protection on the edge of the cliff. A few yards off is a shed where a
waiter, battered by the sea breezes he is forced daily to endure,
supplies the thirsty with beer and coffee. The hearty owner of the
voice, brown with the sun, damp and jolly with exercise and
beer-drinking, stood looking over Mrs. Harvey-Browne's shoulder at the
view with an air of proud proprietorship, his hands in his pockets, his
legs wide apart, his cap pushed well off an extremely heated brow.
He addressed this remark to Mrs. Harvey-Browne, to whom, I suppose, she
being a matron of years and patent sobriety, he thought cheery remarks
might safely be addressed. But if there was a thing the bishop's wife
disliked it was a cheery stranger. The pedagogue that morning, so
artlessly interested in her conversation with me as to forget he had not
met her before, had manifestly revolted her. I myself the previous
evening, though not cheery still a stranger, had been objectionable to
her. How much more offensive, then, was a warm man speaking to her with
a familiarity so sudden and jolly as to resemble nothing so much as a
slap on the back. She, of course, took no notice of him after the first
slight start and glance round, but stared out to sea with eyes grown
stony.
'In England you do not see such blue water, what?' shouted the jolly
man, who was plainly in the happy mood the French call _déboutonné_.
His wife and daughters, ladies clothed in dust-cloaks sitting at a rough
wooden table with empty beer-glasses before them, laughed hilariously.
The mere fact of the Harvey-Brownes being so obviously English appeared
to amuse them enormously. They too were in the mood _déboutonné_.
Ambrose, as ready to talk as his mother to turn her back, answered for
her, and assured the jolly man that he had indeed never seen such blue
water in England.
This seemed to give the whole family intense delight. '_Ja, ja,_'
shouted the father, '_Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles!_' And he
trolled out that famous song in the sort of voice known as rich.
'Quite so,' said Ambrose politely, when he had done.
'Oh come, we must drink together,' cried the jolly man, 'drink in the
best beer in the world to the health of Old England, what?' And he
called the waiter, and in another moment he and Ambrose stood clinking
glasses and praising each other's countries, while the hilarious family
laughed and applauded in the background.
The bishop's wife had not moved. She stood staring out to sea, and her
stare grew ever stonier.
'I wish----' she began; but did not go on. Then, there being plainly no
means of stopping Ambrose's cordiality, she wisely resolved to pass the
time while we waited for him in exchanging luminous thoughts with me.
And we did exchange them for some minutes, until my luminousness was
clouded and put out by the following short conversation:--
'I must say I cannot see what there is about Germans that so fascinates
Ambrose. Do you hear that empty laughter? "The loud laugh that betrays
the empty mind"?'
'As Shakespeare says.'
'Dear Frau X., you are so beautifully read.'
'So nice of you.'
'I know you are a woman of a liberal mind, so you will not object to my
saying that I am much disappointed in the Germans.'
'Not a bit.'
'Ambrose has always been so enthusiastic about them that I expected
quite wonders. What do I find? I pass over in silence many things,
including the ill-bred mirth--just listen to those people--but I cannot
help lamenting their complete want of common sense.'
'Indeed?'
'How sensible English people are compared to them!'
'Do you think so?'
'Why, of course, in everything.'
'But are you not judging the whole nation by the few?'
'Oh, one can always tell. What could be more supremely senseless for
instance'--and she waved a hand over the bay--'than calling the Baltic
the Ostsee?'
'Well, but why shouldn't they if they want to?'
'But dear Frau X., it is so foolish. East sea? Of what is it the east?
One is always the east of something, but one doesn't talk about it. The
name has no meaning whatever. Now "Baltic" exactly describes it.'
THE SEVENTH DAY
FROM BINZ TO STUBBENKAMMER
We left Binz at ten o'clock the next morning for Sassnitz and
Stubbenkammer. Sassnitz is the principal bathing-place on the island,
and I had meant to stay there a night; but as neither of us liked the
glare of chalk roads and white houses we went on that day to
Stubbenkammer, where everything is in the shade.
Charlotte had not gone away as she said she would, and when I got back
to our lodgings the evening before, penitent and apologetic after my
wanderings in the forest, besides being rather frightened, for I was
afraid I was going to be scolded and was not sure that I did not deserve
it, I found her sitting on the pillared verandah indulgently watching
the sunset sky, with _The Prelude_ lying open on her lap. She did not
ask me where I had been all day; she only pointed to _The Prelude_ and
said, 'This is great rubbish; 'to which I only answered 'Oh?'
