, at the resemblance of its manners to those of an
evilly-disposed kitchen-maid; but never have I wondered more than I did
that night at Thiessow.

We had been for a walk after tea through the beechwood, up a hill behind
it to the signal station, along a footpath on the edge of the cliff with
blue gleams of sea on one side through a waving fringe of blue and
purple flowers, and the ryefields on the other. We had stood looking
down at the village of Thiessow far below us, a cluster of picturesque
roofs surrounded on three sides by sunlit water; had gazed across the
vast plain to the distant hill and village of Gross Zickow; watched the
shadows passing over meadows miles away; seen how the sea to the west
had the calm colours of a pearl; how the sea beneath us through the
parting stalks of scabious and harebells was quiet but very blue; and
how behind us, over the beech-tops, there was the eastern sea where the
wind was, as brilliant and busy and foam-flecked as before. It was all
very wide, and open, and roomy. It was a place to bless God in and cease
from vain words. And when the stars came out we went down into the
plain, and wandered out across the dewy grass in the gathering night,
our faces towards the red strip of sky where the sun had set.

Charlotte had not been silent all this time; she had been, on the
contrary, passionately explanatory. She had passionately explained the
intolerableness of her life with the famous Nieberlein; she had
passionately justified her action in cutting it short. And listening in
silence, I had soon located the real wound, the place she did not
mention where all the bruises were; for talk and explain as she might it
was clear that her chief grievance was that the great man had never
taken her seriously. To be strenuous, to hold intense views on questions
that seem to you to burn, and to be treated as an airy nothing, a
charming nothing perhaps, but still a nothing, must be, on the whole,
disconcerting. I do not know that I should call it more than
disconcerting. You need not, after all, let your vision be blocked
entirely by the person with whom you chance to live; however vast his
intellectual bulk may be, you can look round him and see that the stars
and the sky are still there, and you need not run away from him to do
that. If the great Nieberlein had not taken Charlotte sufficiently
seriously, she had manifestly taken him much too seriously. It is better
to laugh at one's Nieberlein than to be angry with him, and it is
infinitely more personally soothing. And presently you find you have
grown old together, and that your Nieberlein has become unaccountably
precious, and that you do not want to laugh at all,--or if you do, it is
a very tender laughter, tender almost to tears.

And then, as we walked on over the wonderful starlit plain in the huge
hush of the brooding night, the air, heavy with dew and the smell of
grass cut that afternoon in distant meadows, so sweet and soft that it
seemed as if it must smooth away every line of midday eagerness from our
tired faces, Charlotte paused; and before I had done praising Providence
for this refreshment, she not yet having paused at all, she began again
in a new key of briskness, and said, 'By the way, I may as well come
with you when you leave this. I have nothing particular to do. I came
down here for a day or two to get away from some English people I was
with at Binz who had rather got on to my nerves. And I have so much to
say to you, and it will be a good opportunity. We can talk all day,
while we are driving.'

Talk all day while we were driving! If Hazlitt saw no wit in talking and
walking, I see less than none in talking and driving. It was this speech
of Charlotte's that set me marvelling anew at the maliciousness of Fate.
Here was I, the most harmless of women, engaged in the most harmless of
little expeditions, asking and wanting nothing but to be left alone; a
person so obscure as to be, one would think, altogether out of the reach
of the blind Fury with the accursèd shears; a person with a plan so mild
and humble that I was ashamed of the childishness of the Fate that could
waste its energies spoiling it. Yet before the end of the fourth day I
was confronted with the old familiar inexorableness, taking its stand
this time on the impossibility of refusing the company of a cousin whom
you have not seen for ten years.

'Oh Charlotte,' I cried, seized her arm convulsively, struggling in the
very clutches of Fate, 'what--what a good idea! And what a thousand
pities that it can't be managed! You see it is a victoria, and there are
only two places because of all the luggage, so that we can't use the
little seat, or Gertrud might have sat on that----'

'Gertrud? Send her home. What do you want with Gertrud if I am with
you?'

