staring straight into space, 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 passengers, 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 shore, to study the names
of past bathers scribbled over it, besides poems, valedictory addresses,
and quotations from the German classics; 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
circumspect-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 butterflies 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 Förster_ 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 shore, 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 gods might come
over the buttercups 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-grass, and not mind grasshoppers
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
embarrassing it would be to the dignified to bathe there. The girls had
no dignity, and were not embarrassed. 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 grass
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 passed 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.
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 coarse grass and stones and little shells. 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 shells out of my shoes, I came to uneven ground, soft green
grass, 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 shells 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 prickly grass and
shells 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 attitude 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 reassuring 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 _gnädiges Fräulein_,
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 assured 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 spacious 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 grass. 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 assure 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 gnädiges Fräulein, 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 coarse grass 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 Fräulein about the
Absolute. He evidently thought--the innocence of him!--that being German
I must, whatever my sex 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 attitude in regard to it. Of course I did not tell
him that. Age has at least made me artful. A real Fräulein 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 Fräulein, 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, passing
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 class called _Junker_--I am a female
_Junker_--to mix on equal terms with the class 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 gratitude. 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 Förster'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 assured 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 passed. 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
Förster, who had seen me disembark and set out for my walk alone, and
who saw me now returning with a companion of the other sex, 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 Fräulein 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 Förster 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?'
'I lunched here to-day. So I will not sup.'
'Is the reason a good one?'
'You will see. Good-bye.'
I went away down the path to the beach. The path is steep, and the corn
on either side stands thick and high, and a few steps took me out of
sight of the house, the chestnuts, and the young man. The smack was
lying some distance out, and the dinghy was tied to her stern. The
fisherman's son's head was visible in a peaceful position on a heap of
ropes. It is difficult as well as embarrassing to shout, as I well knew,
but somebody would have to, and as nobody was there but myself I was
plainly the one to do it, I put my hands to my mouth, and not knowing
the fisherman's name called out _Sie_. It sounded not only feeble but
rude. When I remembered the appearance of the golden-bearded Viking, his
majestic presence and dreamy dignity, I was ashamed to find myself
standing on a rock and calling him as loud as I could _Sie_.
The head on the ropes did not stir. I waved my handkerchief. The boy's
eyes were shut. Again I called out _Sie_, and thought it the most
offensive of pronouns. The boy was asleep, and my plaintive cry went
past him over the golden ripples towards Lauterbach.
Then the Englishman appeared against the sky, up on the ridge of the
cornfield. He saw my dilemma, and taking his hands out of his pockets
ran down. '_Gnädiges Fräulein_ is in a fix,' he observed in his
admirably correct and yet so painful German.
'She is,' I said.
'Shall I shout?'
'Please.'
He shouted. The boy started up in alarm. The fisherman's huge body
reared up from the depths of the boat. In two minutes the dinghy was at
the little plank jetty, and I was in it.
'It was a very good idea to charter one of those romantic smacks to come
over in,' said the young man on the jetty wistfully.
'They're rather fishy,' I replied, smiling, as we pushed off.
'But so very romantic.'
'Have you not observed that the German Fräulein is a romantic
creature,'--the dinghy began to move--'a beautiful mixture of
intelligence, independence, and romance?'
'Are you staying at Putbus?'
'No. Good-bye. Thanks for coming down and shouting. You know your food
will be quite cold and uneatable.'
'I gathered from what you said before that it will be uneatable anyhow.'
The dinghy was moving fast. There was a rapidly-widening strip of golden
water between myself and the young man on the jetty.
'Not all of it,' I said, raising my voice. 'Try the compote. It is
lovely compote. It is what you would call in England glorified
gooseberry jam.'
'Glorified gooseberry jam?' echoed the young man, apparently much struck
by these three English words. 'Why,' he added, speaking louder, for the
golden strip had grown very wide, 'you said that without the ghost of a
foreign accent!'
'Did I?'
The dinghy shot into the shadow of the fishing-smack. The Viking and the
boy shipped their oars, helped me in, tied the dinghy to the stern,
hoisted the sail, and we dropped away into the sunset.
The young man on the distant jetty raised his cap. He might have been a
young archangel, standing there the centre of so much glory. Certainly a
very personable young man.
THE THIRD DAY
FROM LAUTERBACH TO GÖHREN