east (which it was) as the quickest and firmest route from Göhren to
Thiessow; but I chose rather to take the road over the plain because
there was a poem in the guide-book about the way along the shore, and
the guide-book said it described it extremely well, and I was sure that
if that were so I would do better to go the other way. This is the
poem--the translation is exact, the original being unrhymed, and the
punctuation is the poet's--
Splashing waves
Rocking boat
Dipping gulls--
Dunes.
Raging winds
Floating froth.
Flashing lightning
Moon!
Fearful hearts
Morning grey--
Stormy nights
Faith!
I read it, marvelled, and went the other way.
Thiessow is a place that has to be gone to for its sake alone, as a
glance at the map will show. If you make up your mind to journey the
entire length of the plain that separates it from everywhere else you
must also make up your mind to journey the entire length back again, to
see Göhren once more, to pass through Baabe, and to make a closer
acquaintance with Sellin which is on the way to the yet unvisited
villages going north. It is a singular drive down to Thiessow, singular
because it seems as though it would never leave off. You see the place
far away in the distance the whole time, and you jolt on and on at a
walking pace towards it, in and out of ruts, over grass-mounds, the sun
beating on your head, sea on your left rolling up the beach in long
waves, more sea on your right across the undulating greenness, a distant
hill with a village by the water to the west, sails of fisher-boats,
people in a curious costume mowing in a meadow a great way off, and
tethered all over the plain solitary sheep and cows, whose nervousness
at your approach is the nervousness begotten of a retired life. There
are no trees; and if we had not seen Thiessow all the time we should
have lost our way, for there is no road. As it is, you go on till you
are stopped by the land coming to an end, and there you are at Thiessow.
I believe in the summer you can get there by steamer from Göhren or
Baabe; but if it is windy and the waves are too big for the boats that
land you to put off, the steamer does not stop; so that the only way is
over the plain or along the shore. I walked nearly all the time, the
jolting was so intolerable. It was heavy work for the horses, and
straining work for the carriage. Gertrud sat gripping the bandbox, for
with every lurch it tried to roll out. August looked unhappy. His
experiences at Göhren had been worse than ours, and Thiessow was right
down at the end of all things, and had the drawback, obvious even to
August, that whatever it was like we would have to endure it, for
swelter back again over the broiling plain only to stay a second night
at Göhren was as much out of the question for the horses as for
ourselves. As for me, I was absolutely happy. The wide plain, the wide
sea, the wide sky were so gloriously full of light and life. The very
turf beneath my feet had an eager spring in it; the very daisies
covering it looked sprightlier than anywhere else; and up among the
great piled clouds the blessed little larks were fairly drunk with
delight. I walked some way ahead of the carriage so as to feel alone. I
could have walked for ever in that radiance and freshness. The
black-faced sheep ran wildly round and round as I passed, tugging at
their chains in frantic agitation. Even the cows seemed uneasy if I came
too close; and in the far-off meadow the mowers stopped mowing to watch
us dwindle into dots. In this part of Rügen the natives wear a
peculiarly hideous dress, or rather the men do--the women's costume is
not so ugly--and looking through my glasses to my astonishment I saw
that the male mowers had on long baggy white things that were like
nothing so much as a woman's white petticoat on either leg. But the
mowers and their trousers were soon left far behind. The sun had climbed
very high, was pouring down almost straight on to our heads, and still
Thiessow seemed no nearer. Well, it did not matter. That is the chief
beauty of a tour like mine, that nothing matters. As soon as there are
no trains to catch a journey becomes magnificently simple. We might
loiter as long as we liked on the road if only we got to some place, any
place, by nightfall. This, of course, was my buoyant midday mood, before
fatigue had weighed down my limbs and hunger gnawed holes in my
cheerfulness. The wind, smelling of sea and freshly-cut grass, had quite
blown away the memory of how tragic life had looked the night before
when set about by too many beds and not enough wash-stand; and I walked
along with what felt like all the brightness of heaven in my heart.
The end of this walk--I think of it as one of the happiest and most
beautiful I have had--came about one o'clock. At that dull hour, when
the glory of morning is gone and the serenity of afternoon has not
begun, we arrived at a small grey wooden hotel, separated from the east
sea by a belt of fir-wood, facing a common to the south, and about
twenty minutes' walk from Thiessow proper, which lies on the sea on the
western and southern shore of the point. It looked clean, and I went in.