I stared dismayed through the dusk at Charlotte's determined face. 'But
she--packs,' I said.

'Don't be so helpless. As though two healthy women couldn't wrap up
their own hair-brushes.'

'Oh it isn't only hair-brushes,' I went on, still struggling, 'it's
everything. You can't think how much I loathe buttoning boots--I know I
never would button them, but go about with them undone, and then I'd
disgrace you, and I don't want to do that. But that isn't it really
either,' I went on hurriedly, for Charlotte had opened her mouth to tell
me, I felt certain, that she would button them for me, 'my husband never
will let me go anywhere without Gertrud. You see she looked after his
mother too, and he thinks awful things would happen if I hadn't got her.
I'm very sorry, Charlotte. It is most unfortunate. I wish--I wish I had
thought of bringing the omnibus.'

'But is your husband such an absurd tyrant?' asked Charlotte, a robust
scorn for my flabby obedience in her voice.

'Oh--tyrant!' I ejaculated, casting up my eyes to the stars, and
mentally begging the unconscious innocent's pardon.

'Well, then, we must get a luggage cart and put the things into that.'

'Oh,' I cried, seizing her arm again, my thoughts whirling round in
search of a loophole of escape, 'what--what another good idea!'

'And Gertrud can go in the cart too.'

'So she can. What--what a trilogy of good ideas! Have you got any more,
Charlotte? What a resourceful woman you are. I believe you like fighting
and getting over difficulties.'

'I believe I do,' said Charlotte complacently.

I dropped her arm, ceased to struggle, walked on vanquished. Henceforth,
if no more interesting difficulties presented themselves, Charlotte was
going to spend her time overcoming me. And besides an eloquent Charlotte
sitting next to me, there would be a cart rattling along behind me all
day. I could have wept at the sudden end to the peace and perfect
freedom of my journey. I went to bed, to a clean and pleasant bed that
at another time would have pleased me, strongly of opinion that life was
not worth while. Nor did it comfort me that from my pillow I looked out
at the mysterious dark plain with its roof of stars and its faint red
window in the north-west, because Charlotte had opened the door between
our rooms and every now and then asked me if I were asleep. I lay making
plans for the circumvention of Charlotte, and rejecting them one after
the other as too uncousinly; and when I had made my head ache with the
difficulty of uniting a becoming cousinliness with the cold-bloodedness
necessary for shaking her off, I spent my time feebly deprecating the
superabundance of cousins in the world. Surely there are too many?
Surely almost everybody has more than he can manage comfortably? It must
have been long after midnight that Charlotte, herself very restless,
called out once more to know if I were asleep.

'Yes I am,' I answered; not quite kindly I fear, but indeed it is an
irritating question.

We left Thiessow at ten the next morning under a grey sky, and drove, at
the strong recommendation of the landlord, along the hard sands as far
as a little fishing place called Lobberort, where we struck off to the
left on to the plain again, and so came once more to Philippshagen and
the high road that runs from there to Göhren, Baabe, and Sellin. I took
the landlord's advice willingly, because I did not choose to drive on
that grey morning in my altered circumstances over the plain along which
I had walked so happily only the day before. The landlord, as obliging a
person as his wife was a capable one, had provided a cart with two
long-tailed, raw-boned horses who were to come with us as far as Binz,
my next stopping-place. Gertrud sat next to the driver of this cart
looking grim. Her prospects were gloomy, for the seat was hard, the
driver was dirty, the cart had no springs, and she had had to pack
Charlotte's clothes. She did not approve of the Frau Professor; how
should she? Gertrud read her _Kreuzzeitung_ as regularly as she did her
Bible, and believed it as implicitly; she knew all about the pamphlets,
and only from the _Kreuzzeitung's_ point of view. And then Charlotte
made the mistake clever people sometimes do of too readily supposing
that others are stupid; and it did not need much shrewdness on Gertrud's
part to see that the Frau Professor disliked the shape of her head.

