behind it between steep grassy banks blue with harebells and with a
strip of brilliant sky above it between the tops of the beeches. But
once more did I rattle over the stones of the Lonely One, pass the
wooden inn where the same people seemed to be drinking the same beer and
still waiting for the same train, and drive along the dull straight bit
between Baabe and the first pines of Sellin. At Sellin we were going to
lunch, rest the horses, and then, late in the afternoon, go on to Binz.
Sellin from this side is a pine-forest with a very deep sandy road.
Occasional villas appear between the trees, and becoming more frequent
join into a string and form one side of the road. After passing them we
came to a broad gravel road at right angles to the one we were on, with
restaurants and villas on either side, trim rows of iron lamp-posts and
stripling chestnut trees, and a wide gap at the end at the edge of the
cliff below which lay the sea.
This was the real Sellin, this single wide hot road, with its glaring
white houses, and at the back of them on either side the forest brushing
against their windows. It was one o'clock. Dinner bells were ringing all
down the street, visitors were streaming up from the sands into the
different hotels, dishes clattered, and the air was full of food. On
every balcony families were sitting round tables waiting for the servant
who was fetching their dinner from a restaurant. Down at the foot of the
cliff the sea lay in perfect quiet, a heavenly blue, out of reach in
that bay of the wind that was blowing on Thiessow. There was no wind
here, only intense heat and light and smells of cooking. 'Shall we leave
August to put up, and get away into the forest and let Gertrud buy some
lunch and bring it to us?' I asked Charlotte. 'Don't you think dinner in
one of these places will be rather horrid?'
'What sort of lunch will Gertrud buy?' inquired Charlotte cautiously.
'Oh bread, and eggs, and fruit, and things. It is enough on a hot day
like this.'
'My dear soul, it is not enough. Surely it is foolish to starve. I'll
come with you if you like, of course, but I see no sense in not being
properly nourished. And we don't know where and when we shall get
another meal.'
So we drove on to the end hotel, from whose terrace we could look down
at the deserted sands and the wonderful colour of the water. August and
the driver of the luggage cart put up. Gertrud retired to a neighbouring
cafe, and we sat and gasped under the glass roof of the verandah of the
hotel while a hot waiter brought us boiling soup.
It is a barbarous custom, this of dining at one o'clock. Under the most
favourable circumstances one o'clock is a difficult hour to manage
profitably to the soul. There is something peculiarly base about it. It
is the hour, I suppose, when the life of the spirit is at its lowest
ebb, and one should be careful not to extinguish it altogether under the
weight of a gigantic menu. I know my spirit fainted utterly away at the
aspect of those plates of steaming soup and at the smell of all the
other things we were going to be given after it. Charlotte ate her soup
calmly and complacently. It did not seem to make her hotter. She also
ate everything else with equal calmness, and remarked that full brains
are never to be found united to an empty stomach.
'But a full stomach is often to be found united to empty brains,' I
replied.
'No one asserted the contrary,' said Charlotte; and took some more
_Rinderbrust_.
I thought that dinner would never be done. The hotel was full, and the
big dining-room was crowded, as well as the verandah where we were.
Everybody talked at once, and the noise was like the noise of the parrot
house at the Zoological Gardens. It looked as if it were an expensive
place; it had parquet floors and flowers on the tables and various other
things I had not yet come across in Rügen; and when the bill came I
found that it not only looked so but was so. All the more, then, was I
astonished at the numbers of families with many children and the
necessary Fräulein staying in it. How did they manage it? There was a
visitors' list on the table, and turning it over I found that none of
them, in the nature of things, could be well off. They all gave their
occupations, and the majority were _Apotheker_ and _Photographen_. There
were two _Herren Pianofabrikanten_, several _Lehrer_, a _Herr
Geheimcalculator_ whatever that is, many _Bankbeamten_ or clerks, and
one surely who must have found the place beyond his means, a _Herr
Schriftsteller_. All these had wives and children with them, 'I can't
make it out,' I said to Charlotte.
'What can't you make out?'
'How these people contrive to stay weeks in a dear hotel like this.'
'Oh, it is quite simple. The _Badereise_ is the great event of the year.
They save up for it all the rest of the year. They live at home as
frugally as possible so that for one magnificent month they can pretend
to waiters and chambermaids and the other visitors that they are richer
than they are. It is very foolish, sadly foolish. It is one of the
things I am trying to persuade women to give up.'
