The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen Part 4

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 coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and stones and little sh.e.l.ls. 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 sh.e.l.ls out of my shoes, I came to uneven ground, soft green gra.s.s, 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 p.r.i.c.kly gra.s.s and sh.e.l.ls 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 att.i.tude 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 rea.s.suring 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 _gnadiges Fraulein_, 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 a.s.sured 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 s.p.a.cious 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 gra.s.s. 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 a.s.sure 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 gnadiges Fraulein, 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 coa.r.s.e gra.s.s 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 Fraulein about the Absolute. He evidently thought--the innocence of him!--that being German I must, whatever my s.e.x 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 att.i.tude in regard to it. Of course I did not tell him that. Age has at least made me artful. A real Fraulein 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 Fraulein, 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, pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s called _Junker_--I am a female _Junker_--to mix on equal terms with the cla.s.s 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 grat.i.tude. 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 Forster'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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed. 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 Forster, who had seen me disembark and set out for my walk alone, and who saw me now returning with a companion of the other s.e.x, 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 Fraulein 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 Forster 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?'