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 grass-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 reassuring 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 assured me there was just one room vacant
for me, and by the luckiest of chances just one other leading out of it
for the Fräulein. I followed him up the steps. The portico, open at
either end, framed in delicious pictures. The waiter led me through a
spacious boarded hall where a narrow table along one side told of recent
supper, through intricate passages, 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 classic baths, up strange stairs that
sloped alarmingly to one side, along more passages, 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 grasshoppers for the night. In spite of the waiter's
assertion, 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 grass-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 grass and rushes, touched just then by the splendour of
light into a transient divine brightness, lay all along the shore.
'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. Nobody 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 Rügen 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
Rügen 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: scraps of paper lying about the grass
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 passages 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 grass 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 shore 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-glass, 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 passing 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, passed 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 passage, 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 coarse grass. 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 grassy 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 coarse grass 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 assimilated 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 passage 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 God.
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 passage 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 shore 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.