Later in the evening I discovered that the reason of her want of
interest in my movements and absence of reproachfulness was that she
herself had had a busy and a successful day. Judgment, hurried on by
Charlotte, had overtaken the erring Hedwig; and the widow, expressing
horror and disgust, had turned her out. Charlotte praised the widow.
'She is an intelligent and a right-minded woman,' she said. 'She assured
me she would rather do all the work herself and be left without a
servant altogether than keep a wicked girl like that. I was prepared to
leave at once if she had not dismissed her then and there.'
Still later in the evening I gathered from certain remarks Charlotte
made that she had lent the most lurid of her works, a pamphlet called
_The Beast of Prey_, to the widow, who to judge from Charlotte's
satisfaction was quite carried away by it. Its nature was certainly
sufficiently startling to carry any ordinary widow away.
We left the next morning, pursued by the widow's blessings,--blessings
of great potency, I suppose, of the same degree of potency exactly as
the curses of orphans, and we all know the peculiar efficaciousness of
those. 'Good creature,' said Charlotte, touched by the number of them as
we drove away; 'I am so glad I was able to help her a little by opening
her eyes.'
'The operation,' I observed, 'is not always pleasant.'
'But invariably necessary,' said Charlotte with decision.
What then was my astonishment on looking back, as we were turning the
corner by the red-brick hotel, to take a last farewell of the pretty
white house on the shore, to see Hedwig hanging out of an upper window
waving a duster to Gertrud who was following us in the luggage cart, and
chatting and laughing while she did it with the widow standing at the
gate below. 'That house is certainly haunted,' I exclaimed. 'There's a
fresh ghost looking out of the window at this very moment.'
Charlotte turned her head with an incredulous face. Having seen the
apparition she turned it back again.
'It can't be Hedwig,' I hastened to assure her, 'because you told me she
had been sent to her mother in the country. It can only, then, be
Hedwig's ghost. She is very young to have one, isn't she?'
But Charlotte said nothing at all; and so we left Binz in silence, and
got into the sandy road and pine forest that takes you the first part of
your way towards the north and Sassnitz.
The road I had meant to take goes straight from Binz along the narrow
tongue of land, marked Schmale Heide on the map, separating the Baltic
Sea from the inland sea called Jasmunder Bodden; but outside the village
I saw a sheet of calm water shining through pine trunks on the left, and
I got out to go and look at it, and August, always nervous when I got
out, drove off the beaten track after me, and so we missed our way.
The water was the Schmachter See, a real lake in size, not a pond like
the exquisite little Schwarze See, and I stood on the edge admiring its
morning loveliness as it lay without a ripple in the sun, the noise of
the sea on the other side of the belt of pines sounding unreal as the
waves of a dream on that still shore. And while I was standing among its
reeds August was busy thinking out a short cut that would strike the
road we had left higher up. The result was that we very soon went
astray, and emerging from the woods at the farm of Dollahn found
ourselves heading straight for the Jasmunder Bodden. But it did not
matter where we went so long as we were pleased, and when everything is
fresh and new how can you help being pleased? So we drove on looking for
a road to the right that should bring us back again to the Schmale
Heide, and enjoyed the open fields and the bright morning, and pretended
to ourselves that it was not dusty. At least that is what I pretended to
myself. Charlotte pretended nothing of the sort; on the contrary, she
declared at intervals that grew shorter that she was being suffocated.
And that is one of the many points on which the walker has the advantage
of him who drives--he can walk on the grass at the side of the road, or
over moss or whortleberries, and need not endure the dust kicked up by
eight hoofs. But where has he not the advantage? The only one of driving
is that you can take a great many clean clothes with you; for the rest,
there is no comparing the two pleasures. And, after all, what does it
matter if for one fortnight out of all the fortnights there are in a
year you are not so clean as usual? Indeed, I think there must be a
quite peculiar charm for the habitually well-washed in being for a short
time deliberately dirty.
