We Dine.--A Curious Dish.--"A Feeling of Sadness Comes O'er Me."--The
German Cigar.--The Handsomest Match in Europe.--"How Easy 'tis for
Friends to Drift Apart," especially in a place like Munich Railway
Station.--The Victim of Fate.--A Faithful Bradshaw.--Among the
Mountains.--Prince and Pauper.--A Modern Romance.--Arrival at
Oberau.--Wise and Foolish Pilgrims.--An Interesting Drive.--Ettal and its
Monastery.--We Reach the Goal of our Pilgrimage.
At one o'clock we turned into a restaurant for dinner. The Germans
themselves always dine in the middle of the day, and a very substantial
meal they make of it. At the hotels frequented by tourists _table
d'hote_ is, during the season, fixed for about six or seven, but this is
only done to meet the views of foreign customers.
I mention that we had dinner, not because I think that the information
will prove exciting to the reader, but because I wish to warn my
countrymen, travelling in Germany, against undue indulgence in Liptauer
cheese.
I am fond of cheese, and of trying new varieties of cheese; so that when
I looked down the cheese department of the bill of fare, and came across
"liptauer garnit," an article of diet I had never before heard of, I
determined to sample it.
It was not a tempting-looking cheese. It was an unhealthy, sad-looking
cheese. It looked like a cheese that had seen trouble. In appearance it
resembled putty more than anything else. It even tasted like putty--at
least, like I should imagine putty would taste. To this hour I am not
positive that it was not putty. The garnishing was even more remarkable
than the cheese. All the way round the plate were piled articles that I
had never before seen at a dinner, and that I do not ever want to see
there again. There was a little heap of split-peas, three or four
remarkably small potatoes--at least, I suppose they were potatoes; if
not, they were pea-nuts boiled soft,--some caraway-seeds, a very
young-looking fish, apparently of the stickleback breed, and some red
paint. It was quite a little dinner all to itself.
What the red paint was for, I could not understand. B. thought that it
was put there for suicidal purposes. His idea was that the customer,
after eating all the other things in the plate, would wish he were dead,
and that the restaurant people, knowing this, had thoughtfully provided
him with red paint for one, so that he could poison himself off and get
out of his misery.
I thought, after swallowing the first mouthful, that I would not eat any
more of this cheese. Then it occurred to me that it was a pity to waste
it after having ordered it, and, besides, I might get to like it before I
had finished. The taste for most of the good things of this world has to
be acquired. _I_ can remember the time when I did not like beer.
So I mixed up everything on the plate all together--made a sort of salad
of it, in fact--and ate it with a spoon. A more disagreeable dish I have
never tasted since the days when I used to do Willie Evans's "dags," by
walking twice through a sewer, and was subsequently, on returning home,
promptly put to bed, and made to eat brimstone and treacle.
I felt very sad after dinner. All the things I have done in my life that
I should not have done recurred to me with painful vividness. (There
seemed to be a goodish number of them, too.) I thought of all the
disappointments and reverses I had experienced during my career; of all
the injustice that I had suffered, and of all the unkind things that had
been said and done to me. I thought of all the people I had known who
were now dead, and whom I should never see again, of all the girls that I
had loved, who were now married to other fellows, while I did not even
know their present addresses. I pondered upon our earthly existence,
upon how hollow, false, and transient it is, and how full of sorrow. I
mused upon the wickedness of the world and of everybody in it, and the
general cussedness of all things.
I thought how foolish it was for B. and myself to be wasting our time,
gadding about Europe in this silly way. What earthly enjoyment was there
in travelling--being jolted about in stuffy trains, and overcharged at
uncomfortable hotels?
B. was cheerful and frivolously inclined at the beginning of our walk (we
were strolling down the Maximilian Strasse, after dinner); but as I
talked to him, I was glad to notice that he gradually grew more serious
and subdued. He is not really bad, you know, only thoughtless.
