Mrs. Harvey-Browne looked at me too, and in her eyes was coldest
condemnation. 'Is it possible,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne's eyes, 'that
any one can really marry such a person?'
As for me, I walked downstairs, my face bland with innocence and
unconcern. 'How delightful,' I said enthusiastically, 'how truly
delightful these walls look, with all the antlers and things on them.'
'Very,' said Ambrose.
Mrs. Harvey-Browne was silent. Probably she had resolved never to speak
to me again; but when we were at the bottom, and Ambrose was bestowing
fees on the Fräulein and the custodian, she said, 'I did not know your
husband was travelling with you.'
'My husband?' I repeated inquiringly. 'But he isn't. He's at home.
Minding, I hope, my neglected children.'
'At home? Then who--then whose husband was that?'
'Was what?' I asked, following her eyes which were fixed on the door so
lately slammed.
'Why, that man in spectacles?'
'Really, how can I tell? Perhaps nobody's. Certainly not mine.'
Mrs. Harvey-Browne stared at me in immense surprise. 'How very
extraordinary,' she said.
THE SIXTH DAY--_Continued_
THE GRANITZ WOODS, SCHWARZER SEE, AND KIEKÖWER
In the woods behind Binz, alone in the heart of them, near a clearing
where in past days somebody must have lived, for ancient fruit trees
still mark the place that used to be a garden, there is a single grave
on which the dead beech leaves slowly dropping down through the days and
nights of many autumns, have heaped a sober cover. On the headstone is a
rusty iron plate with this inscription--
Hier ruht ein Finnischer Krieger
1806.
There is no fence round it, and no name on it. Every autumn the beech
leaves make the unknown soldier a new brown pall, and through the
sparkling frozen winters, except for the thin shadows of naked branches,
he lies in sunshine. In the spring the blue hepaticas, children of those
that were there the first day, gather about his sodden mound in little
flocks of loveliness. Then, after a warm rain, the shadows broaden and
draw together, for overhead the leaves are bursting; the wind blowing on
to him from the clearing is scented, for the grass out there has violets
in it; the pear trees in the deserted garden put on their white robes of
promise; and then comes summer, and in the long days there are wanderers
in the woods, and the chance passer-by, moved perhaps by some vague
sentiment of pity for so much loneliness, throws him a few flowers or a
bunch of ferns as he goes his way. There was a cross of bracken lying on
the grave when I came upon it, still fresh and tied together with bits
of grass, and a wreath of sea-holly hung round the headstone.
Sitting down by the side of the nameless one to rest, for the sun was
high and I began to be tired, it seemed to me as I leaned my face
against his cool covering of leaves, still wet with the last rain, that
he was very cosily tucked away down there, away from worries and the
chill fingers of fear, with everything over so far as he was concerned,
and each of the hours destined for him in which hard things were to
happen lived through and done with. A curiosity to know how he came to
be in the Granitz woods at a time when Rügen, belonging to the French,
had nothing to do with Finland, made me pull out my guide-book. But it
was blank. The whole time I was journeying round Rügen it was invariably
blank when it ought to have been illuminating. What had this man done or
left undone that he should have been shut out from the company of those
who are buried in churchyards? Why should he, because he was nameless,
be outcast as well? Why should his body be held unworthy of a place by
the side of persons who, though they were as dead as himself, still went
on being respectable? I took off my hat and leaned against the Finnish
warrior's grave and stared up along the smooth beech trunks to the point
where the leaves, getting out of the shade, flashed in the sun at the
top, and marvelled greatly at the ways of men, who pursue each other
with conventions and disapproval even when their object, ceasing to be a
man, is nothing but a poor, unresentful, indifferent corpse.