'But you are doing it yourself.'
'But surely there is a difference in the method. Besides, I was run
down.'
'Well, so I should think were the poor mothers of families by the time
they have kept house frugally for a year. And if it makes them happy,
why not?'
'Just that is another of the things I am working to persuade them to
give up.'
'What, being happy?'
'No, being mothers of families.'
'My dear Charlotte,' I murmured; and mused in silence on the six
Bernhards.
'Of unwieldily big ones, of course I mean.'
'And what do you understand by unwieldily big ones?' I asked, still
musing on the Bernhards.
'Any number above three. And for most of these women even three is
excessive.'
The images of the six Bernhards troubled me so much that I could not
speak.
'Look,' said Charlotte, 'at the women here. All of them, or any of them.
The one at the opposite table, for instance. Do you see the bulk of the
poor soul? Do you see how difficult existence must be made for her by
that circumstance alone? How life can be nothing to her but
uninterrupted panting?'
'Perhaps she doesn't walk enough,' I suggested. 'She ought to walk round
Rügen once a year instead of casting anchor in the flesh-pots of
Sellin.'
'She looks fifty,' continued Charlotte. 'And why does she look fifty?'
'Perhaps because she is fifty.'
'Nonsense. She is quite young. But those four awful children are hers,
and no doubt there is a baby, or perhaps two babies, upstairs, and they
have finished her. How is such a woman to realise herself? How can she
work out her own salvation? What energies she has must be spent on her
children. And if ever she tries to think, she must fall asleep from
sheer torpor of brain. Now why should she be deprived of the use of her
soul?'
'Charlotte, are you not obscure? Here, take my pudding. I don't like
it.'
I hoped the pudding would stem the stream of her eloquence. I feared an
impending lecture. She had resumed the pamphlet manner of the previous
afternoon, and I felt very helpless. She took the pudding, and I was
dismayed, to find that though she ate it it had no effect whatever. She
did not even seem to know she was eating it, and continued to address me
with rapidly-increasing vehemence on the proper treatment of female
souls. Now why could she not talk on this subject without being
vehement? There is something about vehemence that freezes responsiveness
out of me; I suppose it is what Charlotte would call the oyster
characteristics coming out. Anyhow, by the time the waiter brought
cheese and woolly radishes and those wicked black slabs of leather
called _Pumpernickel_, I was sitting quite silent, and Charlotte was
leaning across the little table hurling fiery words at me. And as for
the stout lady who had set her ablaze, she ate almonds and raisins with
a sublime placidity, throwing the almonds down on to the stone floor,
cracking them with the heel of her boot, and exhibiting an unexpected
nimbleness in picking them up again.
'Do you suppose that if she hadn't had those four children and heaven
knows how many besides she wouldn't be different from what she is now?'
asked Charlotte, leaning her elbows on the table and fixing me with eyes
whose brightness dazzled me, 'As different as day is from night? As
health from disease? As briskness from torpor? She'd have looked and
felt ten years younger. She'd have had all her energies unimpaired.
She'd have had the use of her soul, her time, her individuality. Now it
is too late. All that has been choked out of her by the miserable daily
drudgery. What would the man, her smug husband there, say if he were
made to help in the soul-killing work a woman is expected to do as a
matter of course? Yet why shouldn't he help her bear her burdens? Why
shouldn't he take them on his stronger shoulders? Don't give me the
trite answer that it is because he has his own work to do--we know his
work, the man's work, at its hardest full of satisfactions and
pleasures, and hopes and ambitions, besides coming to an end every day
at a certain hour, while she grows old in hopeless, hideous,
never-ending drudgery. There is a difference between the two that makes
my blood boil.'
'Oh don't let it boil,' I cried, alarmed. 'We're so hot as it is.'
'I tell you I think that woman over there as tragic a spectacle as it
would be possible to find. I could cry over her--poor dumb,
half-conscious remnant of what was meant to be the image of God.'