B. bought some cigars and offered me one. I did not want to smoke.
Smoking seemed to me, just then, a foolish waste of time and money. As I
said to B.:
"In a few more years, perhaps before this very month is gone, we shall be
lying in the silent tomb, with the worms feeding on us. Of what
advantage will it be to us then that we smoked these cigars to-day?"
B. said:
"Well, the advantage it will be to me now is, that if you have a cigar in
your mouth I shan't get quite so much of your chatty conversation. Take
one, for my sake."
To humour him, I lit up.
I do not admire the German cigar. B. says that when you consider they
only cost a penny, you cannot grumble. But what I say is, that when you
consider they are dear at six a half-penny, you can grumble. Well
boiled, they might serve for greens; but as smoking material they are not
worth the match with which you light them, especially not if the match be
a German one. The German match is quite a high art work. It has a
yellow head and a magenta or green stem, and can certainly lay claim to
being the handsomest match in Europe.
We smoked a good many penny cigars during our stay in Germany, and that
we were none the worse for doing so I consider as proof of our splendid
physique and constitution. I think the German cigar test might, with
reason, be adopted by life insurance offices.--Question: "Are you at
present, and have you always been, of robust health?" Answer: "I have
smoked a German cigar, and still live." Life accepted.
Towards three o'clock we worked our way round to the station, and began
looking for our train. We hunted all over the place, but could not find
it anywhere. The central station at Munich is an enormous building, and
a perfect maze of passages and halls and corridors. It is much easier to
lose oneself in it, than to find anything in it one may happen to want.
Together and separately B. and I lost ourselves and each other some
twenty-four times. For about half an hour we seemed to be doing nothing
else but rushing up and down the station looking for each other, suddenly
finding each other, and saying, "Why, where the dickens have you been? I
have been hunting for you everywhere. Don't go away like that," and then
immediately losing each other again.
And what was so extraordinary about the matter was that every time, after
losing each other, we invariably met again--when we did meet--outside the
door of the third-class refreshment room.
We came at length to regard the door of the third-class refreshment room
as "home," and to feel a thrill of joy when, in the course of our weary
wanderings through far-off waiting-rooms and lost-luggage bureaus and
lamp depots, we saw its old familiar handle shining in the distance, and
knew that there, beside it, we should find our loved and lost one.
When any very long time elapsed without our coming across it, we would go
up to one of the officials, and ask to be directed to it.
"Please can you tell me," we would say, "the nearest way to the door of
the third-class refreshment room?"
When three o'clock came, and still we had not found the 3.10 train, we
became quite anxious about the poor thing, and made inquiries concerning
it.
"The 3.10 train to Ober-Ammergau," they said. "Oh, we've not thought
about that yet."
"Haven't thought about it!" we exclaimed indignantly. "Well, do for
heaven's sake wake up a bit. It is 3.5 now!"
"Yes," they answered, "3.5 in the afternoon; the 3.10 is a night train.
Don't you see it's printed in thick type? All the trains between six in
the evening and six in the morning are printed in fat figures, and the
day trains in thin. You have got plenty of time. Look around after
supper."
I do believe I am the most unfortunate man at a time-table that ever was
born. I do not think it can be stupidity; for if it were mere stupidity,
I should occasionally, now and then when I was feeling well, not make a
mistake. It must be fate.
If there is one train out of forty that goes on "Saturdays only" to some
place I want to get to, that is the train I select to travel by on a
Friday. On Saturday morning I get up at six, swallow a hasty breakfast,
and rush off to catch a return train that goes on every day in the week
"except Saturdays."
I go to London, Brighton and South Coast Railway-stations and clamour for
South-Eastern trains. On Bank Holidays I forget it is Bank Holiday, and
go and sit on draughty platforms for hours, waiting for trains that do
not run on Bank Holidays.
To add to my misfortunes, I am the miserable possessor of a demon
time-table that I cannot get rid of, a Bradshaw for August, 1887.
