The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen Part 24

'It is very probable,' said Gertrud; and went away to give the order.

August did. He slept so heavily that eight o'clock found the Professor and myself still at Glowe, breakfasting at a little table in the road before the house on flounders and hot gooseberry jam. The Professor was much calmer, quite composed in fact, and liked the flounders, which he said were as fresh as young love. He had been very tired after his long day and the previous sleepless night, and when he found I was immovable he too had gone to bed and overslept himself Immediately on seeing him in the morning I told him what I felt sure was true--that Charlotte, knowing I would come to Arkona in the course of my drive round the coast, had gone on there to wait for me. 'So there is really no hurry,'

I added.

'Hurry? certainly not,' he said, gay and reasonable after his good night. 'We will enjoy the present, little cousin, and the admirable flounders.' And he told me the story of the boastful man who had vaunted the loftiness of his rooms to a man poorer than himself except in wit; and the poorer man, weary of this talk of ceilings, was goaded at last to relate how in his own house the rooms were so low that the only things he could ever have for meals were flounders; and though I had heard the story before I took care to exhibit a decent mirth in the proper place, ending by laughing with all my heart only to see how the Professor laughed and wiped his eyes.

It was a close day of sunless heat. The sky was an intolerable grey glare. There was no wind, and the flies buzzed in swarms about the horses' heads as we drove along the straight white road between the pines towards Arkona. Gertrud was once more relegated to a cart, but she did not look nearly so grim as before; she obviously preferred the Professor to his wife, which was a lapse from the normal discretion of her manners, Gertruds not being supposed to have preferences, and certainly none that are obvious.

From Glowe the high road goes through the pines almost without a bend to the next place, Juliusruh, about an hour and a half north of Glowe. We did not pa.s.s a single house. The way was absolutely lonely, and its stuffiness dreadful. We could see neither the Baltic nor the Bodden, though both were only a few yards off on the other side of the pines. At Juliusruh, a flat, airless place of new lodging-houses, we did get a glimpse of a mud-coloured sea; and after Juliusruh, the high road and the pines abruptly ending, we got into the open country of whose sandiness the Glowe landlord had spoken with uplifted hands. As we laboured along at a walking pace the greyness of the sky grew denser, and it began to rain. This was the first rain I had had during my journey, and it was delicious. The ripe corn on our left looked a deeper gold against the dull sky; the ditches were like streaks of light, they were so crammed with yellow flowers; the air grew fragrant with wetness; and, best of all, the dust left off. The Professor put up his umbrella, which turned out to be so enormous when open that we could both sit comfortably under it and keep dry; and he was in such good spirits at being fairly on Charlotte's tracks that I am inclined to think it was the most agreeable drive I had had in Rugen. The traveller, however, who does not sit under one umbrella with a pleased Professor on the way to Arkona must not suppose that he too will like this bit best, for he will not.

The road turns off sharply inland at Vitt, a tiny fisher-hamlet we came upon unexpectedly, hidden in a deep clough. It is a charming little place--a few fishermen's huts, a minute inn, and a great many walnut trees. Pa.s.sing along the upper end of the clough we looked straight down its one shingly street to the sea washing among rocks. Big black fisher-boats were hauled up almost into the street itself. A forlorn artist's umbrella stood all alone half-way down, sheltering an unfinished painting from the gentle rain, while the artist--I supposed him to be the artist because of his unique neck arrangements--watched it wistfully from the inn door. As Vitt even in rain was perfectly charming I can confidently recommend it to the traveller; for on a sunny day it must be quite one of the prettiest spots in Rugen. If I had been alone I would certainly have stayed there at least one night, though the inn looked as if its beds were feather and its b.u.t.ter bad; but I now had a mission, and he who has a mission spends most of his time pa.s.sing the best things by.

'Is not that a little paradise?' I exclaimed.

The Professor quoted Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, remarking that he understood their taste better than that of those persons who indulge in ill-defined and windy raptures about scenery and the weather.

'But we cannot all have the tastes of great scholars,' I said rather coldly, for I did not like the expression windy raptures.

'If thou meanest me by great scholars, thou female babe, know that my years and poor rudiments of learning have served only to make it clear to me that the best things in life are of the cla.s.s to which sitting under one umbrella with a dear little cousin belong. I endeavoured yesterday to impress this result of experience on the long Englishman, but he is still knee-deep in theories, and cannot yet see the simple and the close at hand.'

'I don't care one little bit for the umbrella form of joy,' I said obstinately. 'It is the blankest dulness compared to the joy to be extracted from looking at a place like Vitt in fine weather.'

'Tut, tut,' said the Professor, 'talk not to me of weather. Thou dost not mean it from thy heart.' And he arranged the rug afresh round me so that I should not get wet, and inquired solicitously why I did not wear a waterproof cloak like his, which was so very _praktisch_.

From Vitt the road to Arkona describes a triangle of which the village of Putgarten is the apex, and round which it took us half an hour to drive. We got to Arkona, which consists solely of a lighthouse with an inn in it, about one.

'Now for the little Lot,' cried the Professor leaping out into the rain and hastening towards the emerging landlord, while I hurriedly rehea.r.s.ed the main points of my arguments.

But Charlotte was not there. She had been there, the landlord said, the previous afternoon, having arrived by steamer; had asked for a bedroom, been shown one, but had wanted better accommodation than he could give.

Anyhow after drinking coffee she had hired a conveyance and had gone on to Wiek.

The Professor was terribly crestfallen. 'We will go on, then,' he said.

'We will at once proceed to Wiek. Where Wiek is, I conclude we shall ultimately discover.'