The drive along the wet sands was uninteresting because of the
prevailing greyness of sky and sea; but the waves made so much noise
that Charlotte, unable to get anything out of me but head-shakings and
pointings to my ears, gave up trying to talk and kept quiet. The luggage
cart came on close behind, the lean horses showing an undesirable
skittishness, and once, in an attempt to run away, swerved so close to
the water that Gertrud's gloom became absolutely leaden. But we reached
Lobberort safely, ploughed up through the deep sand on to the track
again, and after Philippshagen the sky cleared, the sun came out, and
the world began on a sudden to sparkle.

We did not see Göhren again. The road, very hilly just there, passes
behind it between steep grassy banks blue with harebells and with a
strip of brilliant sky above it between the tops of the beeches. But
once more did I rattle over the stones of the Lonely One, pass the
wooden inn where the same people seemed to be drinking the same beer and
still waiting for the same train, and drive along the dull straight bit
between Baabe and the first pines of Sellin. At Sellin we were going to
lunch, rest the horses, and then, late in the afternoon, go on to Binz.
Sellin from this side is a pine-forest with a very deep sandy road.
Occasional villas appear between the trees, and becoming more frequent
join into a string and form one side of the road. After passing them we
came to a broad gravel road at right angles to the one we were on, with
restaurants and villas on either side, trim rows of iron lamp-posts and
stripling chestnut trees, and a wide gap at the end at the edge of the
cliff below which lay the sea.

This was the real Sellin, this single wide hot road, with its glaring
white houses, and at the back of them on either side the forest brushing
against their windows. It was one o'clock. Dinner bells were ringing all
down the street, visitors were streaming up from the sands into the
different hotels, dishes clattered, and the air was full of food. On
every balcony families were sitting round tables waiting for the servant
who was fetching their dinner from a restaurant. Down at the foot of the
cliff the sea lay in perfect quiet, a heavenly blue, out of reach in
that bay of the wind that was blowing on Thiessow. There was no wind
here, only intense heat and light and smells of cooking. 'Shall we leave
August to put up, and get away into the forest and let Gertrud buy some
lunch and bring it to us?' I asked Charlotte. 'Don't you think dinner in
one of these places will be rather horrid?'

'What sort of lunch will Gertrud buy?' inquired Charlotte cautiously.

'Oh bread, and eggs, and fruit, and things. It is enough on a hot day
like this.'

'My dear soul, it is not enough. Surely it is foolish to starve. I'll
come with you if you like, of course, but I see no sense in not being
properly nourished. And we don't know where and when we shall get
another meal.'

So we drove on to the end hotel, from whose terrace we could look down
at the deserted sands and the wonderful colour of the water. August and
the driver of the luggage cart put up. Gertrud retired to a neighbouring
cafe, and we sat and gasped under the glass roof of the verandah of the
hotel while a hot waiter brought us boiling soup.

It is a barbarous custom, this of dining at one o'clock. Under the most
favourable circumstances one o'clock is a difficult hour to manage
profitably to the soul. There is something peculiarly base about it. It
is the hour, I suppose, when the life of the spirit is at its lowest
ebb, and one should be careful not to extinguish it altogether under the
weight of a gigantic menu. I know my spirit fainted utterly away at the
aspect of those plates of steaming soup and at the smell of all the
other things we were going to be given after it. Charlotte ate her soup
calmly and complacently. It did not seem to make her hotter. She also
ate everything else with equal calmness, and remarked that full brains
are never to be found united to an empty stomach.

'But a full stomach is often to be found united to empty brains,' I
replied.

'No one asserted the contrary,' said Charlotte; and took some more
_Rinderbrust_.

I thought that dinner would never be done. The hotel was full, and the
big dining-room was crowded, as well as the verandah where we were.
Everybody talked at once, and the noise was like the noise of the parrot
house at the Zoological Gardens. It looked as if it were an expensive
place; it had parquet floors and flowers on the tables and various other
things I had not yet come across in Rügen; and when the bill came I
found that it not only looked so but was so. All the more, then, was I
astonished at the numbers of families with many children and the
necessary Fräulein staying in it. How did they manage it? There was a
visitors' list on the table, and turning it over I found that none of
them, in the nature of things, could be well off. They all gave their
occupations, and the majority were _Apotheker_ and _Photographen_. There
were two _Herren Pianofabrikanten_, several _Lehrer_, a _Herr
Geheimcalculator_ whatever that is, many _Bankbeamten_ or clerks, and
one surely who must have found the place beyond his means, a _Herr
Schriftsteller_. All these had wives and children with them, 'I can't
make it out,' I said to Charlotte.