August and Gertrud sat broiling in the sun of the shelterless sandy road
in front of the lily-grown garden. Somehow I had no doubts about being
taken in here, and I was at once shown a spotless little bedroom by a
spotless landlady. It was a corner room in the south-west corner of the
house, and one window looked south on to the common and the other west
on to the plain. The bed was drawn across this window, and lying on it I
could see the western sea, the distant hill on the shore with its
village, and grass, grass, nothing but grass, rolling away from the very
wall of the house to infinity and the sunset. The room was tiny. If I
had had more than a hold-all I should not have been able to get into it.
It had a locked door leading into another bedroom which was occupied,
said the chambermaid, by a quiet lady who would make no noise. Gertrud's
room was opposite mine. August cheered up when I went out and told him
he could go to the stables and put up, and Gertrud was visibly agreeably
surprised by the cleanliness of both our rooms.
I lunched on a verandah overlooking the common, with the Madonna lilies
of the little garden within reach of my hand; and the tablecloth and the
spoons and the waiter were all in keeping with the clean landlady. The
inn being small the visitors were few, and those I saw dining at the
other little tables on the verandah appeared to be quiet, inoffensive
people such as one would expect to find in a quiet, out-of-the-way
place. The sea was not visible, but I could hear it on the other side of
the belt of firs; and the verandah facing south and being hot and
airless, a longing to get into the cool water took hold of me. The
waiter said the bathing-huts were open in the afternoon from four to
five, and I went upstairs to tell Gertrud to bring my things down to the
beach at four, when she would find me lying in the sand. While I was
talking, the quiet lady in the next room began to talk too, apparently
to the chambermaid, for she talked of hot water. I broke off my own talk
short. It was not that the partition was so thin that it seemed as if
she were in the same room as myself, though that was sufficiently
disturbing--it was that I thought for a moment I knew the voice. I
looked at Gertrud. Gertrud's face was empty of all expression. The quiet
lady, continuing, told the chambermaid to let down the sun-blinds, and
the note in her voice that had struck me was no longer there. Feeling
relieved, for I did not want to come across acquaintances, I put _The
Prelude_ in my pocket and went out. The fir-wood was stuffy, and
suggested mosquitoes, but several bath-guests had slung up hammocks and
were lying in them dozing, so that there could not have been mosquitoes;
and coming suddenly out on to the sands all idea of stuffiness vanished,
for there was the same glorious, heaving, sparkling, splashing blue that
I had seen from the dunes of Göhren the evening before at sunset. The
bathing-house, a modest place with only two cells and a long plank
bridge running into deep water, was just opposite the end of the path
through the firs. It was locked up and deserted. The sands were deserted
too, for the tourists were all dozing in hammocks or in beds. I made a
hollow in the clean dry sand beneath the last of the fir trees, and
settled down to enjoy myself till Gertrud came. Oh, I was happy!
Thiessow was so quiet and primitive, the afternoon so radiant, the
colours of the sea and of the long line of silver sand, and of the soft
green gloom of the background of firs so beautiful. Commendably far away
to the north I saw the coastguard hill belonging to Göhren. On my right
the woods turned into beechwoods, and scrambled up high cliffs that
seemed to form the end of the peninsula. I would go and look at all that
later on after my bathe. If there is a thing I love it is exploring the
little paths of an unknown wood, finding out the corners where it keeps
its periwinkles and anemones, discovering its birds' nests, waiting
motionless for its hedgehogs and squirrels, and even searching out those
luscious recesses, oozy and green, where it keeps its happy slugs. They
tell me slugs are not really happy, that Nature is cruel, and that you
only have to scratch the pleasant surface of things to get at once to
blood-curdling brutalities. Perhaps if you were to go on scratching you
might get to consolations and beneficiencies again; but why scratch at
all? Why not take the beauty and be grateful? I will not scratch. I will
not criticise my own mother who has sheltered me so long in her broad
bosom, and been so long my surest guide to all that is gentle and
lovely. Whatever she does, from thunderbolts to headaches, I will not
criticise; for if she gives me a headache, is there not pleasure when it
leaves off? And if she hurls a thunderbolt at me and I am unexpectedly
exterminated, my body shall serve as a basis for fresh life and growth,
and shall blossom out presently into an immortality of daisies.