It is--certainly with me it is--a symptom of fatigue and want of food to
marvel at the ways of men. My spirit grows more and more inclined to
carp as my body grows more tired and hungry. When I am not too weary and
have not given my breakfast to fowls, my thoughts have a cheerful way of
fixing themselves entirely on the happy side of things, and life seems
extraordinarily charming. But I see nothing happy and my soul is lost in
blackness if, for many hours, I have had no food. How useless to talk to
a person of the charities if you have not first fed him. How useless to
explain that they are scattered at his feet like flowers if you have fed
him too much. Both these states, of being over-fed and not fed enough,
are equally fatal to the exquisitely sensitive life of the soul. And so
it came about that because it was long past luncheon-time, and I had
walked far, and it was hot, I found myself growing sentimental over the
poor dead Finn; inclined to envy him because he could go on resting
there while I had to find a way back to Binz in the heat and excuse my
absence to an offended cousin; launching, indignant at his having been
denied Christian burial, into a whole sea of woful reflections on the
spites and follies of mankind, from which a single piece of bread would
have rescued me. And as I was very tired, and it was very hot, and very
silent, and very drowsy, my grumblings and disapprovals grew gradually
vaguer, grew milder, grew confused, grew intermittent, and I went to
sleep.
Now to go to sleep out of doors on a fine summer afternoon is an
extremely pleasant thing to do if nobody comes and looks at you and you
are comfortable. I was not exactly comfortable, for the ground round the
grave was mossless and hard; and when the wind caught it the bracken
cross tickled my ear and jerked my mind dismally on to earwigs. Also
some spiders with frail long legs which they seemed to leave lying about
at the least and gentlest attempt to persuade them to go away, walked
about on me and would not walk anywhere else. But presently I left off
feeling them or caring and sank away deliciously into dreams, the last
thing I heard being the rustling of leaves, and the last thing I felt
the cool wind lifting my hair.
And now the truly literary, if he did not here digress into a
description of what he dreamed, which is a form of digression skipped by
the truly judicious, would certainly write 'How long I had slept I know
not,' and would then tell the reader that, waking with a start, he
immediately proceeded to shiver. I cannot do better than imitate him,
leaving out the start and the shiver, since I did neither, and altering
his method to suit my greater homeliness, remark that I don't know how
long I had been asleep because I had not looked at a watch when I began,
but opening my eyes in due season I found that they stared straight into
the eyes of Mrs. Harvey-Browne, and that she and Brosy were standing
side by side looking down at me.
Being a woman, my first thought was a fervent hope that I had not been
sleeping with my mouth wide open. Being a human creature torn by
ungovernable passions, my second was to cry out inwardly and
historically, 'Will no one rid me of this troublesome prelatess?' Then I
sat up and feverishly patted my hair.
'I am not in the guide-book,' I said with some asperity.
'We came to look at the grave,' smilingly answered Mrs. Harvey-Browne.
'May I help you up?' asked Ambrose.
'Thanks, no.'
'Brosy, fetch me my camp-stool out of the fly--I will sit here a few
minutes with Frau X. You were having a little post-prandial nap?' she
added, turning to me still smiling.
'Ante-prandial.'
'What, you have been in the woods ever since we parted this morning at
the Jagdschloss? Brosy,' she called after him, 'bring the tea-basket out
as well. My dear Frau X., you must be absolutely faint. Do you not think
it injudicious to go so many hours without nourishment? We will make tea
now instead of a little later, and I insist on your eating something.'
Really this was very obliging. What had happened to the bishop's wife?
Her urbanity was so marked that I thought it could only be a beautiful
dream, and I rubbed my eyes before answering. But it was undoubtedly
Mrs. Harvey-Browne. She had been home since I saw her last, rested,
lunched, put on fresh garments, perhaps bathed; but all these things,
soothing as they are, could not by themselves account for the change.
Also she spoke to me in English for the first time. 'You are very kind,'
I murmured, staring.
'Just imagine,' she said to Ambrose, who approached across the crackling
leaves with the camp-stool, tea-basket, and cushions from the seats of
the fly waiting in the forest road a few yards away, 'this little lady
has had nothing to eat all day.'
'Oh I say!' said Brosy sympathetically.
'Little lady?' I repeated to myself, more and more puzzled.
'If you must lean against a hard grave,' said Brosy; 'at least, let me
put this cushion behind your back. And I can make you much more
comfortable if you will stand up a moment.'
'Oh I am so stiff,' I exclaimed as he helped me up; 'I must have been
here hours. What time is it?'
'Past four,' said Brosy.
'_Most_ injudicious,' said his mother. 'Dear Frau X., you must promise
me never to do such a thing again. What would happen to those sweet
children of yours if their little mother were to be laid up?'
Dear, dear me. What was all this? Sweet children? Little mother? I could
only sit on my cushions and stare.
