As I had feared, the carriage was very nearly smashed getting it over the sides of the smack. I sat up in the bows looking on in terror, expecting every instant to see the wheels wrenched off, and with their wrenching the end of our holiday. The optimistic ferryman assured us that it was going in quite easily — like a lamb, he declared, with great boldness of imagery. He sloped two ineffectual planks, one for each set of wheels, up the side of the boat, and he and August, hatless, coatless, and breathless, lifted the carriage over on to them. It was a horrid moment. The front wheels twisted right round and were as near coming off as any wheels I saw in my life. I was afraid to look at August, so right did he seem to have been when he protested that the thing could not be accomplished. Yet there was Rügen and here were we, and we had to get across to it somehow or turn round and do the dreary journey to Stralsund.
The horses, both exceedingly restive, had been unharnessed and got in first. They were held in the stern of the boat by two boys, who needed all their determination to do it. Then it was that I was thankful for the boat’s steep sides, for if they had been lower those horses would certainly have kicked themselves over into the sea; and what should I have done then? And how should I have faced him who is in authority over me if I returned to him without his horses?
‘We take them across daily,’ the ferryman remarked, airily jerking his thumb in the direction of the carriage.
‘Do so many people drive to Rügen?’ I asked astonished, for the plank arrangements were staringly makeshift.
‘Many people?’ cried the ferryman. ‘Rightly speaking, crowds.’
He was trying to make me happy. At least it reassured August to hear it; but I could not suppress a smile of deprecation at the size of the fib.
By this time we were under weigh, a fair wind sending us merrily over the water. The ferryman steered; August stood at his horses’ heads talking to them soothingly; the two boys came and sat on some coiled ropes close to me, leaned their elbows on their knees and their chins on their hands, and fixing their blue fisher-boy eyes on my face kept them there with an unwinking interest during the entire crossing. Oh, it was lovely sitting up there in the sun, safe so far, in the delicious quiet of sailing. The tawny sail, darned and patched in divers shades of brown and red and orange, towered above us against the sky. The huge mast seemed to brush along across the very surface of the little white clouds. Above the rippling of the water we could hear the distant larks on either shore. August had put on his scarlet stable-jacket for the work of lifting the carriage in, and made a beautiful bit of colour among the browns of the old boat at the stern. The eyes of the ferryman lost all the alertness they had had on shore, and he stood at the rudder gazing dreamily out at the afternoon light on the Rügen meadows. How perfect it was after the train, after the clattering along the dusty road, and the heat and terror of getting on board. For one exquisite quarter of an hour we were softly lapped across in the sun, and for all that beauty we were only asked to pay three marks, which included the horses and carriage and the labour of getting us in and out. For a further small sum the ferryman became enthusiastic and begged me to be sure to come back that way. There was a single house on the Rügen shore where he lived, he said, and from which he would watch for us. A little dog came down to welcome us, but we saw no other living creature. The carriage conducted itself far more like a lamb on this side, and I drove away well pleased to have got over the chief difficulty of the tour, the soft-voiced ferryman wishing us Godspeed, and the two boys unwinking to the last.
So here we were on the legend-surrounded island. ‘Hail, thou isle of fairyland, filled with beckoning figures!’ I murmured under my breath, careful not to appear too unaccountable in Gertrud’s eyes. With eager interest I looked about me, and anything less like fairyland and more like the coast of Pomerania lately left I have seldom seen. The road, a continuation of the road on the mainland, was exactly like other roads that are dull as far as a rambling village three miles farther on called Garz — persons referring to the map at the beginning of this book will see with what a melancholy straightness it proceeds to that village — and after Garz I ceased to care what it was like, for reasons which I will now set forth.