'What can't you make out?'

'How these people contrive to stay weeks in a dear hotel like this.'

'Oh, it is quite simple. The _Badereise_ is the great event of the year.
They save up for it all the rest of the year. They live at home as
frugally as possible so that for one magnificent month they can pretend
to waiters and chambermaids and the other visitors that they are richer
than they are. It is very foolish, sadly foolish. It is one of the
things I am trying to persuade women to give up.'

'But you are doing it yourself.'

'But surely there is a difference in the method. Besides, I was run
down.'

'Well, so I should think were the poor mothers of families by the time
they have kept house frugally for a year. And if it makes them happy,
why not?'

'Just that is another of the things I am working to persuade them to
give up.'

'What, being happy?'

'No, being mothers of families.'

'My dear Charlotte,' I murmured; and mused in silence on the six
Bernhards.

'Of unwieldily big ones, of course I mean.'

'And what do you understand by unwieldily big ones?' I asked, still
musing on the Bernhards.

'Any number above three. And for most of these women even three is
excessive.'

The images of the six Bernhards troubled me so much that I could not
speak.

'Look,' said Charlotte, 'at the women here. All of them, or any of them.
The one at the opposite table, for instance. Do you see the bulk of the
poor soul? Do you see how difficult existence must be made for her by
that circumstance alone? How life can be nothing to her but
uninterrupted panting?'

'Perhaps she doesn't walk enough,' I suggested. 'She ought to walk round
Rügen once a year instead of casting anchor in the flesh-pots of
Sellin.'

'She looks fifty,' continued Charlotte. 'And why does she look fifty?'

'Perhaps because she is fifty.'

'Nonsense. She is quite young. But those four awful children are hers,
and no doubt there is a baby, or perhaps two babies, upstairs, and they
have finished her. How is such a woman to realise herself? How can she
work out her own salvation? What energies she has must be spent on her
children. And if ever she tries to think, she must fall asleep from
sheer torpor of brain. Now why should she be deprived of the use of her
soul?'

'Charlotte, are you not obscure? Here, take my pudding. I don't like
it.'

I hoped the pudding would stem the stream of her eloquence. I feared an
impending lecture. She had resumed the pamphlet manner of the previous
afternoon, and I felt very helpless. She took the pudding, and I was
dismayed, to find that though she ate it it had no effect whatever. She
did not even seem to know she was eating it, and continued to address me
with rapidly-increasing vehemence on the proper treatment of female
souls. Now why could she not talk on this subject without being
vehement? There is something about vehemence that freezes responsiveness
out of me; I suppose it is what Charlotte would call the oyster
characteristics coming out. Anyhow, by the time the waiter brought
cheese and woolly radishes and those wicked black slabs of leather
called _Pumpernickel_, I was sitting quite silent, and Charlotte was
leaning across the little table hurling fiery words at me. And as for
the stout lady who had set her ablaze, she ate almonds and raisins with
a sublime placidity, throwing the almonds down on to the stone floor,
cracking them with the heel of her boot, and exhibiting an unexpected
nimbleness in picking them up again.