I think I must have slept, for the sound of the waves grew very far
away, and I only seemed to have been watching the sun on them for a few
minutes, when Gertrud's voice floated across space to my ears; and she
was saying it was past four, and that one lady had already gone down to
bathe, and that, as there were only two cells, if I did not go soon I
might not get a bathe at all. I sat up in my hollow and looked across to
the huts. The bathing woman in the usual white calico sunbonnet was
there, waiting on the plank bridge. No one was in the sea yet. It was a
great bore that there should be any one else bathing just then, for
German female tourists are apt to be extraordinarily cordial in the
water. On land, laced into suppressive whalebone, dressed, and with
their hair dry and curled, they cannot but keep within the limits set by
convention; but the more clothes they take off the more do they seem to
consider the last barrier between human creature and human creature
broken down, and they will behave towards you, meeting you on this
common ground of wateriness, as though they had known you and
extravagantly esteemed you for years. Their cordiality, too, becomes
more pronounced in proportion to the coldness and roughness of the
water; and the water that day looked cold and was certainly rough, and I
felt that there being only two of us in it it would be impossible to
escape the advances of the other one. Still, as the cells were shut at
five, I could not wait till she had done, so I went down and began to
undress.
While I was doing it I heard her leave her cell and anxiously ask the
woman if the sea were very cold. Then she apparently put in one foot,
for I heard her shriek. Then she apparently bent down, and scooping up
water in her hand splashed her face with it, for I heard her gasp. Then
she tried the other foot, and shrieked again. And then the bathing
woman, fearful lest five o'clock should still find her on duty, began
mellifluously to persuade. By this time I was ready, but I did not
choose to meet the unknown emotional one on the plank bridge because the
garments in which one bathes in German waters are regrettably scanty; so
I waited, peeping through the little window. After much talk the
eloquence of the bathing woman had its effect, and the bather with one
wild scream leapt into the foam, which immediately engulfed her, and
when she emerged the first thing she did on getting her breath was to
clutch hold of the rope and shriek without stopping for at least a
minute. 'Unwürdiges Benehmen,' I observed to Gertrud with a shrug. 'It
must be very cold,' I added to myself, not without a secret shrinking.
But to my surprise, when I ran along the planks above where the
unfortunate clutched and shrieked, she looked up at me with a wet but
beaming countenance, and interrupted her shrieks to gasp out,
'_Prachtvoll!_'
'Really these bath-guests in the water----' I thought indignantly. What
right had this one, only because my apparel was scanty, to smile at me
and say _prachtvoll_? I was so much startled by the unexpected
exclamation from a person who had the minute before been rending the air
with her laments, that my foot slipped on the wet planks, I just heard
the bathing woman advising me to take care, just had time to comment to
myself on the foolishness of such advice to one already hurling through
space, and then came a shock of all-engulfing coldness and wetness and
suffocation, and the next moment there I was gasping and spluttering
exactly as the other bath-guest had gasped and spluttered, but with this
difference, that she had clutched the rope and shrieked, and I, with all
the convulsive energy of panic, was shrieking and clutching the
bath-guest.
'_Prachtvoll_, nicht?' I heard her say with an odious jollity through
the singing in my ears. Every wave lifted me a little off my feet. My
mouth was full of water. My eyes were blinded with spray. I continued to
cling to her with one hand, miserably conscious that after this there
would be no shaking her off, and rubbing my eyes with the other looked
at her. My shrieks froze on my lips. Where had I seen her face before?
Surely I knew it? She wore one of those grey india-rubber caps, drawn
tightly down to her eyes, that keep the water out so well and are so
hopelessly hideous. She smiled back at me with the utmost friendliness,
and asked me again whether I did not think it glorious.
'_Ach ja-ja_,' I panted, letting her go and groping blindly for the
rope. 'Thank you, thank you; pray pardon me for having seized you so
rudely.'
'_Bitte, bitte_,' she cried, beginning to jump up and down again.