'My dear Charlotte,' I murmured uneasily. There were actual tears in
Charlotte's eyes. Where I saw only an ample lady serenely cracking
almonds in a way condemned by the polite, Charlotte's earnest glance
pierced the veil of flesh to the withered, stunted soul of her. And
Charlotte was so sincere, was so honestly grieved by the hopeless
dulness of the fulfilment of what had once been the blithe promise of
young girlhood, that I began to feel distressed too, and cast glances of
respectful sympathy at the poor lady. Very little more would have made
me cry, but I was saved by something unexpected; for the waiter came
round with newly-arrived letters for the visitors, and laying two by the
almond-eating lady's plate he said quite distinctly, and we both heard
him distinctly, _Zwei für Fräulein Schmidt_; and the eldest of the four
children, a pert little girl with a pig-tail, cried out, _Ei, ei, hast
Du heute Glück, Tante Marie_; and having finished our dinner we got up
and went on our way in silence; and when we were at the door, I said
with a suavity of voice and manner meant to be healing, 'Shall we go
into the woods, Charlotte? There are a few remarks I should like to
offer you on the Souls of Maiden Aunts;' and Charlotte said, with some
petulance, that the principle was the same, and that her head ached, and
would I mind being quiet.
THE FIFTH DAY--_Continued_
FROM SELLIN TO BINZ
Suppose a being who should be neither man nor woman, a creature wholly
removed from the temptations that beset either sex, a person who could
look on with absolute indifference at all our various ways of wasting
life, untouched by the ambitions of man, and unstirred by the longings
of woman, what would such a being think of the popular notion against
which other uneasy women besides Charlotte raise their voices, that the
man should never be bothered by the cares of the house and the babies,
but rather go his daily round of business or pleasure precisely as he
did before he had his house and his babies? I love to have the details
of life arranged with fastidious justice, all its little burdens
distributed with an exact fairness among those who have to carry them;
and I imagine that this being, who should be rather more than man and
less than god, who should understand everything and care nothing, would
call it wrong to allot a double weight to the strong merely because he
is strong, and would call it right that he should have his exact share,
and use the strength he has left over not in carrying the burden of some
weak friend who, burdenless, is still of no account in life, but in
praising God, going first, and showing the others the way.
Thus did I meditate, walking in silence by Charlotte's side in the beech
forest of Sellin. Not for anything would I have put my meditations into
words, well aware that though they might be nourishing to me they would
poison Charlotte. The maiden aunt and the dinner together had given
Charlotte a headache, which I respected by keeping silent; and for two
hours we wandered and sat about among the beeches, sometimes on the
grassy edge of the cliffs, our backs against tree trunks, looking out
over the brilliant blue water with its brilliant green shallows, or
lying in the grass watching the fine weather clouds floating past
between the shining beech-leaves.
Those were glorious hours, for Charlotte dozed most of the time, and it
was almost as quiet as though she had not been there at all. No
bath-guests parted the branches to stare at us; they were sleeping till
the cool of the day. No pedestrians with field-glasses came to look at
the view and ask each other, with one attentive eye on us, if it were
not colossal. No warm students walked along wiping their foreheads as
they sang of love and beer. Nothing that had dined at a _table d'hôte_
could possibly move in such heat.
And so it came about that Charlotte and I shared the forest only with
birds and squirrels.
This forest is extremely beautiful. It stretches for miles along the
coast, and is full of paths and roads that lead you to unexpected
lovelinesses--sudden glimpses of the sea between huge beech trunks on
grassy plateaus; deep ravines, their sides clothed with moss, with water
trickling down over green stones to the sea out in the sun at the
bottom; silent glades of bracken, silvery in the afternoon light, where
fallow deer examine you for one brief moment of curiosity before they
spring away, panic-stricken, into the deeper shadows of the beeches. In
that sun-flecked place, so exquisite whichever way I looked, so
spacious, and so quiet, how could I be seriously interested in stuffy
indoor questions such as the equality of the sexes, in anything but the
beauty of the world and the joy of living in it? I was not seriously
interested; I doubt if I have ever been. Destiny having decided that I
shall walk through life petticoated, weighed down by the entire range of
disabilities connected with German petticoats, I will waste no time
arguing. There it is, the inexorable fact, and there it will remain; and
one gets used to the disabilities, and finds, on looking at them closer,
that they exclude nothing that is really worth having.
I glanced at the dozing Charlotte, half inclined to wake her up to tell
her this, and exhort her to do as the dragons in the glorious verse of
Doctor Watts, who
Changed their fierce hissings into joyful songs.
And praised their Maker with their forked tongues.