'Do you suppose that if she hadn't had those four children and heaven
knows how many besides she wouldn't be different from what she is now?'
asked Charlotte, leaning her elbows on the table and fixing me with eyes
whose brightness dazzled me, 'As different as day is from night? As
health from disease? As briskness from torpor? She'd have looked and
felt ten years younger. She'd have had all her energies unimpaired.
She'd have had the use of her soul, her time, her individuality. Now it
is too late. All that has been choked out of her by the miserable daily
drudgery. What would the man, her smug husband there, say if he were
made to help in the soul-killing work a woman is expected to do as a
matter of course? Yet why shouldn't he help her bear her burdens? Why
shouldn't he take them on his stronger shoulders? Don't give me the
trite answer that it is because he has his own work to do--we know his
work, the man's work, at its hardest full of satisfactions and
pleasures, and hopes and ambitions, besides coming to an end every day
at a certain hour, while she grows old in hopeless, hideous,
never-ending drudgery. There is a difference between the two that makes
my blood boil.'

'Oh don't let it boil,' I cried, alarmed. 'We're so hot as it is.'

'I tell you I think that woman over there as tragic a spectacle as it
would be possible to find. I could cry over her--poor dumb,
half-conscious remnant of what was meant to be the image of God.'

'My dear Charlotte,' I murmured uneasily. There were actual tears in
Charlotte's eyes. Where I saw only an ample lady serenely cracking
almonds in a way condemned by the polite, Charlotte's earnest glance
pierced the veil of flesh to the withered, stunted soul of her. And
Charlotte was so sincere, was so honestly grieved by the hopeless
dulness of the fulfilment of what had once been the blithe promise of
young girlhood, that I began to feel distressed too, and cast glances of
respectful sympathy at the poor lady. Very little more would have made
me cry, but I was saved by something unexpected; for the waiter came
round with newly-arrived letters for the visitors, and laying two by the
almond-eating lady's plate he said quite distinctly, and we both heard
him distinctly, _Zwei für Fräulein Schmidt_; and the eldest of the four
children, a pert little girl with a pig-tail, cried out, _Ei, ei, hast
Du heute Glück, Tante Marie_; and having finished our dinner we got up
and went on our way in silence; and when we were at the door, I said
with a suavity of voice and manner meant to be healing, 'Shall we go
into the woods, Charlotte? There are a few remarks I should like to
offer you on the Souls of Maiden Aunts;' and Charlotte said, with some
petulance, that the principle was the same, and that her head ached, and
would I mind being quiet.




THE FIFTH DAY--_Continued_

FROM SELLIN TO BINZ

Suppose a being who should be neither man nor woman, a creature wholly
removed from the temptations that beset either sex, a person who could
look on with absolute indifference at all our various ways of wasting
life, untouched by the ambitions of man, and unstirred by the longings
of woman, what would such a being think of the popular notion against
which other uneasy women besides Charlotte raise their voices, that the
man should never be bothered by the cares of the house and the babies,
but rather go his daily round of business or pleasure precisely as he
did before he had his house and his babies? I love to have the details
of life arranged with fastidious justice, all its little burdens
distributed with an exact fairness among those who have to carry them;
and I imagine that this being, who should be rather more than man and
less than god, who should understand everything and care nothing, would
call it wrong to allot a double weight to the strong merely because he
is strong, and would call it right that he should have his exact share,
and use the strength he has left over not in carrying the burden of some
weak friend who, burdenless, is still of no account in life, but in
praising God, going first, and showing the others the way.

Thus did I meditate, walking in silence by Charlotte's side in the beech
forest of Sellin. Not for anything would I have put my meditations into
words, well aware that though they might be nourishing to me they would
poison Charlotte. The maiden aunt and the dinner together had given
Charlotte a headache, which I respected by keeping silent; and for two
hours we wandered and sat about among the beeches, sometimes on the
grassy edge of the cliffs, our backs against tree trunks, looking out
over the brilliant blue water with its brilliant green shallows, or
lying in the grass watching the fine weather clouds floating past
between the shining beech-leaves.

Those were glorious hours, for Charlotte dozed most of the time, and it
was almost as quiet as though she had not been there at all. No
bath-guests parted the branches to stare at us; they were sleeping till
the cool of the day. No pedestrians with field-glasses came to look at
the view and ask each other, with one attentive eye on us, if it were
not colossal. No warm students walked along wiping their foreheads as
they sang of love and beer. Nothing that had dined at a _table d'hôte_
could possibly move in such heat.

