The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen Part 17

My intention when I began this book was to write a useful Guide to Rugen, one that should point out its best parts and least uncomfortable inns to any English or American traveller whose energy lands him on its sh.o.r.es. With every page I write it grows more plain that I shall not fulfil that intention. What, for instance, have Charlotte and the bishop's wife of illuminating for the tourist who wants to be shown the way? As I cannot conscientiously praise the inns I will not give their names, and what is the use of that to a tourist who wishes to know where to sleep and dine? I meant to describe the Jagdschloss, and find I only repeated a ghost story. It is true I said the rolls at the inn there were hard, but the information was so deeply embedded in superfluities that no tourist will discover it in time to save him from ordering one.

Still anxious to be of use, I will now tell the traveller that he must on no account miss going from Binz to Kiekower, but that he must go there on his feet, and not allow himself to be driven over the roots and stones by the wives of bishops; and that shortly before he reaches Kiekower (Low German for look, or peep over), he will come to four cross-roads with a sign-post in the middle, and he is to follow the one to the right, which will lead him to the Schwarze See or Black Lake, and having got there let him sit down quietly, and take out the volume of poetry he ought to have in his pocket, and bless G.o.d who made this little lovely hollow on the top of the hills, and drew it round with a girdle of forest, and filled its reedy curves with white water-lilies, and set it about with silence, and gave him eyes to see its beauty.

I am afraid I could not have heard Mrs. Harvey-Browne's questions for quite a long time, for presently I found she had sauntered round this enchanted spot to the side where Brosy was taking photographs, and I was sitting alone on the moss looking down through the trees at the lilies, and listening only to frogs. I looked down between the slender stems of some silver birches that hung over the water; every now and then a tiny gust of wind came along and rippled their clear reflections, ruffling up half of each water-lily leaf, and losing itself somewhere among the reeds. Then when it had gone, the lily leaves dropped back one after the other on to the calm water, each with a little thud. On the west side the lake ends in a reedy marsh, very froggy that afternoon, and starred with the snowy cotton flower. A peculiarly fragrant smell like exceedingly delicate Russian leather hangs round the place, or did that afternoon. It was, I suppose, the hot sun bringing out the scent of some hidden herb, and it would not always be there; but I like to think of the beautiful little lake as for ever fragrant, all the year round lying alone and sweet-smelling and enchanted, tucked away in the bosom of the solitary hills.

When the traveller has spent some time lying on the moss with his poet--and he should lie there long enough for his soul to grow as quiet and clear as the water, and the poet, I think, should be Milton--he can go back to the cross-roads, five minutes' walk over beech leaves, and so to Kiekower, about half a mile farther on. The contrast between the Schwarze See and Kiekower is striking. Coming from that sheltered place of suspended breath you climb up a steep hill and find yourself suddenly on the edge of high cliffs where the air is always moving and the wind blows freshly on to you across the bay. Far down below, the blue water heaves and glitters. In the distance lies the headland beyond Sa.s.snitz, hazy in the afternoon light. The beech trees, motionless round the lake, here keep up a ceaseless rustle. You who have been so hot all day find you are growing almost too cool.

'_Sie ist schon, unsere Ostsee, was?_' said a hearty male voice behind us.

We were all three leaning against the wooden rail put up for our protection on the edge of the cliff. A few yards off is a shed where a waiter, battered by the sea breezes he is forced daily to endure, supplies the thirsty with beer and coffee. The hearty owner of the voice, brown with the sun, damp and jolly with exercise and beer-drinking, stood looking over Mrs. Harvey-Browne's shoulder at the view with an air of proud proprietorship, his hands in his pockets, his legs wide apart, his cap pushed well off an extremely heated brow.

He addressed this remark to Mrs. Harvey-Browne, to whom, I suppose, she being a matron of years and patent sobriety, he thought cheery remarks might safely be addressed. But if there was a thing the bishop's wife disliked it was a cheery stranger. The pedagogue that morning, so artlessly interested in her conversation with me as to forget he had not met her before, had manifestly revolted her. I myself the previous evening, though not cheery still a stranger, had been objectionable to her. How much more offensive, then, was a warm man speaking to her with a familiarity so sudden and jolly as to resemble nothing so much as a slap on the back. She, of course, took no notice of him after the first slight start and glance round, but stared out to sea with eyes grown stony.

'In England you do not see such blue water, what?' shouted the jolly man, who was plainly in the happy mood the French call _deboutonne_.

His wife and daughters, ladies clothed in dust-cloaks sitting at a rough wooden table with empty beer-gla.s.ses before them, laughed hilariously.

The mere fact of the Harvey-Brownes being so obviously English appeared to amuse them enormously. They too were in the mood _deboutonne_.

Ambrose, as ready to talk as his mother to turn her back, answered for her, and a.s.sured the jolly man that he had indeed never seen such blue water in England.

This seemed to give the whole family intense delight. '_Ja, ja,_'

shouted the father, '_Deutschland, Deutschland, uber Alles!_' And he trolled out that famous song in the sort of voice known as rich.

'Quite so,' said Ambrose politely, when he had done.

'Oh come, we must drink together,' cried the jolly man, 'drink in the best beer in the world to the health of Old England, what?' And he called the waiter, and in another moment he and Ambrose stood clinking gla.s.ses and praising each other's countries, while the hilarious family laughed and applauded in the background.

The bishop's wife had not moved. She stood staring out to sea, and her stare grew ever stonier.

'I wish----' she began; but did not go on. Then, there being plainly no means of stopping Ambrose's cordiality, she wisely resolved to pa.s.s the time while we waited for him in exchanging luminous thoughts with me.

And we did exchange them for some minutes, until my luminousness was clouded and put out by the following short conversation:--

'I must say I cannot see what there is about Germans that so fascinates Ambrose. Do you hear that empty laughter? "The loud laugh that betrays the empty mind"?'