But I was afraid to stir her up lest her tongue should be too forked and
split my arguments to pieces. So she dozed on undisturbed, and I enjoyed
myself in silence, repeating gems from the pages of the immortal doctor,
echoes of the days when I lisped in numbers that were not only infant
but English at the knee of a pious nurse from the land of fogs.
At five o'clock, when I felt that a gentle shaking of Charlotte was no
longer avoidable if we were to reach Binz that evening, and was
preparing to apply it with cousinly gingerliness, an obliging bumble-bee
who had been swinging deliciously for some minutes past in the purple
flower of a foxglove on the very edge of the cliff, backed out of it and
blundered so near Charlotte's face that he brushed it with his wings.
Charlotte instantly sat up, opened her eyes, and stared hard at me. Such
is the suspiciousness of cousins that though I was lying half a dozen
yards away she was manifestly of opinion that I had tickled her. This
annoyed me, for Charlotte was the last person in the world I would think
of tickling. There was something about her that would make it
impossible, however sportively disposed I might be; and besides, you
must be very great friends before you begin to tickle. Charlotte and I
were cousins, but we were as yet nowhere near being very great friends.
I got up, put on my hat, and said rather stiffly, for she still sat
staring, that it was time to go. We walked back in silence, each feeling
resentful, and keeping along the cliff passed, just before we came to
Sellin, a little restaurant of coloured glass, a round building of an
atrocious ugliness, which we discovered was one of the prides of Sellin;
for afterwards, driving through the forest to Binz, all the sign-posts
had fingers pointing in its direction, and bore the inscription _Glas
Pavilion, schönste Aussicht Sellins_. The _schöne Aussicht_ was
indisputable, but to choose the loveliest spot and blot its beauty with
a coloured glass restaurant so close to a place full of restaurants is
surely unusually profane. There it is, however, and all day long it
industriously scents the forest round it with the smell of soup. People
were beginning to gather about its tables, the people we had seen dining
and who had slept since, and some of them were already drinking coffee
and eating slabs of cherry cake with a pile of whipped cream on each
slab, for all the world as though they had had nothing since breakfast.
Conspicuous at one table sat the maiden aunt, still rosy from her sleep.
She too had ordered cherry cake, and the waiter put it down before her
as we came by, and she sat for a moment fondly regarding it, turning the
plate round and round so as to take in all its beauties, and if ever a
woman looked happy it was that one. 'Poor dumb, half-conscious
remnant'--I murmured under my breath. Charlotte seemed to read my
thoughts, for she turned her head impatiently away from the cake and the
lady, and said once again and defiantly, 'The principle is the same, of
course.'
'Of course,' said I.
The drive from Sellin to Binz was by far the most beautiful I had had.
Up to that point no drive had been uninterruptedly beautiful, but this
one was lovely from end to end. It took about an hour and a half, and we
were the whole time in the glorious mixed forest belonging to Prince
Putbus and called the Granitz. As we neared Binz the road runs down
close to the sea, and through the overhanging branches we could see that
we had rounded another headland and were in another bay. Also, after
having met nothing but shy troops of deer, we began to pass increasing
numbers of bath-guests, walking slowly, taking the gentlest of exercise
before their evening meal. Charlotte had been fairly quiet. Her head,
apparently, still ached; but suddenly she started and exclaimed 'There
are the Harvey-Brownes.'
'And who, pray, are the Harvey-Brownes?' I inquired, following the
direction of her eyes.
It was easy enough to see which of the groups of tourists were the
Harvey-Brownes. They were going in the same direction as ourselves, a
tall couple in clothes of surpassing simplicity and excellence.
Immediately afterwards we drove past them; Charlotte bowed coldly; the
Harvey-Brownes bowed cordially, and I saw that the young man was my
philosophic friend of the afternoon at Vilm.
'And who, pray, are the Harvey-Brownes?' I asked again.
'The English people I told you about who had got on to my nerves. I
thought they'd have left by now.'
'And why were they on your nerves?'
'Oh she's a bishop's wife, and is about the narrowest person I have met,
so we're not likely to be anywhere but on each other's nerves. But she
adores that son of hers and would do anything in the world that pleases
him, and he pursues me.'
'Pursues you?' I cried, with an incredulousness that I immediately
perceived was rude. I hastened to correct it by shaking my head in
gentle reproof and saying: 'Dear me, Charlotte--dear, dear me.'