There was that afternoon in the market-place of Garz, and I know not why, since it was neither a Sunday nor a holiday, a brass band playing with a singular sonorousness. The horses having never before been required to listen to music, their functions at home being solely to draw me through the solitudes of forests, did not like it. I was astonished at the vigour of the dislike they showed who were wont to be so meek. They danced through Garz, pursued by the braying of the trumpets and the delighted shouts of the crowd, who seemed to bray and shout the louder the more the horses danced, and I was considering whether the time had not come for clinging to Gertrud and shutting my eyes when we turned a corner and got away from the noise on to the familiar rattle of the hard country road. I gave a sigh of relief and stretched out my head to see whether it were as straight a bit as the last. It was quite as straight, and in the distance bearing down on us was a black speck that swelled at an awful speed into a motor car. Now the horses had not yet seen a motor car. Their nerves, already shaken by the brass band, would never stand such a horrid sight I thought, and prudence urged an immediate getting out and a rushing to their heads. ‘Stop, August!’ I cried. ‘Jump out, Gertrud — there’s a dreadful thing coming — they’re sure to bolt — —’
August slowed down in apparent obedience to my order, and without waiting for him to stop entirely, the motor being almost upon us, I jumped out on one side and Gertrud jumped out on the other. Before I had time to run to the horses’ heads the motor whizzed past. The horses strange to say hardly cared at all, only mildly shying as August drove them slowly along without stopping.
‘That’s all right,’ I remarked, greatly relieved, to Gertrud, who still held her stocking. ‘Now we’ll get in again.’
But we could not get in again because August did not stop.
‘Call to him to stop,’ I said to Gertrud, turning aside to pick some unusually big poppies.
She called, but he did not stop.
‘Call louder, Gertrud,’ I said impatiently, for we were now a good way behind.
She called louder, but he did not stop.
Then I called; then she called; then we called together, but he did not stop. On the contrary, he was driving on now at the usual pace, rattling noisily over the hard road, getting more and more out of reach.
‘Shout, shout, Gertrud!’ I cried in a frenzy; but how could any one so respectable as Gertrud shout? She sent a faint shriek after the ever-receding August, and when I tried to shout myself I was seized with such uncontrollable laughter that nothing whatever of the nature of a noise could be produced.
Meanwhile August was growing very small in the distance. He evidently did not know we had got out when the motor car appeared, and was under the pleasing impression that we were sitting behind him being jogged comfortably towards Putbus. He dwindled and dwindled with a rapidity distressing to witness. ‘Shout, shout,’ I gasped, myself contorted with dreadful laughter, half-wildest mirth and half despair.
She began to trot down the road after him waving her stocking at his distant back and emitting a series of shrill shrieks, goaded by the exigencies of the situation.
The last we saw of the carriage was a yellow glint as the sun caught the shiny surface of my bandbox; immediately afterwards it vanished over the edge of a far-away dip in the road, and we were alone with Nature.
Gertrud and I stared at each other in speechless dismay. Then she looked on in silence while I sank on to a milestone and laughed. There was nothing, her look said, to laugh at, and much to be earnest over in our tragic predicament, and I knew it but I could not stop. August had had no instructions as to where he was driving to or where we were going to put up that night; of Putbus and Marianna North he had never heard. With the open ordnance map on my lap I had merely called out directions, since leavi
ng Miltzow, at cross-roads. Therefore in all human probability he would drive straight on till dark, no doubt in growing private astonishment at the absence of orders and the length of the way; then when night came he would, I supposed, want to light his lamps, and getting down to do so would immediately be frozen with horror at what he saw, or rather did not see, in the carriage. What he would do after that I could not conceive. In sheerest despair I laughed till I cried, and the sight of Gertrud watching me silently from the middle of the deserted road only made me less able to leave off. Behind us in the distance, at the end of a vista of chaussée trees, were the houses of Garz; in front of us, a long way in front of us, rose the red spire of the church of Casnewitz, a village through which, as I still remembered from the map now driving along by itself, our road to Putbus lay. Up and down the whiteness of this road not a living creature, either in a cart or on its legs, was to be seen. The bald country, here very bald and desolate, stretched away on either side into nothingness. The wind sighed about, whisking little puffs of derisive dust into our eyes as it passed. There was a dreadful absence of anything like sounds.