'I know where it is--it's on the map.'

'I never doubted it.'

'I mean I know the way from here. I was going there anyhow, and Charlotte knew that. But we can't go on yet, dear Professor. The horses would never get us there. It must be at least ten miles off, and awful sand the whole way.'

It took me some time and many words to convince him that nothing would make me move till the horses had had a feed and a rest. 'We'll only stay here a few hours,' I comforted, 'and get to Wiek anyhow to-day.'

'But who can tell whether she will be there two nights running?' cried the Professor, excitedly striding about in the mud.

'Why, we can, when we get there, and it's no use bothering till we are there. But I'm sure she'll wait till I come. Let us go in out of the rain.'

'I will hire a cart,' he announced with great determination.

'What, and go on without me?'

'I tell thee I will hire a cart. No time shall be lost.'

And he ran back again to the landlord who was watching us from the door with much disapproval; for I suppose Charlotte's refusal to consider his accommodation worthy of her had not disposed him well towards her friends, and possibly he considered the Professor's rapid movements among the puddles too unaccountable to be nice. There was no cart, he said, absolutely none; and the Professor, in a state of fuming dejection, was forced to what resignation he could muster.

During this parleying I had been sitting alone under the umbrella, the rain falling monotonously on its vast surface, running off the glazed lid of my yellow bandbox in streams, and dripping from the brim of August's hat down his patient neck. A yard or two behind sat Gertrud on the hold-all, dimly visible through the cloud of steam rising from the back of her soaked cart-horse. I could hear the sea at the foot of the cliff sluggishly heaving on and off the shingle, and I could see it over the edge of the cliff to the east, and here for the first time round the bend of the island to the north. It was flat, oily, and brown. Never was such a dreary sea or such a melancholy spot. I got out and went into the house feeling depressed.

The landlord led us into a room at the back, the room in front being for the use of fishermen wishing to drink. Clouds of smoke and a great clamour smote our senses when he opened the door. The room was full of what looked like an excursion; about thirty people, male and female, sitting at narrow tables eating, chattering, singing, and smoking all at once. Three specially variegated young women, dressed in the flimsiest of fine-weather clothes, all damp muslin and feathers, pretty girls with p.r.o.nounced hair arrangements, were smoking cigarettes; and in the corner near the door, demure and solitary, sat another pretty young woman in black, with a very small bonnet trimmed with a very big Alsatian bow on the back of a very elaborately curled head. Her eyes were discreetly fixed on a Wiener Schnitzel that she was eating with a singular mincingness; and all those young men who could not get near the girls in muslin, were doing their utmost to attract this one's notice.

'We can't stay here,' I whispered to the Professor; 'it is too dreadful.'

'Dreadful? It is humanity, little cousin. Humanity at its happiest--in other words, at its dinner.'

And he pulled off his cloak and hung up his hat with a brisk cheerfulness at which I, who had just seen him striding about among puddles, rent with vexation, could only marvel.

'But there is no room,' I objected.

'There is an ample sufficiency of room. We shall sit there in the corner by the young lady in black.'

'Well, you go and sit there, and I'll go out into that porch place over there, and get some air.'

'Never did I meet any one needing so much air. Air! Has thou not, then, been aired the entire morning?'

But I made my way through the smoke to a door standing open at the other end that led into a little covered place, through which was the garden.

I put my head gratefully round the corner to breathe the sweet air. The garden is on the west side of the lighthouse on ground falling steeply away to the flat of the cornfields that stretch between Arkona and Putgarten. It is a pretty place full of lilies--in flower that day--and of poplars, those most musical of trees. Rough steps cut in the side of the hill lead down out of the garden to a footpath through the rye to Putgarten; and on the top step, as straight and motionless as the poplars, stood two persons under umbrellas, gazing in silence at the view. Oh, unmistakable English backs! And most unmistakable of all backs, the backs of the Harvey-Brownes.

I pulled my head into the porch again with a wrench, and instinctively turned to flee; but there in the corner of the room sat the Professor, and I could hear him being pleasant to the young person in the Alsatian bow. I did not choose to interrupt him, for she was obviously Mrs.

Harvey-Browne's maid; but I did wonder whether the bishop had grieved at all over the manifest unregeneracy of the way she did her hair.

Hesitating where to go, and sure of being ultimately caught wherever I went, I peeped again in a sort of fascination at the two mackintoshed figures outlined against the lowering heavens; and as so often happens, the persons being looked at turned round.

'My _dear_ Frau X., you here too? When did you arrive in this terrible place?' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne, hurrying towards me through the rain with outstretched hand and face made up of welcome and commiseration.

'This is too charming--to meet you again, but here! Imagine it, we were under the impression it was a place one could stay at, and we brought all our luggage and left our comfortable Binz for good. It is impossible to be in that room. We were just considering what we could do, and feeling really desperate. Brosy, is not this a charming surprise?'

Brosy smiled, and said it was very charming, and he wished it would leave off raining. He supposed I was only driving through on my way round?

'Yes,' I said, a thousand thoughts flying about in my head.

'Have you seen anything more of the Nieberleins?' asked Mrs.

Harvey-Browne, shutting her umbrella, and preparing to come inside the porch too.

'My cousin left that evening, as you know,' I said.

'Yes; I could not help wondering----' began Mrs. Harvey-Browne; but was interrupted by her son, who asked where I was going to sleep that night.

'I think at Wiek,' I answered.

'Isn't Wiek a little place on the----' began Brosy; but was interrupted by his mother, who asked if the Professor had followed his wife.

'Yes,' I said.