'Who in the world is she?' I asked myself, getting away as fast as I
could. 'Where have I seen her before?'
Probably she was an undesirable acquaintance. Perhaps she was my
dressmaker. I had not paid her last absurd bill, and that and a certain
faint resemblance to what my dressmaker would look like in an
india-rubber cap was what put her into my head; and no sooner had I
thought it than I was sure of it, and the conviction was one of quite
unprecedented disagreeableness. How profoundly unpleasant to meet this
person in the water, to have come all the way to Rügen, to have suffered
at Göhren, to have walked miles in the heat of the day to Thiessow, for
the sole purpose of bathing tête-à-tête with my dressmaker. And to have
tumbled in on top of her and clung about her neck! I climbed out and ran
into my cell. My idea was to get dressed and away as speedily as
possible; yet with all Gertrud's haste, just as I came out of my cell
the other woman came out of hers in her clothes, and we met face to
face. With one accord we stopped dead and our mouths fell open, 'What,'
she cried, 'it is _you_?'
'What,' I cried, 'it is _you_?'
It was my cousin Charlotte whom I had not seen for ten years.
THE FOURTH DAY--_Continued_
AT THIESSOW
My cousin Charlotte was twenty when I saw her last. Now she was thirty,
besides having had an india-rubber cap on. Both these things make a
difference to a woman, though she did not seem aware of it, and was lost
in amazement that I should not have recognised her at once. I told her
it was because of the cap. Then I expressed the astonishment I felt that
she had not at once recognised me, and after hesitating a moment she
said that I had been making too many faces; and so with infinite
delicacy did we avoid all allusion to those ten unhideable years.
Charlotte had had a chequered career; at least, beside my placid life it
seemed to have bristled with events. In her early youth, and to the
dismay of her parents, she insisted on being educated at one of the
English colleges for women--it was at Oxford, but I forget its name--a
most unusual course for a young German girl of her class to take. She
was so determined, and made her relations so uncomfortable during their
period of opposition, that they gave in with what appeared to more
distant relatives who were not with Charlotte all day long a criminal
weakness. At Oxford she took everything there was to take in the way of
honours and prizes, and was the joy and pride of her college. In her
last year, a German savant of sixty, an exceedingly bright light in the
firmament of European learning, came to Oxford and was fêted. When
Charlotte saw the great local beings she was accustomed to look upon as
the most marvellous men of the age--the heads of colleges, professors,
and other celebrities--vying with each other in honouring her
countryman, her admiration for him was such that it took her breath
away. At some function she was brought to his notice, and her family
being well known in Germany and she herself then in the freshness of
twenty-one, besides being very pretty, the great man was much
interested, and beamed benevolently upon her, and chucked her under the
chin. The head in whose house he was staying, a person equally exquisite
in appearance and manners, who had had much to forgive that was less
excellent in his guest and had done so freely for the sake of the known
profundity of his knowledge, could not but remark this interest in
Charlotte, and told him pleasantly of her promising career. The
professor appeared to listen with attention, and looked pleased and
approving; but when the head ceased, instead of commenting on her
talents or the creditable manner in which she had developed them, what
he said was, 'A nice, round little girl. A very nice, round little girl.
_Colossal appetitlich_.' And this he repeated emphatically several
times, to the distinct discomfort of the head, while his eyes followed
her benignly into the distant corner placed at the disposal of the
obscure.
Six months later she married the professor. Her family wept and implored
in vain; told her in vain of the terrificness of marrying a widower with
seven children all older than herself. Charlotte was blinded by the
glory of having been chosen by the greatest man Oxford had ever seen.
Oxford was everything to her. Her distant German home and its spiritless
inhabitants were objects only of her good-natured shrugs. She wrote to
me saying she was going to be the life companion of the finest thinker
of the age; her people, so illiterate and so full of prejudices, could
not, she supposed, be expected to appreciate the splendour of her
prospects; she thanked heaven that her own education had saved her from
such a laughable blindness; she could conceive nothing more glorious
than marrying the man in all the world whom you most reverently admire,
than being chosen as the sharer of his thoughts, and the partner of his
intellectual joys. After that I seldom heard from her. She lived in the
south of Germany, and her professor's fame waxed vaster every year.