‘No doubt,’ said Gertrud, ‘August will soon return?’
‘He won’t,’ I said, wiping my eyes; ‘he’ll go on for ever. He’s wound up. Nothing will stop him.’
‘What, then, will the gracious one do?’
‘Walk after him, I suppose,’ I said, getting up, ‘and trust to something unexpected making him find out he hasn’t got us. But I’m afraid nothing will. Come on, Gertrud,’ I continued, feigning briskness while my heart was as lead, ‘it’s nearly six already, and the road is long and lonely.’
‘Ach,’ groaned Gertrud, who never walks.
‘Perhaps a cart will pass us and give us a lift. If not we’ll walk to that village with the church over there and see if we can get something on wheels to pursue August with. Come on — I hope your boots are all right.’
‘Ach,’ groaned Gertrud again, lifting up one foot, as a dog pitifully lifts up its wounded paw, and showing me a black cashmere boot of the sort that is soft and pleasant to the feet of servants who are not required to use them much.
‘I’m afraid they’re not much good on this hard road,’ I said. ‘Let us hope something will catch us up soon.’
‘Ach,’ groaned poor Gertrud, whose feet are very tender.
But nothing did catch us up, and we trudged along in grim silence, the desire to laugh all gone.
‘You must, my dear Gertrud,’ I said after a while, seeking to be cheerful, ‘regard this in the light of healthful exercise. You and I are taking a pleasant afternoon walk together in Rügen.’
Gertrud said nothing; at all times loathing movement out of doors she felt that this walking was peculiarly hateful because it had no visible end. And what would become of us if we were forced to spend the night in some inn without our luggage? The only thing I had with me was my purse, the presence of which, containing as it did all the money I had brought, caused me to cast a careful eye at short intervals behind me, less in the hope of seeing a cart than in the fear of seeing a tramp; and the only thing Gertrud had was her half-knitted stocking. Also we had had nothing to eat but a scrappy tea-basket lunch hours before in the train, and my intention had been to have food at Putbus and then drive down to a place called Lauterbach, which being on the seashore was more convenient for the jelly-fish than Putbus, and spend the night there in an hotel much recommended by the guide-book. By this time according to my plans we ought to have been sitting in Putbus eating Kalbsschnitzel. ‘Gertrud,’ I asked rather faintly, my soul drooping within me at the thought of the Kalbsschnitzel, ‘are you hungry?’
Gertrud sighed. ‘It is long since we ate,’ she said.
We trudged on in silence for another five minutes.
‘Gertrud,’ I asked again, for during those five minutes my thoughts had dwelt with a shameful persistency on the succulent and the gross, ‘are you very hungry?’
‘The gracious one too must be in need of food,’ evaded Gertrud, who for some reason never would admit she wanted feeding.
‘Oh she is,’ I sighed; and again we trudged on in silence.
It seemed a long while before we reached that edge over which my bandbox had disappeared flashing farewell as it went, and when we did get to it and eagerly looked along the fresh stretch of road in hopes of seeing August miraculously turned back, we gave a simultaneous groan, for it was as deserted as the one we had just come along. Something lay in the middle of it a few yards on, a dark object like a little heap of brown leaves. Thinking it was leaves I saw no reason for comment; but Gertrud, whose eyes are very sharp, exclaimed.
‘What, do you see August?’ I cried.
‘No, no — but there in the road — the tea-basket!’
It was indeed the tea-basket, shaken out as it naturally would be on the removal of the bodies that had kept it in its place, come to us like the ravens of old to give us strength and sustenance.
‘It still contains food,’ said Gertrud, hurrying towards it.
‘Thank heaven,’ said I.
We dragged it out of the road to the grass at the side, and Gertrud lit the spirit-lamp and warmed what was left in the teapot of the tea. It was of an awful blackness. No water was to be got near, and we dared not leave the road to look for any in case August should come back. There were some sorry pieces of cake, one or two chicken sandwiches grown unaccountably horrible, and all those strawberries we had avoided at lunch because they were too small or two much squashed. Over these mournful revels the church spire of Casnewitz, now come much closer, presided; it was the silent witness of how honourably we shared, and how Gertrud got the odd sandwich because of her cashmere boots.
