The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen Part 3

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 facade, conspicuous in its whiteness against a background of beechwoods. Woods and fields and sea and a lovely little island a short way from the sh.o.r.e 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 gra.s.sy banks starry with flowers to the Greek hotel.

How delightful it looked as we got out of the deep chestnut lane into the open s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed between the trunks of the willows down near the water.

'Shall I go in?' inquired Gertrud.

She went up the steps and disappeared through gla.s.s doors. Gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s-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 rea.s.suring 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 a.s.sured me there was just one room vacant for me, and by the luckiest of chances just one other leading out of it for the Fraulein. I followed him up the steps. The portico, open at either end, framed in delicious pictures. The waiter led me through a s.p.a.cious boarded hall where a narrow table along one side told of recent supper, through intricate pa.s.sages, 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 cla.s.sic baths, up strange stairs that sloped alarmingly to one side, along more pa.s.sages, 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 gra.s.shoppers for the night. In spite of the waiter's a.s.sertion, 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 gra.s.s-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 gra.s.s and rushes, touched just then by the splendour of light into a transient divine brightness, lay all along the sh.o.r.e.

'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. n.o.body 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 Rugen 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 Rugen 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: sc.r.a.ps of paper lying about the gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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 gra.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e 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-gla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sing 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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage, 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 coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.sy 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 coa.r.s.e gra.s.s 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 a.s.similated 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d.

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 pa.s.sage 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 sh.o.r.e, to study the names of past bathers scribbled over it, besides poems, valedictory addresses, and quotations from the German cla.s.sics; 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 circ.u.mspect-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 b.u.t.terflies 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 Forster_ 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 G.o.ds might come over the b.u.t.tercups 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-gra.s.s, and not mind gra.s.shoppers 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 embarra.s.sing it would be to the dignified to bathe there. The girls had no dignity, and were not embarra.s.sed. 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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.