'As Shakespeare says.'

'Dear Frau X., you are so beautifully read.'

'So nice of you.'

'I know you are a woman of a liberal mind, so you will not object to my saying that I am much disappointed in the Germans.'

'Not a bit.'

'Ambrose has always been so enthusiastic about them that I expected quite wonders. What do I find? I pa.s.s over in silence many things, including the ill-bred mirth--just listen to those people--but I cannot help lamenting their complete want of common sense.'

'Indeed?'

'How sensible English people are compared to them!'

'Do you think so?'

'Why, of course, in everything.'

'But are you not judging the whole nation by the few?'

'Oh, one can always tell. What could be more supremely senseless for instance'--and she waved a hand over the bay--'than calling the Baltic the Ostsee?'

'Well, but why shouldn't they if they want to?'

'But dear Frau X., it is so foolish. East sea? Of what is it the east?

One is always the east of something, but one doesn't talk about it. The name has no meaning whatever. Now "Baltic" exactly describes it.'

THE SEVENTH DAY

FROM BINZ TO STUBBENKAMMER

We left Binz at ten o'clock the next morning for Sa.s.snitz and Stubbenkammer. Sa.s.snitz is the princ.i.p.al bathing-place on the island, and I had meant to stay there a night; but as neither of us liked the glare of chalk roads and white houses we went on that day to Stubbenkammer, where everything is in the shade.

Charlotte had not gone away as she said she would, and when I got back to our lodgings the evening before, penitent and apologetic after my wanderings in the forest, besides being rather frightened, for I was afraid I was going to be scolded and was not sure that I did not deserve it, I found her sitting on the pillared verandah indulgently watching the sunset sky, with _The Prelude_ lying open on her lap. She did not ask me where I had been all day; she only pointed to _The Prelude_ and said, 'This is great rubbish; 'to which I only answered 'Oh?'

Later in the evening I discovered that the reason of her want of interest in my movements and absence of reproachfulness was that she herself had had a busy and a successful day. Judgment, hurried on by Charlotte, had overtaken the erring Hedwig; and the widow, expressing horror and disgust, had turned her out. Charlotte praised the widow.

'She is an intelligent and a right-minded woman,' she said. 'She a.s.sured me she would rather do all the work herself and be left without a servant altogether than keep a wicked girl like that. I was prepared to leave at once if she had not dismissed her then and there.'

Still later in the evening I gathered from certain remarks Charlotte made that she had lent the most lurid of her works, a pamphlet called _The Beast of Prey_, to the widow, who to judge from Charlotte's satisfaction was quite carried away by it. Its nature was certainly sufficiently startling to carry any ordinary widow away.

We left the next morning, pursued by the widow's blessings,--blessings of great potency, I suppose, of the same degree of potency exactly as the curses of orphans, and we all know the peculiar efficaciousness of those. 'Good creature,' said Charlotte, touched by the number of them as we drove away; 'I am so glad I was able to help her a little by opening her eyes.'

'The operation,' I observed, 'is not always pleasant.'

'But invariably necessary,' said Charlotte with decision.

What then was my astonishment on looking back, as we were turning the corner by the red-brick hotel, to take a last farewell of the pretty white house on the sh.o.r.e, to see Hedwig hanging out of an upper window waving a duster to Gertrud who was following us in the luggage cart, and chatting and laughing while she did it with the widow standing at the gate below. 'That house is certainly haunted,' I exclaimed. 'There's a fresh ghost looking out of the window at this very moment.'

Charlotte turned her head with an incredulous face. Having seen the apparition she turned it back again.

'It can't be Hedwig,' I hastened to a.s.sure her, 'because you told me she had been sent to her mother in the country. It can only, then, be Hedwig's ghost. She is very young to have one, isn't she?'

But Charlotte said nothing at all; and so we left Binz in silence, and got into the sandy road and pine forest that takes you the first part of your way towards the north and Sa.s.snitz.

The road I had meant to take goes straight from Binz along the narrow tongue of land, marked Schmale Heide on the map, separating the Baltic Sea from the inland sea called Jasmunder Bodden; but outside the village I saw a sheet of calm water shining through pine trunks on the left, and I got out to go and look at it, and August, always nervous when I got out, drove off the beaten track after me, and so we missed our way.

The water was the Schmachter See, a real lake in size, not a pond like the exquisite little Schwarze See, and I stood on the edge admiring its morning loveliness as it lay without a ripple in the sun, the noise of the sea on the other side of the belt of pines sounding unreal as the waves of a dream on that still sh.o.r.e. And while I was standing among its reeds August was busy thinking out a short cut that would strike the road we had left higher up. The result was that we very soon went astray, and emerging from the woods at the farm of Dollahn found ourselves heading straight for the Jasmunder Bodden. But it did not matter where we went so long as we were pleased, and when everything is fresh and new how can you help being pleased? So we drove on looking for a road to the right that should bring us back again to the Schmale Heide, and enjoyed the open fields and the bright morning, and pretended to ourselves that it was not dusty. At least that is what I pretended to myself. Charlotte pretended nothing of the sort; on the contrary, she declared at intervals that grew shorter that she was being suffocated.

And that is one of the many points on which the walker has the advantage of him who drives--he can walk on the gra.s.s at the side of the road, or over moss or whortleberries, and need not endure the dust kicked up by eight hoofs. But where has he not the advantage? The only one of driving is that you can take a great many clean clothes with you; for the rest, there is no comparing the two pleasures. And, after all, what does it matter if for one fortnight out of all the fortnights there are in a year you are not so clean as usual? Indeed, I think there must be a quite peculiar charm for the habitually well-washed in being for a short time deliberately dirty.