And so it came about that Charlotte and I shared the forest only with
birds and squirrels.

This forest is extremely beautiful. It stretches for miles along the
coast, and is full of paths and roads that lead you to unexpected
lovelinesses--sudden glimpses of the sea between huge beech trunks on
grassy plateaus; deep ravines, their sides clothed with moss, with water
trickling down over green stones to the sea out in the sun at the
bottom; silent glades of bracken, silvery in the afternoon light, where
fallow deer examine you for one brief moment of curiosity before they
spring away, panic-stricken, into the deeper shadows of the beeches. In
that sun-flecked place, so exquisite whichever way I looked, so
spacious, and so quiet, how could I be seriously interested in stuffy
indoor questions such as the equality of the sexes, in anything but the
beauty of the world and the joy of living in it? I was not seriously
interested; I doubt if I have ever been. Destiny having decided that I
shall walk through life petticoated, weighed down by the entire range of
disabilities connected with German petticoats, I will waste no time
arguing. There it is, the inexorable fact, and there it will remain; and
one gets used to the disabilities, and finds, on looking at them closer,
that they exclude nothing that is really worth having.

I glanced at the dozing Charlotte, half inclined to wake her up to tell
her this, and exhort her to do as the dragons in the glorious verse of
Doctor Watts, who

     Changed their fierce hissings into joyful songs.
     And praised their Maker with their forked tongues.

But I was afraid to stir her up lest her tongue should be too forked and
split my arguments to pieces. So she dozed on undisturbed, and I enjoyed
myself in silence, repeating gems from the pages of the immortal doctor,
echoes of the days when I lisped in numbers that were not only infant
but English at the knee of a pious nurse from the land of fogs.

At five o'clock, when I felt that a gentle shaking of Charlotte was no
longer avoidable if we were to reach Binz that evening, and was
preparing to apply it with cousinly gingerliness, an obliging bumble-bee
who had been swinging deliciously for some minutes past in the purple
flower of a foxglove on the very edge of the cliff, backed out of it and
blundered so near Charlotte's face that he brushed it with his wings.
Charlotte instantly sat up, opened her eyes, and stared hard at me. Such
is the suspiciousness of cousins that though I was lying half a dozen
yards away she was manifestly of opinion that I had tickled her. This
annoyed me, for Charlotte was the last person in the world I would think
of tickling. There was something about her that would make it
impossible, however sportively disposed I might be; and besides, you
must be very great friends before you begin to tickle. Charlotte and I
were cousins, but we were as yet nowhere near being very great friends.
I got up, put on my hat, and said rather stiffly, for she still sat
staring, that it was time to go. We walked back in silence, each feeling
resentful, and keeping along the cliff passed, just before we came to
Sellin, a little restaurant of coloured glass, a round building of an
atrocious ugliness, which we discovered was one of the prides of Sellin;
for afterwards, driving through the forest to Binz, all the sign-posts
had fingers pointing in its direction, and bore the inscription _Glas
Pavilion, schönste Aussicht Sellins_. The _schöne Aussicht_ was
indisputable, but to choose the loveliest spot and blot its beauty with
a coloured glass restaurant so close to a place full of restaurants is
surely unusually profane. There it is, however, and all day long it
industriously scents the forest round it with the smell of soup. People
were beginning to gather about its tables, the people we had seen dining
and who had slept since, and some of them were already drinking coffee
and eating slabs of cherry cake with a pile of whipped cream on each
slab, for all the world as though they had had nothing since breakfast.
Conspicuous at one table sat the maiden aunt, still rosy from her sleep.
She too had ordered cherry cake, and the waiter put it down before her
as we came by, and she sat for a moment fondly regarding it, turning the
plate round and round so as to take in all its beauties, and if ever a
woman looked happy it was that one. 'Poor dumb, half-conscious
remnant'--I murmured under my breath. Charlotte seemed to read my
thoughts, for she turned her head impatiently away from the cake and the
lady, and said once again and defiantly, 'The principle is the same, of
course.'

'Of course,' said I.