'This,' she explained, noticing I suppose that I looked astonished, and
thinking it was because Brosy was spreading out cups and lighting the
spirit-lamp so very close to the deceased Finn, 'is not desecration. It
is not as though we were having tea in a churchyard, which of course we
never would have. This is unconsecrated ground. One cannot desecrate
that which has never been consecrated. Desecration can only begin after
consecration has taken place.'
I bowed my head and then, cheered into speech by the sight of an
approaching rusk, I added, 'I know a family with a mausoleum, and on
fine days they go and have coffee at it.'
'Germans, of course,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne, smiling, but with an
effort. 'One can hardly imagine English----'
'Oh yes, Germans. When any one goes to see them, if it is fine they say,
"Let us drink coffee at the mausoleum." And then they do.'
'Is it a special treat?' asked Brosy.
'The view there is very lovely.'
'Oh I see,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne, relieved. 'They only sit outside. I
was afraid for a moment that they actually----'
'Oh no,' I said, eating what seemed to be the most perfect rusk ever
produced by German baker, 'not actually.'
'What a sweet spot this is to be buried in,' remarked Mrs.
Harvey-Browne, while Brosy, with the skill of one used to doing it, made
the tea; and then according to the wont of good women when they speak of
being buried, she sighed. 'I wonder,' she went on, 'how he came to be
put here.'
'That is what I have been wondering ever since I found him,' I said.
'He was wounded in some battle and was trying to get home,' said Brosy.
'You know Finland was Swedish in those days, and so was Rügen.'
As I did not know I said nothing, but looked exceedingly bright.
'He had been fighting for Sweden against the French. I met a forester
yesterday, and he told me there used to be a forester's house where
those fruit trees are, and the people in it took him in and nursed him
till he died. Then they buried him here.'
'But why was he not buried in a churchyard?' asked his mother.
'I don't know. Poor chap, I don't suppose he would have cared. The great
point I should say under such circumstances would be the being dead.'
'My dear Brosy,' murmured his mother; which was what she always murmured
when he said things that she disapproved without quite knowing why.
'Or a still greater point,' I remarked, moved again to cheerful speech
by the excellent tea Brosy had made, and his mother, justly suspicious
of the tea of Teutons, had smuggled through the customs, as she
afterwards told me with pride,--'a still greater point if those are the
circumstances that lie in wait for one, would be the never being born.'
'Oh but that is pessimism!' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne, shaking a finger
at me. 'What have you, of all people in the world, to do with
pessimism?'
'Oh I don't know--I suppose I have my days, like everybody else,' I
said, slightly puzzled again by this remark. 'Once I was told of two
aged Germans,' I continued, for by this time I had had three rusks and
was feeling very pleasant,--'of two aged Germans whose digestive
machinery was fragile.'
'Oh, poor things,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne sympathetically.
'And in spite of that they drank beer all their lives persistently and
excessively.'
'How very injudicious,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.
'They drank such a fearful lot and for so long that at last they became
philosophers.'
'My dear Frau X.,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne incredulously, 'what an
unexpected result.'
'Oh but indeed there is hardly anything you may not at last become,' I
insisted, 'if besides being German your diet is indiscreet enough.'
'Yes, I quite think _that_,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.
'Well, and what happened?' asked Brosy with smiling eyes.
'Well, they were naturally profoundly pessimistic, both of them. You
are, you know, if your diet----'
'Oh yes, yes indeed,' agreed Mrs. Harvey-Browne, with the conviction of
one who has been through it.
'They were absolutely sick of things. They loathed everything anybody
said or did. And they were disciples of Nietzsche.'
'Was that the cause or the effect of the excessive beer-drinking?' asked
Brosy.
'Oh, I can't _endure_ Nietzsche,' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne. 'Don't ever
read him, Brosy. I saw some things he says about women--he is too
dreadful.'
'And one said to the other over their despairing potations: "Only those
can be considered truly happy who are destined never to be born."'
'There!' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne. 'That is Nietzsche all over--_rank_
pessimism.'
'I never heard ranker,' said Brosy smiling.
'And the other thought it over, and then said drearily: "But to how few
falls that happy lot."'