At Lubkow, a small village on the Jasmunder Bodden, we got on to the
high road to Bergen, and turning up it to the right faced northwards
once more. Soon after passing a forestry in the woods we reached the
Schmale Heide again, and then for four miles drove along a white road
between young pines, the bluest of skies overhead, and on our right,
level with the road, the violet sea. This was the first time I saw the
Baltic really violet. On other days it had been a deep blue or a
brilliant green, but here it was a wonderful, dazzling violet.
At Neu Mucran--all these places are on the map--we left the high road to
go on by itself up to the inland town of Sagard, and plunged into sandy,
shadeless country roads, trying to keep as near the shore as possible.
The rest of the way to Sassnitz was too unmitigatedly glaring and dusty
to be pleasant. There were no trees at all; and as it was uphill nearly
the whole way we had time to be thoroughly scorched and blinded. Nor
could we keep near the sea. The road took us farther and farther away
from it as we toiled slowly up between cornfields, crammed on that poor
soil with poppies and marguerites and chickory. Earth and sky were one
blaze of brightness. Our eyes, filled with dust, were smarting long
before we got to the yet fiercer blaze of Sassnitz; and it was when we
found that the place is all chalk and white houses, built in the open
with the forest pushed well back behind, that with one accord we decided
not to stay in it.
I would advise the intending tourist to use Sassnitz only as a place to
make excursions to from Binz on one side or Stubbenkammer on the other;
though, aware of my peculiarities, I advise it with diffidence. For out
of every thousand Germans nine hundred and ninety-nine would give, with
emphasis, a contrary advice, and the remaining one would not agree with
me. But I have nothing to do with the enthusiasms of other people, and
can only repeat that it is a dusty, glaring place--quaint enough on a
fine day, with its steep streets leading down to the water, and on wet
days dreary beyond words, for its houses all look as though they were
built of cardboard and were only meant, as indeed is the case, to be
used during a few weeks in summer.
August, Gertrud, and the horses were sent to an inn for a three hours'
rest, and we walked down the little street, lined with stalls covered
with amber ornaments and photographs, to the sea. As it was dinner-time
the place was empty, and from the different hotels came such a hum and
clatter of voices and dishes that, remembering Sellin, we decided not to
go in. Down on the beach we found a confectioner's shop directly
overlooking the sea, with sun-blinds and open windows, and no one in it.
It looked cool, so we went in and sat at a marble table in a draught,
and the sea splashed refreshingly on the shingle just outside, and we
ate a great many cakes and sardines and vanilla ices, and then began to
feel wretched.
'What shall we do till four o'clock?' I inquired disconsolately, leaning
my elbows on the window-sill and watching the heat dancing outside over
the shingle.
'Do?' said somebody, stopping beneath the window; 'why, walk with us to
Stubbenkammer, of course.'
It was Ambrose, clad from head to foot in white linen, a cool and
beautiful vision.
'You here? I thought you were going to stay in Binz?'
'We came across for the day in a steamer. My mother is waiting for me in
the shade. She sent me to get some biscuits, and then we are going to
Stubbenkammer. Come too.'
'Oh but the heat!'
'Wait a minute. I'm coming in there to get the biscuits.'
He disappeared round the corner of the house, the door being behind.
'He is good-looking, isn't he?' I said to Charlotte.
'I dislike that type of healthy, successful, self-satisfied young
animal.'
'That's because you have eaten so many cakes and sardines,' I said
soothingly.
'Are you never serious?'
'But invariably.'
'Frankly, I find nothing more tiring than talking to a person who is
persistently playful.'
'That's only those three vanilla ices,' I assured her encouragingly.
'You here, too, Frau Nieberlein?' exclaimed Ambrose, coming in. 'Oh
good. You will come with us, won't you? It's a beautiful walk--shade the
whole way. And I have just got that work of the Professor's about the
Phrygians, and want to talk about it frightfully badly. I've been
reading it all night. It's the most marvellous book. No wonder it
revolutionised European thought. Absolutely epoch-making.' He bought his
biscuits as one in a dream, so greatly did he glow with rapture.
'Come on Charlotte,' I said; 'a walk will do us both good. I'll send
word to August to meet us at Stubbenkammer.'
But Charlotte would not come on. She would sit there quietly, she said;
bathe perhaps, later, and then drive to Stubbenkammer.
'I tell you what, Frau Nieberlein,' cried Ambrose from the counter, 'I
never envied a woman before, but I must say I envy you. What a
marvellously glorious fate to be the wife of such an extraordinary
thinker!'