Every year, too, she brought a potential professor into a world already
so full of them, and every year death cut short its career after a
period varying from ten days to a fortnight, and the _Kreuzzeitung_
seemed perpetually to be announcing that _Heute früh ist meine liebe
Frau Charlotte von einem strammen Jungen leicht und glücklich entbunden
worden_, and _Heute starb unser Sohn Bernhard im zarten Alter von zwei
Wochen_. None of the children lived long enough to meet the next
brother, and they were steadily christened Bernhard, after a father
apparently thirsting to perpetuate his name. It became at last quite
uncomfortable. Charlotte seemed never to be out of the _Kreuzzeitung_.
For six years she and the poor little Bernhards went on in this manner,
haunting its birth and death columns, and then abruptly disappeared from
them; and the next I heard of her was that she was in England,--in
London, Oxford, and other intellectual centres, lecturing in the cause
of Woman. The _Kreuzzeitung_ began about her again, but on another page.
The _Kreuzzeitung_ was shocked; for Charlotte was emancipated.
Charlotte's family was so much shocked that it was hysterical.
Charlotte, not content with lecturing, wrote pamphlets,--lofty documents
of a deadly earnestness, in German and English, and they might be seen
any day in the bookshop windows _Unter den Linden_. Charlotte's family
nearly fainted when it had to walk _Unter den Linden_. The Radical
papers, which were only read by Charlotte's family when nobody was
looking and were never allowed openly to darken their doors, took her
under their wing and wrote articles in her praise. It was, they said,
surprising and refreshing to find views and intelligence of the sort
emerging from the suffocating ancestral atmosphere that hangs about the
_Landadel_. The paralysing effect of too many ancestors was not as a
rule to be lightly shaken off, especially by the female descendants.
When it did get shaken off, as in this instance, it should be the
subject of rejoicing to every person who had the advancement of
civilisation at heart. The civilisation of a state could never be great
so long as its women, etc. etc.
My uncle and aunt nearly died of this praise. Her brothers and sisters
stayed in the country and refused invitations. Only the professor seemed
as pleased as ever. 'Charlotte is my cousin,' I said to him at a party
in Berlin where he was being lionised. 'How proud you must be of such a
clever wife!' I had not met him before, and a more pleasant, rosy, nice
little old man I have never seen.
He beamed at me through his spectacles. Almost could I see the narrow
line that separated me from a chin-chucking. 'Yes, yes,' he said, 'so
they all tell me. The little Lotte is making a noise. Empty vessels do.
But I daresay what she tells them is a very pretty little nonsense. One
must not be too critical in these cases.' And, seizing upon the
cousinship, he began to call me _Du_.
I inquired how it was she was wandering about the world alone. He said
he could not imagine. I asked him what he thought of the pamphlets. He
said he had no time for light reading. I was so unfortunate as to
remark, no doubt with enthusiasm, that I had read some of his simpler
works to my great benefit and unbounded admiration. He looked more
benign than ever, and said he had had no idea that anything of his was
taught in elementary schools.
In a word, I was routed by the professor. I withdrew, feeling crushed,
and wondering if I had deserved it. He came after me, called me his
_liebe kleine Cousine_, and sitting down beside me patted my hand and
inquired with solicitude how it was he had never seen me before. Renewed
attempts on my part to feed like a bee on the honey of his learning were
met only by pats. He would pat, but he would not impart wisdom; and the
longer he patted the more perfect did his serenity seem to become. When
people approached us and showed a tendency to hang on the great man's
lips, he looked up with a happy smile and said, 'This is my little
cousin--we have much to say to each other,' and turned his back on them.
And when I was asked whether I had not spent a memorable, an elevating
evening, being talked to so much by the famous Nieberlein, I could only
put on a solemn face and say that I should not soon forget it. 'It will
be something to tell your children of, in the days to come when he is a
splendid memory,' said the enthusiast.
'Oh won't it!' I ejaculated, with the turned-up eyes of rapture.
'Tell me one thing,' I said to Charlotte as we walked slowly along the
sands towards the cliff and the beechwood; 'why, since you took me for a
stranger, were you so--well, so gracious to me in the water?'