There was a pause. Brosy was laughing behind his teacup. His mother, on
the contrary, looked solemn, and gazed at me thoughtfully. 'There is a
great want of simple faith about Germans,' she said. 'The bishop thinks
it so sad. A story like that would quite upset him. He has been very
anxious lest Brosy--our only child, dear Frau X., so you may imagine how
precious--should become tainted by it.'
'I dislike beer,' said Brosy.
'That man this morning, for instance--did you ever hear anything like
it? He was just the type of man, quite apart from his insolence, that
most grieves the bishop.'
'Really?' I said; and wondered respectfully at the amount of grieving
the bishop got through.
'An educated man, I suppose--did he not say he was a schoolmaster? A
teacher of the young, without a vestige himself of the simple faith he
ought to inculcate. For if he had had a vestige, would it not have
prevented his launching into an irreverent conversation with a lady who
was not only a stranger, but the wife of a prelate of the Church of
England?'
'He couldn't know that, mother,' said Brosy; 'and from what you told me
it wasn't a conversation he launched into but a monologue. And I must
beg your pardon,' he added, turning to me with a smile, 'for the absurd
mistake we made. It was the guide's fault.'
'Oh yes, my dear Frau X., you must forgive me--it was really too silly
of me--I might have known--I was completely taken aback, I assure you,
but the guide was so very positive----' And there followed such a number
of apologies that again I was bewildered, only retaining the one clear
impression that the bishop's wife desired exceedingly to be agreeable.
Well, a woman bent on being agreeable is better than a woman bent on
being disagreeable, though, being the soul of caution in my statements,
I must add, Not always; for I suppose few of us have walked any distance
along the path of life without having had to go at least some part of
the way in the company of persons who, filled with the praiseworthy wish
to be very pleasant, succeeded only in drenching our spirits with the
depressing torrents of effusion. And effusiveness applied to myself has
precisely the effect of a finger applied to the horns of a snail who
shall be innocently airing himself in the sun: he gets back without more
ado into his shell, and so do I.
That is what happened on this occasion. For some reason, which I could
only faintly guess, the bishop's wife after disapproving of me in the
morning was petting me in the afternoon. She had been lunching, she told
me, with Charlotte, and they had had a nice talk, she said, about me.
About me? Instantly I scrambled back into my shell. There is surely
nothing in the world so tiresome as being questioned, as I now was, on
one's household arrangements and personal habits. I will talk about
anything but that. I will talk with the courage of ignorance about all
high matters, of which I know nothing. I am ready to discourse on all or
any of the great Abstractions with the glibness of the shallow mind. I
will listen sympathetically to descriptions of diseases suffered and
operations survived, of the brilliance of sons and the beauty of
daughters. I will lend an attentive ear to an enumeration of social
successes and family difficulties, of woes and triumphs of every sort,
including those connected with kitchens; but I will not answer questions
about myself. And indeed, what is there to talk about? No one is
interested in my soul, and as for my body I long ago got tired of that.
One cannot, however, eat a person's rusks without assuming a certain
amount of subsequent blandness; so I did my best to behave nicely. Brosy
smoked cigarettes. Whatever it was that had sent me up in his mother's
estimation had apparently sent me down in his. He no longer, it seemed,
looked upon me as a good specimen of the intelligent German female. I
might be as eloquently silent as I liked, and it did not impress him in
the least. The few remarks he made showed me that. This was grievous,
for Brosy was, in person, a very charming young man, and the good
opinion of charming young men is quite a nice thing to possess. Now I
began to regret, now that he was merely interjectional, those earnest
paragraphs in which he had talked the night before at supper and during
the sunset walk on the island of Vilm. Observing him sideways and
cautiously I saw that the pretty speeches his mother was making me
_apropos_ of everything and nothing were objectionable to him; and I
silently agreed with him that pretty speeches are unpleasant things,
especially when made by one woman to another. You can forgive a man
perhaps, because in your heart in spite of all experience lurks the
comfortable belief that he means what he says; but how shall you forgive
a woman for mistaking you for a fool?
They persuaded me to drive with them to the place in the woods they were
bound for called Kieköwer, where the view over the bay was said to be
very beautiful; and when I got on to my feet I found I was so stiff that
driving seemed the only thing possible. Ambrose was very kind and
careful of my bodily comfort, but did not bother about me spiritually.