Then we buried the tea-basket in a ditch, in a bed of long grass and cow-parsley, for it was plain that I could not ask Gertrud, who could hardly walk as it was, to carry it, and it was equally plain that I could not carry it myself, for it was as mysteriously heavy as other tea-baskets and in size very nearly as big as I am. So we buried it, not without some natural regrets and a dim feeling that we were flying in the face of Providence, and there it is, I suppose, grown very rusty, to this day.
After that Gertrud got along a little better, and my thoughts being no longer concentrated on food I could think out what was best to be done. The result was that on reaching Casnewitz we inquired at once which of the cottages was an inn, and having found one asked a man who seemed to belong there to let us have a conveyance with as much speed as possible.
‘Where have you come from?’ he inquired, staring first at one and then at the other.
‘Oh — from Garz.’
‘From Garz? Where do you want to go to?’
‘To Putbus.’
‘To Putbus? Are you staying there?’
‘No — yes — anyhow we wish to drive there. Kindly let us start as soon as possible.’
‘Start! I have no cart.’
‘Sir,’ said Gertrud with much dignity, ‘why did you not say so at once?’
‘Ja, ja, Fräulein, why did I not?’
We walked out.
‘This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,’ I remarked, and I wondered what those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the banter of publicans.
‘There is a little shop,’ said Gertrud. ‘Does the gracious one permit that I make inquiries there?’
We went in and Gertrud did the talking.
‘Putbus is not very far from here,’ said the old man presiding, who was at least polite. ‘Why do not the ladies walk? My horse has been out all day, and my son who drives him has other things now to do.’
‘Oh we can’t walk,’ I broke in. ‘We must drive because we might want to go beyond Putbus — we are not sure — it depends — —’
The old man looked puzzled. ‘Where is it that the ladies wish to go?’ he inquired, trying to be patient.
‘To Putbus, anyhow. Perhaps only to
Putbus. We can’t tell till we get there. But indeed, indeed you must let us have your horse.’
Still puzzled, the old man went out to consult with his son, and we waited in profound dejection among candles and coffee. Putbus was not, as he had said, far, but I remembered how on the map it seemed to be a very nest of cross-roads, all radiating from a round circus sort of place in the middle. Which of them would August consider to be the straight continuation of the road from Garz? Once beyond Putbus he would be lost to us indeed.
It took about half an hour to persuade the son and to harness the horse; and while this was going on we stood at the door watching the road and listening eagerly for sounds of wheels. One cart did pass, going in the direction of Garz, and when I heard it coming I was so sure that it was August that I triumphantly called to Gertrud to run and tell the old man we did not need his son. Gertrud, wiser, waited till she saw what it was, and after the quenching of that sudden hope we both drooped more than ever.
‘Where am I to drive to?’ asked the son, whipping up his horse and bumping us away over the stones of Casnewitz. He sat huddled up looking exceedingly sulky, manifestly disgusted at having to go out again at the end of a day’s work. As for the cart, it was a sad contrast to the cushioned comfort of the vanished victoria. It was very high, very wooden, very shaky, and we sat on a plank in the middle of so terrible a noise that when we wanted to say anything we had to shout. ‘Where am I to drive to?’ repeated the youth, scowling over his shoulder.
‘Please drive straight on until you meet a carriage.’
‘A what?’
‘A carriage.’
‘Whose carriage?’
‘My carriage.’
He scowled round again with deepened disgust. ‘If you have a carriage,’ he said, looking at us as though he were afraid we were lunatics, ‘why are you in my cart?’
‘Oh why, why are we!’ I cried wringing my hands, overcome by the wretchedness of our plight; for we were now beyond Casnewitz, and gazing anxiously ahead with the strained eyes of Sister Annes we saw the road as straight and as empty as ever.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 296