The drive from Sellin to Binz was by far the most beautiful I had had.
Up to that point no drive had been uninterruptedly beautiful, but this
one was lovely from end to end. It took about an hour and a half, and we
were the whole time in the glorious mixed forest belonging to Prince
Putbus and called the Granitz. As we neared Binz the road runs down
close to the sea, and through the overhanging branches we could see that
we had rounded another headland and were in another bay. Also, after
having met nothing but shy troops of deer, we began to pass increasing
numbers of bath-guests, walking slowly, taking the gentlest of exercise
before their evening meal. Charlotte had been fairly quiet. Her head,
apparently, still ached; but suddenly she started and exclaimed 'There
are the Harvey-Brownes.'

'And who, pray, are the Harvey-Brownes?' I inquired, following the
direction of her eyes.

It was easy enough to see which of the groups of tourists were the
Harvey-Brownes. They were going in the same direction as ourselves, a
tall couple in clothes of surpassing simplicity and excellence.
Immediately afterwards we drove past them; Charlotte bowed coldly; the
Harvey-Brownes bowed cordially, and I saw that the young man was my
philosophic friend of the afternoon at Vilm.

'And who, pray, are the Harvey-Brownes?' I asked again.

'The English people I told you about who had got on to my nerves. I
thought they'd have left by now.'

'And why were they on your nerves?'

'Oh she's a bishop's wife, and is about the narrowest person I have met,
so we're not likely to be anywhere but on each other's nerves. But she
adores that son of hers and would do anything in the world that pleases
him, and he pursues me.'

'Pursues you?' I cried, with an incredulousness that I immediately
perceived was rude. I hastened to correct it by shaking my head in
gentle reproof and saying: 'Dear me, Charlotte--dear, dear me.'
Simultaneously I was conscious of feeling disappointed in young
Harvey-Browne.

'What do you suppose he pursues me for?' Charlotte asked, turning her
head and looking at me.

'I can't think,' I was going to say, but stopped in time.

'The most absurd reason. He torments me with attentions because I am
Bernhard's wife. He is a hero-worshipper, and he says Bernhard is the
greatest man living.'

'Well, but isn't he?'

'He can't get hold of him, so he hovers round me, and talks Bernhard to
me for hours together. That's why I went to Thiessow. He was sending me
mad.'

'He hasn't an idea, poor innocent, that you don't--that you no
longer----'

'I have as much courage as other people, but I don't think there's
enough of it for explaining things to the mother. You see, she's the
wife of a bishop.'

Not being so well acquainted as Charlotte with the characteristics of
the wives of bishops I did not see; but she seemed to think it explained
everything.

'Doesn't she know about your writings?' I inquired.

'Oh yes, and she came to a lecture I gave at Oxford--the boy is at
Balliol--and she read some of the pamphlets. He made her.'

'Well?'

'Oh she made a few conventional remarks that showed me her limitations,
and then she began about Bernhard. To these people I have no
individuality, no separate existence, no brains of my own, no opinions
worth listening to--I am solely of interest as the wife of Bernhard. Oh,
it's maddening! The boy has put I don't know what ideas into his
mother's head. She has actually tried to read one of Bernhard's works,
and she pretends she thought it sublime. She quotes it. I won't stay at
Binz. Let us go on somewhere else to-morrow.'

'But I think Binz looks as if it were a lovely place, and the
Harvey-Brownes look very nice. I am not at all sure that I want to go on
somewhere else to-morrow.'

'Then I'll go on alone, and wait for you at Sassnitz.'

'Oh, don't wait. I mightn't come to Sassnitz.'

'Oh well, I'll be sure to pick you up again somewhere. It isn't a very
big island, and you are a conspicuous object, driving round it.'

This was true. So long as I was on that island I could not hope to
escape Charlotte. I entered Binz in a state of moody acquiescence.

