The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen Part 18

At Lubkow, a small village on the Jasmunder Bodden, we got on to the high road to Bergen, and turning up it to the right faced northwards once more. Soon after pa.s.sing a forestry in the woods we reached the Schmale Heide again, and then for four miles drove along a white road between young pines, the bluest of skies overhead, and on our right, level with the road, the violet sea. This was the first time I saw the Baltic really violet. On other days it had been a deep blue or a brilliant green, but here it was a wonderful, dazzling violet.

At Neu Mucran--all these places are on the map--we left the high road to go on by itself up to the inland town of Sagard, and plunged into sandy, shadeless country roads, trying to keep as near the sh.o.r.e as possible.

The rest of the way to Sa.s.snitz was too unmitigatedly glaring and dusty to be pleasant. There were no trees at all; and as it was uphill nearly the whole way we had time to be thoroughly scorched and blinded. Nor could we keep near the sea. The road took us farther and farther away from it as we toiled slowly up between cornfields, crammed on that poor soil with poppies and marguerites and chickory. Earth and sky were one blaze of brightness. Our eyes, filled with dust, were smarting long before we got to the yet fiercer blaze of Sa.s.snitz; and it was when we found that the place is all chalk and white houses, built in the open with the forest pushed well back behind, that with one accord we decided not to stay in it.

I would advise the intending tourist to use Sa.s.snitz only as a place to make excursions to from Binz on one side or Stubbenkammer on the other; though, aware of my peculiarities, I advise it with diffidence. For out of every thousand Germans nine hundred and ninety-nine would give, with emphasis, a contrary advice, and the remaining one would not agree with me. But I have nothing to do with the enthusiasms of other people, and can only repeat that it is a dusty, glaring place--quaint enough on a fine day, with its steep streets leading down to the water, and on wet days dreary beyond words, for its houses all look as though they were built of cardboard and were only meant, as indeed is the case, to be used during a few weeks in summer.

August, Gertrud, and the horses were sent to an inn for a three hours'

rest, and we walked down the little street, lined with stalls covered with amber ornaments and photographs, to the sea. As it was dinner-time the place was empty, and from the different hotels came such a hum and clatter of voices and dishes that, remembering Sellin, we decided not to go in. Down on the beach we found a confectioner's shop directly overlooking the sea, with sun-blinds and open windows, and no one in it.

It looked cool, so we went in and sat at a marble table in a draught, and the sea splashed refreshingly on the shingle just outside, and we ate a great many cakes and sardines and vanilla ices, and then began to feel wretched.

'What shall we do till four o'clock?' I inquired disconsolately, leaning my elbows on the window-sill and watching the heat dancing outside over the shingle.

'Do?' said somebody, stopping beneath the window; 'why, walk with us to Stubbenkammer, of course.'

It was Ambrose, clad from head to foot in white linen, a cool and beautiful vision.

'You here? I thought you were going to stay in Binz?'

'We came across for the day in a steamer. My mother is waiting for me in the shade. She sent me to get some biscuits, and then we are going to Stubbenkammer. Come too.'

'Oh but the heat!'

'Wait a minute. I'm coming in there to get the biscuits.'

He disappeared round the corner of the house, the door being behind.

'He is good-looking, isn't he?' I said to Charlotte.

'I dislike that type of healthy, successful, self-satisfied young animal.'

'That's because you have eaten so many cakes and sardines,' I said soothingly.

'Are you never serious?'

'But invariably.'

'Frankly, I find nothing more tiring than talking to a person who is persistently playful.'

'That's only those three vanilla ices,' I a.s.sured her encouragingly.

'You here, too, Frau Nieberlein?' exclaimed Ambrose, coming in. 'Oh good. You will come with us, won't you? It's a beautiful walk--shade the whole way. And I have just got that work of the Professor's about the Phrygians, and want to talk about it frightfully badly. I've been reading it all night. It's the most marvellous book. No wonder it revolutionised European thought. Absolutely epoch-making.' He bought his biscuits as one in a dream, so greatly did he glow with rapture.

'Come on Charlotte,' I said; 'a walk will do us both good. I'll send word to August to meet us at Stubbenkammer.'

But Charlotte would not come on. She would sit there quietly, she said; bathe perhaps, later, and then drive to Stubbenkammer.

'I tell you what, Frau Nieberlein,' cried Ambrose from the counter, 'I never envied a woman before, but I must say I envy you. What a marvellously glorious fate to be the wife of such an extraordinary thinker!'

'Very well then,' I said quickly, not knowing what Charlotte's reply might be, 'you'll come on with August and meet us there. _Auf Wiedersehen_, Lottchen.' And I hurried Ambrose and his biscuits out.

Looking up as we pa.s.sed beneath the window, we saw Charlotte still sitting at the marble table gazing into s.p.a.ce.

'Your cousin is wonderful about the Professor,' said Ambrose as we crossed a scorching bit of chalky promenade to the trees where Mrs.

Harvey-Browne was waiting.

'In what way wonderful?' I asked uneasily, for I had no wish to discuss the Nieberlein conjugalities with him.

'Oh, so self-controlled, so quiet, so modest; never trots him out, never puts on airs because she's his wife--oh, quite wonderful.'

'Ah, yes. About those Phrygians----'

And so I got his thoughts away from Charlotte, and by the time we had found his mother I knew far more about Phrygians than I should have thought possible.