Regularly, on the first of each month, I buy and bring home with me a new
Bradshaw and a new A.B.C. What becomes of them after the second of the
month, I do not know. After the second of the month, I never see either
of them again. What their fate is, I can only guess. In their place is
left, to mislead me, this wretched old 1887 corpse.
For three years I have been trying to escape from it, but it will not
leave me.
I have thrown it out of the window, and it has fallen on people's heads,
and those people have picked it up and smoothed it out, and brought it
back to the house, and members of my family--"friends" they call
themselves--people of my own flesh and blood--have thanked them and taken
it in again!
I have kicked it into a dozen pieces, and kicked the pieces all the way
downstairs and out into the garden, and persons--persons, mind you, who
will not sew a button on the back of my shirt to save me from
madness--have collected the pieces and stitched them carefully together,
and made the book look as good as new, and put it back in my study!
It has acquired the secret of perpetual youth, has this time-table.
Other time-tables that I buy become dissipated-looking wrecks in about a
week. This book looks as fresh and new and clean as it did on the day
when it first lured me into purchasing it. There is nothing about its
appearance to suggest to the casual observer that it is not this month's
Bradshaw. Its evident aim and object in life is to deceive people into
the idea that it is this month's Bradshaw.
It is undermining my moral character, this book is. It is responsible
for at least ten per cent. of the bad language that I use every year. It
leads me into drink and gambling. I am continually finding myself with
some three or four hours to wait at dismal provincial railway stations.
I read all the advertisements on both platforms, and then I get wild and
reckless, and plunge into the railway hotel and play billiards with the
landlord for threes of Scotch.
I intend to have that Bradshaw put into my coffin with me when I am
buried, so that I can show it to the recording angel and explain matters.
I expect to obtain a discount of at least five-and-twenty per cent. off
my bill of crimes for that Bradshaw.
The 3.10 train in the morning was, of course, too late for us. It would
not get us to Ober-Ammergau until about 9 a.m. There was a train leaving
at 7.30 (I let B. find out this) by which we might reach the village some
time during the night, if only we could get a conveyance from Oberau, the
nearest railway-station. Accordingly, we telegraphed to Cook's agent,
who was at Ober-Ammergau (we all of us sneer at Mr. Cook and Mr. Gaze,
and such-like gentlemen, who kindly conduct travellers that cannot
conduct themselves properly, when we are at home; but I notice most of us
appeal, on the quiet, to one or the other of them the moment we want to
move abroad), to try and send a carriage to meet us by that train; and
then went to an hotel, and turned into bed until it was time to start.
We had another grand railway-ride from Munich to Oberau. We passed by
the beautiful lake of Starnberg just as the sun was setting and gilding
with gold the little villages and pleasant villas that lie around its
shores. It was in the lake of Starnberg, near the lordly pleasure-house
that he had built for himself in that fair vale, that poor mad Ludwig,
the late King of Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor King! Fate gave him
everything calculated to make a man happy, excepting one thing, and that
was the power of being happy. Fate has a mania for striking balances. I
knew a little shoeblack once who used to follow his profession at the
corner of Westminster Bridge. Fate gave him an average of sixpence a day
to live upon and provide himself with luxuries; but she also gave him a
power of enjoying that kept him jolly all day long. He could buy as much
enjoyment for a penny as the average man could for a ten-pound
note--more, I almost think. He did not know he was badly off, any more
than King Ludwig knew he was well off; and all day long he laughed and
played, and worked a little--not more than he could help--and ate and
drank, and gambled. The last time I saw him was in St. Thomas's
Hospital, into which he had got himself owing to his fatal passion for
walking along outside the stone coping of Westminster Bridge. He thought
it was "prime," being in the hospital, and told me that he was living
like a fighting-cock, and that he did not mean to go out sooner than he
could help. I asked him if he were not in pain, and he said "Yes," when
he "thought about it."
Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a "fighting-cock" for
three days more. Then he died, cheerful up to the last, so they told me,
like the plucky little English game-cock he was. He could not have been
more than twelve years old when he crowed his last. It had been a short
life for him, but a very merry one.
Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have gone into
partnership, and so have shared between them the shoeblack's power of
enjoying and the king's stock of enjoyments, what a good thing it would
have been for both of them--especially for King Ludwig. He would never
have thought of drowning himself then--life would have been too
delightful.
But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh at men, and to
make of life a paradox. To the one, she played ravishing strains, having
first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf. To the other, she
piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle, and he thought it was
music, and danced!
A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw back
to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish young lovers
ended their disappointments, and, finding they could not be wedded
together in life, wedded themselves together in death. The story, duly
reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign intelligence, read more
like some old Rhine-legend than the record of a real occurrence in this
prosaic nineteenth century.
He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German
Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when proposed
to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law, refused his consent. The Count
then went abroad to try and make, or at all events improve, his fortune.
He went to America, and there he prospered. In a year or two he came
back, tolerably rich--to find, however, that he was too late. His lady,
persuaded of his death, had been urged into a marriage with a rich
somebody else. In ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented
himself with continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich
somebody else to pay for her keep. This young couple, however, a little
lighter headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever
it may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which the air
around them seemed filled, went down one stormy night together to the
lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by turning her grim comedy
into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.
Soon after losing sight of Starnberg's placid waters, we plunged into the
gloom of the mountains, and began a long, winding climb among their
hidden recesses. At times, shrieking as if in terror, we passed some
ghostly hamlet, standing out white and silent in the moonlight against
the shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark, still lake, or mountain
torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long white streak across the
blackness of the night.
We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town which
possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and which, until
a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed forward to
Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to Ober-Ammergau. It was a
tolerably steep climb up the road from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to
Ammergau--so steep, indeed, that one stout pilgrim not many years ago,
died from the exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged mountaineer and
pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side, for no horses could do
more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.
Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more pampered,
and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and interest of his journey
more and more curtailed and spoilt. In a few years' time, he will be
packed in cotton-wool in his own back-parlour, labelled for the place he
wants to go to, and unpacked and taken out when he gets there. The
railway now carries him round Mount Ettal to Oberau, from which little
village a tolerably easy road, as mountain roadways go, of about four or
five English miles takes him up to the valley of the Ammer.
It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the place
was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it is at
mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims thronged the little hotel,
wondering, as also did the landlord, where they were all going to sleep;
and wondering still more, though this latter consideration evidently did
not trouble their host, how they were going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in
the morning in time for the play, which always begins at 8 a.m.
Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for them at five;
and others, who could not secure carriages, and who had determined to
walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake them at 2.30, and ordering
breakfast for a quarter-past three sharp. (I had no idea there were such
times in the morning!)
We were fortunate enough to find our land-lord, a worthy farmer, waiting
for us with a tumble-down conveyance, in appearance something between a
circus-chariot and a bath-chair, drawn by a couple of powerful-looking
horses; and in this, after a spirited skirmish between our driver and a
mob of twenty or so tourists, who pretended to mistake the affair for an
omnibus, and who would have clambered into it and swamped it, we drove
away.
Higher and higher we climbed, and grander and grander towered the
frowning moon-bathed mountains round us, and chillier and chillier grew
the air. For most of the way we crawled along, the horses tugging us
from side to side of the steep road; but, wherever our coachman could
vary the monotony of the pace by a stretch-gallop--as, for instance, down
the precipitous descents that occasionally followed upon some extra long
and toilsome ascent--he thoughtfully did so. At such times the drive
became really quite exciting, and all our weariness was forgotten.
The steeper the descent, the faster, of course, we could go. The rougher
the road, the more anxious the horses seemed to be to get over it
quickly. During the gallop, B. and I enjoyed, in a condensed form, all
the advantages usually derived from crossing the Channel on a stormy day,
riding on a switchback railway, and being tossed in a blanket--a hard,
nobbly blanket, full of nasty corners and sharp edges. I should never
have thought that so many different sensations could have been obtained
from one machine!