'Very well then,' I said quickly, not knowing what Charlotte's reply
might be, 'you'll come on with August and meet us there. _Auf
Wiedersehen_, Lottchen.' And I hurried Ambrose and his biscuits out.
Looking up as we passed beneath the window, we saw Charlotte still
sitting at the marble table gazing into space.
'Your cousin is wonderful about the Professor,' said Ambrose as we
crossed a scorching bit of chalky promenade to the trees where Mrs.
Harvey-Browne was waiting.
'In what way wonderful?' I asked uneasily, for I had no wish to discuss
the Nieberlein conjugalities with him.
'Oh, so self-controlled, so quiet, so modest; never trots him out, never
puts on airs because she's his wife--oh, quite wonderful.'
'Ah, yes. About those Phrygians----'
And so I got his thoughts away from Charlotte, and by the time we had
found his mother I knew far more about Phrygians than I should have
thought possible.
The walk along the coast from Sassnitz to Stubbenkammer is alone worth a
journey to Rügen. I suppose there are few walks in the world more wholly
beautiful from beginning to end. On no account, therefore, should the
traveller, all unsuspecting of so much beauty so near at hand, be
persuaded to go to Stubbenkammer by road. The road will give him merely
a pretty country drive, taking him the shortest way, quite out of sight
of the sea; the path keeps close to the edge of the cliffs, and is a
series of exquisite surprises. But only the lusty and the spare must
undertake it, for it is not to be done under three hours, and is an
almost continual going down countless steps into deep ravines, and up
countless steps out of them again. You are, however, in the shade of
beeches the whole time; and who shall describe, as you climb higher and
higher, the lovely sparkle and colour of the sea as it curls, far below
you, in and out among the folds of the cliffs?
Mrs. Harvey-Browne was sufficiently spare to enjoy the walk. Ambrose was
perfectly content telling us about Nieberlein's new work. I was
perfectly content too, because only one ear was wanted for Nieberlein,
and I still had one over for the larks and the lapping of the water,
besides both my happy eyes. We did not hurry, but lingered over each
beauty, resting on little sunny plateaus high up on the very edge of the
cliffs, where, sitting on the hot sweet grass, we saw the colour of the
sea shine through the colour of the fringing scabious--a divine meeting
of colours often to be seen along the Rügen coast in July; or, in the
deep shade at the bottom of a ravine, we rested on the moss by water
trickling down over slimy green stones to the sea which looked, from
those dark places, like a great wall of light.
Mrs. Harvey-Browne listened with a placid pride to her son's
explanations of the scope and nature of Nieberlein's book. His
enthusiasm made him talk so much that she, perforce, was silent; and her
love for him written so plainly on her face showed what she must have
been like in her best days, the younger days before her husband got his
gaiters and began to grieve. Besides, during the last and steepest part
of the walk we were beyond the range of other tourists, for they had all
dropped off at the Waldhalle, a place half-way where you drink, so that
there was nothing at all to offend her. We arrived, therefore, at
Stubbenkammer about six o'clock in a state of perfect concord,
pleasantly tired, and hot enough to be glad we had got there. On the
plateau in front of the restaurant--there is, of course, a restaurant at
the climax of the walk--there were tables under the trees and people
eating and drinking. One table, at a little distance from the others,
with the best view over the cliff, had a white cloth on it, and was
spread for what looked like tea. There were nice thin cups, and
strawberries, and a teapot, and a jug in the middle with roses in it;
and while I was wondering who were the privileged persons for whom it
had been laid Gertrud came out of the restaurant, followed by a waiter
carrying thin bread and butter, and then I knew that the privileged
persons were ourselves.
'I had tea with you yesterday,' I said to Mrs. Harvey-Browne. 'Now it is
your turn to have tea with me.'
'How charming,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne with a sigh of satisfaction,
sinking into a chair and smelling the roses. 'Your maid seems to be one
of those rare treasures who like doing extra things for their
mistresses.'
Well, Gertrud is a rare treasure, and it did look clean and dainty next
to the beer-stained tables at which coffee was being drunk and spilt by
tourists who had left their Gertruds at home. Then the place was so
wonderful, the white cliffs cutting out sheer and sharp into the sea,
their huge folds filled with every sort of greenery--masses of shrubby
trees, masses of ferns, masses of wild-flowers. Down at the bottom there
was a steamer anchored, the one by which the Harvey-Brownes were going
back later to Binz, quite a big, two-funnelled steamer, and it looked
from where we were like a tiny white toy.