Every hotel was full, and every room in the villas was taken. It was the
Göhren experience over again. At last we found shelter by the merest
chance in the prettiest house in the place--we had not dared inquire
there, certain that its rooms would be taken first of all--a little
house on the sands, overhung at the back by beechwoods, its windows
garnished with bright yellow damask curtains, its roof very red, and its
walls very white. A most cheerful, trim little house, with a nice tiled
path up to the door, and pots of geraniums on its sills. A cleanly
person of the usual decent widow type welcomed us with a cordiality
contrasting pleasantly with the indifference of those widows whose rooms
had been all engaged. The entire lower floor, she said, was at our
disposal. We each had a bedroom opening on to a verandah that seemed to
hang right over the sea; and there was a dining-room, and a beautiful
blue-and-white kitchen if we wanted to cook, and a spacious chamber for
Gertrud. The price was low. Even when I said that we should probably
only stay one or two nights it did not go up. The widow explained that
the rooms were engaged for the entire season, but that the Berlin
gentleman who had taken them was unavoidably prevented coming, which was
the reason why we might have them, for it was not her habit to take in
the passing stranger.

I asked whether it were likely that the Berlin gentleman might yet
appear and turn us out. She stared at me a moment as though struck by my
question, and then shook her head. 'No, no,' she said decidedly; 'he
will not appear.'

A very pretty little maidservant who was bringing in our luggage was so
much perturbed by my innocent inquiry that she let the things drop.

'Hedwig, do not be a fool,' said the widow sternly. 'The gentleman,' she
went on, turning to me, 'cannot come, because he is dead.'

'Oh,' I said, silenced by the excellence of the reason.

Charlotte, being readier of speech, said 'Indeed.'

The reason was a good one; but when I heard it it seemed as if the
pleasant rooms with the beds all ready and everything set out for the
expected one took on a look of awfulness. It is true it was now past
eight o'clock, and the sun had gone, and across the bay the dusk was
creeping. I went out through the long windows to the little verandah. It
had white pillars of great apparent massiveness, which looked as though
they were meant to support vast weights of masonry; and through them I
watched the water rippling in slow, steely ripples along the sand just
beneath me, and the ripples had the peculiar lonely sound that slight
waves have in the evening when they lick a deserted shore.

'When was he expected?' I heard Charlotte, within the room, ask in a
depressed voice.

'To-day,' said the widow.

'To-day?' echoed Charlotte.

'That is why the beds are made. It is lucky for you ladies.'

'Very,' agreed Charlotte; and her voice was hollow.

'He died yesterday--an accident. I received the telegram only this
morning. It is a great misfortune for me. Will the ladies sup? I have
some provisions in the house sent on by the gentleman for his supper
to-night. He, poor soul, will never sup again.'

The widow, more moved by this last reflection than she had yet been,
sighed heavily. She then made the observation usual on such occasions
that it is a strange world, and that one is here to-day and gone
to-morrow--or rather, correcting herself, here yesterday and gone
to-day--and that the one thing certain was the _schönes Essen_ at that
moment on the shelves of the larder. Would the ladies not seize the
splendid opportunity and sup?

'No, no, we will not sup,' Charlotte cried with great decision. 'You
won't eat here to-night, will you?' she asked through the yellow
window-curtains, which made her look very pale. 'It is always horrid in
lodgings. Shall we go to that nice red-brick hotel we passed, where the
people were sitting under the big tree looking so happy?'

We went in silence to the red-brick hotel; and threading our way among
the crowded tables set out under a huge beech tree a few yards from the
water to the only empty one, we found ourselves sitting next to the
Harvey-Brownes.

'Dear Frau Nieberlein, how delightful to have you here again!' cried the
bishop's wife in tones of utmost cordiality, leaning across the little
space between the tables to press Charlotte's hand. 'Brosy has been
scouring the country on his bicycle trying to discover your retreat, and
was quite disconsolate at not finding you.'

Scouring the country in search of Charlotte! Heavens. And I who had
dropped straight on top of her in the waters of Thiessow without any
effort at all! Thus does Fortune withhold blessings from those who
clamour, and piles them unasked on the shrinking heads of the meek.

Brosy Harvey-Browne meanwhile, like a polite young man acquainted with
German customs, had

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