The walk along the coast from Sa.s.snitz to Stubbenkammer is alone worth a journey to Rugen. I suppose there are few walks in the world more wholly beautiful from beginning to end. On no account, therefore, should the traveller, all unsuspecting of so much beauty so near at hand, be persuaded to go to Stubbenkammer by road. The road will give him merely a pretty country drive, taking him the shortest way, quite out of sight of the sea; the path keeps close to the edge of the cliffs, and is a series of exquisite surprises. But only the l.u.s.ty and the spare must undertake it, for it is not to be done under three hours, and is an almost continual going down countless steps into deep ravines, and up countless steps out of them again. You are, however, in the shade of beeches the whole time; and who shall describe, as you climb higher and higher, the lovely sparkle and colour of the sea as it curls, far below you, in and out among the folds of the cliffs?

Mrs. Harvey-Browne was sufficiently spare to enjoy the walk. Ambrose was perfectly content telling us about Nieberlein's new work. I was perfectly content too, because only one ear was wanted for Nieberlein, and I still had one over for the larks and the lapping of the water, besides both my happy eyes. We did not hurry, but lingered over each beauty, resting on little sunny plateaus high up on the very edge of the cliffs, where, sitting on the hot sweet gra.s.s, we saw the colour of the sea shine through the colour of the fringing scabious--a divine meeting of colours often to be seen along the Rugen coast in July; or, in the deep shade at the bottom of a ravine, we rested on the moss by water trickling down over slimy green stones to the sea which looked, from those dark places, like a great wall of light.

Mrs. Harvey-Browne listened with a placid pride to her son's explanations of the scope and nature of Nieberlein's book. His enthusiasm made him talk so much that she, perforce, was silent; and her love for him written so plainly on her face showed what she must have been like in her best days, the younger days before her husband got his gaiters and began to grieve. Besides, during the last and steepest part of the walk we were beyond the range of other tourists, for they had all dropped off at the Waldhalle, a place half-way where you drink, so that there was nothing at all to offend her. We arrived, therefore, at Stubbenkammer about six o'clock in a state of perfect concord, pleasantly tired, and hot enough to be glad we had got there. On the plateau in front of the restaurant--there is, of course, a restaurant at the climax of the walk--there were tables under the trees and people eating and drinking. One table, at a little distance from the others, with the best view over the cliff, had a white cloth on it, and was spread for what looked like tea. There were nice thin cups, and strawberries, and a teapot, and a jug in the middle with roses in it; and while I was wondering who were the privileged persons for whom it had been laid Gertrud came out of the restaurant, followed by a waiter carrying thin bread and b.u.t.ter, and then I knew that the privileged persons were ourselves.

'I had tea with you yesterday,' I said to Mrs. Harvey-Browne. 'Now it is your turn to have tea with me.'

'How charming,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne with a sigh of satisfaction, sinking into a chair and smelling the roses. 'Your maid seems to be one of those rare treasures who like doing extra things for their mistresses.'

Well, Gertrud is a rare treasure, and it did look clean and dainty next to the beer-stained tables at which coffee was being drunk and spilt by tourists who had left their Gertruds at home. Then the place was so wonderful, the white cliffs cutting out sheer and sharp into the sea, their huge folds filled with every sort of greenery--ma.s.ses of shrubby trees, ma.s.ses of ferns, ma.s.ses of wild-flowers. Down at the bottom there was a steamer anch.o.r.ed, the one by which the Harvey-Brownes were going back later to Binz, quite a big, two-funnelled steamer, and it looked from where we were like a tiny white toy.

'I fear the gracious one will not enjoy sleeping here,' whispered Gertrud as she put a pot of milk on the table. 'I made inquiries on arrival, and the hotel is entirely full, and only one small bedroom in a pavilion, detached, among trees, can be placed at the gracious one's disposal.'

'And my cousin?'

'The room has two beds, and the cousin of the gracious one is sitting on one of them. We have been here already an hour. August is installed. The horses are well accommodated here. I have an attic of sufficient comfort. Only the ladies will suffer.'

'I will go to my cousin. Show me, I pray thee, the way.'

Excusing myself to Mrs. Harvey-Browne I followed Gertrud. At the back of the restaurant there is an open s.p.a.ce where a great many feather-beds in red covers were being aired on the gra.s.s, while fowls and the waiting drivers of the Sa.s.snitz waggonettes wandered about among them. In the middle of this s.p.a.ce is a big, bare, yellow house, the only hotel in Stubbenkammer, the only house in fact that I saw at all, and some distance to the left of this in the shade of the forest, one-storied, dank, dark, and mosquito-y, the pavilion.

'Gertrud,' I said, scanning it with a sinking heart, 'never yet did I sleep in a pavilion.'

'I know it, gracious one.'

'With shutterless windows on a level with the elbows of the pa.s.sers-by.'

'What the gracious one says is but too true.'

'I will enter and speak with my cousin Charlotte.'

Charlotte was, as Gertrud had said, sitting on one of the two beds that nearly filled the room. She was feverishly writing something in pencil on the margin of _The Beast of Prey_, and looked up with an eager, worried expression when I opened the door. 'Is it not terrible,' she said, 'that one should not be able to do more than one's best, and that one's best is never enough?'

'Why, what's the matter?'