'I fear the gracious one will not enjoy sleeping here,' whispered
Gertrud as she put a pot of milk on the table. 'I made inquiries on
arrival, and the hotel is entirely full, and only one small bedroom in a
pavilion, detached, among trees, can be placed at the gracious one's
disposal.'
'And my cousin?'
'The room has two beds, and the cousin of the gracious one is sitting on
one of them. We have been here already an hour. August is installed. The
horses are well accommodated here. I have an attic of sufficient
comfort. Only the ladies will suffer.'
'I will go to my cousin. Show me, I pray thee, the way.'
Excusing myself to Mrs. Harvey-Browne I followed Gertrud. At the back of
the restaurant there is an open space where a great many feather-beds in
red covers were being aired on the grass, while fowls and the waiting
drivers of the Sassnitz waggonettes wandered about among them. In the
middle of this space is a big, bare, yellow house, the only hotel in
Stubbenkammer, the only house in fact that I saw at all, and some
distance to the left of this in the shade of the forest, one-storied,
dank, dark, and mosquito-y, the pavilion.
'Gertrud,' I said, scanning it with a sinking heart, 'never yet did I
sleep in a pavilion.'
'I know it, gracious one.'
'With shutterless windows on a level with the elbows of the passers-by.'
'What the gracious one says is but too true.'
'I will enter and speak with my cousin Charlotte.'
Charlotte was, as Gertrud had said, sitting on one of the two beds that
nearly filled the room. She was feverishly writing something in pencil
on the margin of _The Beast of Prey_, and looked up with an eager,
worried expression when I opened the door. 'Is it not terrible,' she
said, 'that one should not be able to do more than one's best, and that
one's best is never enough?'
'Why, what's the matter?'
'Oh everything's the matter! You are all dull, indifferent, deadened to
everything that is vital. You don't care--you let things slide--and if
any one tries to wake you up and tell you the truth you never, never
listen.'
'Who--me?' I asked, confused into this sad grammar by her outburst.
She threw the pamphlet down and jumped up, 'Oh, I am sick of all your
sins and stupidities!' she cried, pulling her hat straight and sticking
violent pins into it.
'Whose--mine?' I asked in great perplexity.
'It would almost seem,' said Charlotte, fixing me with angry eyes,--'it
would really almost seem that there is no use whatever in devoting one's
life to one's fellow-creatures.'
'Well, one naturally likes to be left alone,' I murmured.
'What I try to do is to pull them out of the mud when they are in it, to
warn them when they are going in it, and to help them when they have
been in it.'
'Well, that sounds very noble. Being full of noble intentions, why on
earth, my dear Charlotte, can't you be placid? You are never placid.
Come and have some tea.'
'Tea! What, with those wretched people? Those leathern souls? Those
Harvey-Brownes?'
'Come along--it isn't only tea--it's strawberries and roses, and looks
lovely.'
'Oh, those people half kill me! They are so pleased with themselves, so
satisfied with life, such prigs, such toadies. What have I in common
with them?'
'Nonsense. Ambrose is not a toady at all--he's nothing but a dear. And
his mother has her points. Why not try to do them good? You'd be
interested in them at once if you'd look upon them as patients.'
I put my arm through hers and drew her out of the room. 'This stuffy
room is enough to depress anybody,' I said. 'And I know what's worrying
you--it's that widow.'
'I know what's an irritating trick of yours,' exclaimed Charlotte,
turning on me, 'it's always explaining the reason why I say or feel what
I do say or feel.'
'What, and isn't there any reason?'
'That widow has no power to worry me. Her hypocrisy will bear its own
fruit, and she will have to eat it. Then, when the catastrophe comes,
the sure consequence of folly and weakness, she'll do what you all do in
face of the inevitable--sit and lament and say it was somebody else's
fault. And of course every single thing that happens to you is never
anybody's fault but your own miserable self's.'
'I wish you would teach me to dodge what you call the inevitable,' I
said.
'As though it wanted any teaching,' said Charlotte stopping short in the
middle of the open space before our table to look into my eyes. 'You've
only not got to be silly.'
'But what am I to do if I am silly--naturally silly--born it?'