About half-way up we passed Ettal, at the entrance to the Valley of the
Ammer. The great white temple, standing, surrounded by its little
village, high up amid the mountain solitudes, is a famous place of
pilgrimage among devout Catholics. Many hundreds of years ago, one of
the early Bavarian kings built here a monastery as a shrine for a
miraculous image of the Virgin that had been sent down to him from Heaven
to help him when, in a foreign land, he had stood sore in need,
encompassed by his enemies. Maybe the stout arms and hearts of his
Bavarian friends were of some service in the crisis also; but the living
helpers were forgotten. The old church and monastery, which latter was a
sort of ancient Chelsea Hospital for decayed knights, was destroyed one
terrible night some hundred and fifty years ago by a flash of lightning;
but the wonder-working image was rescued unhurt, and may still be seen
and worshipped beneath the dome of the present much less imposing church
which has been reared upon the ruins of its ancestor.
The monastery, which was also rebuilt at the same time, now serves the
more useful purpose of a brewery.
From Ettal the road is comparatively level, and, jolting swiftly over it,
we soon reached Ober-Ammergau. Lights were passing to and fro behind the
many windows of the square stone houses, and dark, strange-looking
figures were moving about the streets, busy with preparations for the
great business that would commence with the dawn.
We rattled noisily through the village, our driver roaring out "Good
Night!" to everyone he passed in a voice sufficient to wake up everybody
who might be sleeping within a mile, charged light-heartedly round
half-a-dozen corners, trotted down the centre path of somebody's front
garden, squeezed our way through a gate, and drew up at an open door,
through which the streaming light poured out upon two tall, comely
lasses, our host's daughters, who were standing waiting for us in the
porch. They led us into a large, comfortably furnished room, where a
tempting supper of hot veal-chops (they seem to live on veal in Germany)
and white wine was standing ready. Under ordinary circumstances I should
have been afraid that such a supper would cause me to be more eager for
change and movement during the ensuing six hours than for sleep; but I
felt that to-night it would take a dozen half-baked firebricks to keep me
awake five seconds after I had got my head on the pillow--or what they
call a pillow in Germany; and so, without hesitation, I made a very
satisfactory meal.
After supper our host escorted us to our bedroom, an airy apartment
adorned with various highly-coloured wood-carvings of a pious but
somewhat ghastly character, calculated, I should say, to exercise a
disturbing influence upon the night's rest of a nervous or sensitive
person.
"Mind that we are called at proper time in the morning," said B. to the
man. "We don't want to wake up at four o'clock in the afternoon and find
that we have missed the play, after coming all this way to see it."
"Oh! that will be all right," answered the old fellow. "You won't get
much chance of oversleeping yourself. We shall all be up and about, and
the whole village stirring, before five; and besides, the band will be
playing at six just beneath the window here, and the cannon on the Kofel
goes off at--"
"Look here," I interrupted, "that won't do for me, you know. Don't you
think that I am going to be woke up by mere riots outside the window, and
brass-band contests, and earthquakes, and explosions, and those sort of
things, because it can't be done that way. Somebody's got to come into
this room and haul me out of bed, and sit down on the bed and see that I
don't get into it again, and that I don't go to sleep on the floor. That
will be the way to get me up to-morrow morning. Don't let's have any
nonsense about stirring villages and guns and German bands. I know what
all that will end in, my going back to England without seeing the show.
I want to be roused in the morning, not lulled off to sleep again."
B. translated the essential portions of this speech to the man, and he
laughed and promised upon his sacred word of honour that he would come up
himself and have us both out; and as he was a stalwart and
determined-looking man, I felt satisfied, and wished him "Good-night,"
and made haste to get off my boots before I fell asleep.