Simultaneously I was conscious of feeling disappointed in young
Harvey-Browne.
'What do you suppose he pursues me for?' Charlotte asked, turning her
head and looking at me.
'I can't think,' I was going to say, but stopped in time.
'The most absurd reason. He torments me with attentions because I am
Bernhard's wife. He is a hero-worshipper, and he says Bernhard is the
greatest man living.'
'Well, but isn't he?'
'He can't get hold of him, so he hovers round me, and talks Bernhard to
me for hours together. That's why I went to Thiessow. He was sending me
mad.'
'He hasn't an idea, poor innocent, that you don't--that you no
longer----'
'I have as much courage as other people, but I don't think there's
enough of it for explaining things to the mother. You see, she's the
wife of a bishop.'
Not being so well acquainted as Charlotte with the characteristics of
the wives of bishops I did not see; but she seemed to think it explained
everything.
'Doesn't she know about your writings?' I inquired.
'Oh yes, and she came to a lecture I gave at Oxford--the boy is at
Balliol--and she read some of the pamphlets. He made her.'
'Well?'
'Oh she made a few conventional remarks that showed me her limitations,
and then she began about Bernhard. To these people I have no
individuality, no separate existence, no brains of my own, no opinions
worth listening to--I am solely of interest as the wife of Bernhard. Oh,
it's maddening! The boy has put I don't know what ideas into his
mother's head. She has actually tried to read one of Bernhard's works,
and she pretends she thought it sublime. She quotes it. I won't stay at
Binz. Let us go on somewhere else to-morrow.'
'But I think Binz looks as if it were a lovely place, and the
Harvey-Brownes look very nice. I am not at all sure that I want to go on
somewhere else to-morrow.'
'Then I'll go on alone, and wait for you at Sassnitz.'
'Oh, don't wait. I mightn't come to Sassnitz.'
'Oh well, I'll be sure to pick you up again somewhere. It isn't a very
big island, and you are a conspicuous object, driving round it.'
This was true. So long as I was on that island I could not hope to
escape Charlotte. I entered Binz in a state of moody acquiescence.
Every hotel was full, and every room in the villas was taken. It was the
Göhren experience over again. At last we found shelter by the merest
chance in the prettiest house in the place--we had not dared inquire
there, certain that its rooms would be taken first of all--a little
house on the sands, overhung at the back by beechwoods, its windows
garnished with bright yellow damask curtains, its roof very red, and its
walls very white. A most cheerful, trim little house, with a nice tiled
path up to the door, and pots of geraniums on its sills. A cleanly
person of the usual decent widow type welcomed us with a cordiality
contrasting pleasantly with the indifference of those widows whose rooms
had been all engaged. The entire lower floor, she said, was at our
disposal. We each had a bedroom opening on to a verandah that seemed to
hang right over the sea; and there was a dining-room, and a beautiful
blue-and-white kitchen if we wanted to cook, and a spacious chamber for
Gertrud. The price was low. Even when I said that we should probably
only stay one or two nights it did not go up. The widow explained that
the rooms were engaged for the entire season, but that the Berlin
gentleman who had taken them was unavoidably prevented coming, which was
the reason why we might have them, for it was not her habit to take in
the passing stranger.
I asked whether it were likely that the Berlin gentleman might yet
appear and turn us out. She stared at me a moment as though struck by my
question, and then shook her head. 'No, no,' she said decidedly; 'he
will not appear.'
A very pretty little maidservant who was bringing in our luggage was so
much perturbed by my innocent inquiry that she let the things drop.
'Hedwig, do not be a fool,' said the widow sternly. 'The gentleman,' she
went on, turning to me, 'cannot come, because he is dead.'
'Oh,' I said, silenced by the excellence of the reason.
Charlotte, being readier of speech, said 'Indeed.'
The reason was a good one; but when I heard it it seemed as if the
pleasant rooms with the beds all ready and everything set out for the
expected one took on a look of awfulness. It is true it was now past
eight o'clock, and the sun had gone, and across the bay the dusk was
creeping. I went out through the long windows to the little verandah. It
had white pillars of great apparent massiveness, which looked as though
they were meant to support vast weights of masonry; and through them I
watched the water rippling in slow, steely ripples along the sand just
beneath me, and the ripples had the peculiar lonely sound that slight
waves have in the evening when they lick a deserted shore.