Whenever there was a hill, and there kept on being hills, he got out and
walked, leaving me wholly to his mother. But it did not matter any more,
for the forest was so exquisite that way, the afternoon so serene, so
mellow with lovely light, that I could not look round me without being
happy. Oh blessed state, when mere quiet weather, trees and grass, sea
and clouds, can make you forget that life has anything in it but
rapture, can make you drink in heaven with every breath! How long will
it last, this joy of living, this splendid ecstasy of the soul? I am
more afraid of losing this, of losing even a little of this, of having
so much as the edge of its radiance dimmed, than of parting with any
other earthly possession. And I think of Wordsworth, its divine singer,
who yet lost it so soon and could no longer see the splendour in the
grass, the glory in the flower, and I ask myself with a sinking heart if
it faded so quickly for him who saw it and sang it by God's grace to
such perfection, how long, oh how long does the common soul, half blind,
half dead, half dumb, keep its little, precious share?
My intention when I began this book was to write a useful Guide to
Rügen, one that should point out its best parts and least uncomfortable
inns to any English or American traveller whose energy lands him on its
shores. With every page I write it grows more plain that I shall not
fulfil that intention. What, for instance, have Charlotte and the
bishop's wife of illuminating for the tourist who wants to be shown the
way? As I cannot conscientiously praise the inns I will not give their
names, and what is the use of that to a tourist who wishes to know where
to sleep and dine? I meant to describe the Jagdschloss, and find I only
repeated a ghost story. It is true I said the rolls at the inn there
were hard, but the information was so deeply embedded in superfluities
that no tourist will discover it in time to save him from ordering one.
Still anxious to be of use, I will now tell the traveller that he must
on no account miss going from Binz to Kieköwer, but that he must go
there on his feet, and not allow himself to be driven over the roots and
stones by the wives of bishops; and that shortly before he reaches
Kieköwer (Low German for look, or peep over), he will come to four
cross-roads with a sign-post in the middle, and he is to follow the one
to the right, which will lead him to the Schwarze See or Black Lake, and
having got there let him sit down quietly, and take out the volume of
poetry he ought to have in his pocket, and bless God who made this
little lovely hollow on the top of the hills, and drew it round with a
girdle of forest, and filled its reedy curves with white water-lilies,
and set it about with silence, and gave him eyes to see its beauty.
I am afraid I could not have heard Mrs. Harvey-Browne's questions for
quite a long time, for presently I found she had sauntered round this
enchanted spot to the side where Brosy was taking photographs, and I was
sitting alone on the moss looking down through the trees at the lilies,
and listening only to frogs. I looked down between the slender stems of
some silver birches that hung over the water; every now and then a tiny
gust of wind came along and rippled their clear reflections, ruffling up
half of each water-lily leaf, and losing itself somewhere among the
reeds. Then when it had gone, the lily leaves dropped back one after the
other on to the calm water, each with a little thud. On the west side
the lake ends in a reedy marsh, very froggy that afternoon, and starred
with the snowy cotton flower. A peculiarly fragrant smell like
exceedingly delicate Russian leather hangs round the place, or did that
afternoon. It was, I suppose, the hot sun bringing out the scent of some
hidden herb, and it would not always be there; but I like to think of
the beautiful little lake as for ever fragrant, all the year round lying
alone and sweet-smelling and enchanted, tucked away in the bosom of the
solitary hills.
When the traveller has spent some time lying on the moss with his
poet--and he should lie there long enough for his soul to grow as quiet
and clear as the water, and the poet, I think, should be Milton--he can
go back to the cross-roads, five minutes' walk over beech leaves, and so
to Kieköwer, about half a mile farther on. The contrast between the
Schwarze See and Kieköwer is striking. Coming from that sheltered place
of suspended breath you climb up a steep hill and find yourself suddenly
on the edge of high cliffs where the air is always moving and the wind
blows freshly on to you across the bay. Far down below, the blue water
heaves and glitters. In the distance lies the headland beyond Sassnitz,
hazy in the afternoon light. The beech trees, motionless round the lake,
here keep up a ceaseless rustle. You who have been so hot all day find
you are growing almost too cool.
'_Sie ist schön, unsere Ostsee, was?_' said a hearty male voice behind
us.