The carriage was waiting just outside the empty, sunny little place, in a road that winds chalkily between undulating fields in the direction of Glowe. Gertrud’s face wore a look of satisfaction as she got into her old seat beside me and took out her knitting. She had not been able to knit during those few dreadful days in which her place had been usurped, and she had bumped after us ignominiously in a cart; and how pleasant it was not to have the ceaseless rattle just behind. Yes; it became more and more clear that Charlotte ought to be in her own home with her husband. Her being there would undoubtedly promote the general peace. And why should she go about stirring people up and forcing them to be dogged by luggage carts?
The road wound higher through the cornfields, dwindling at last into a stony track. The country heaved away in ample undulations on either side. There were no trees, but so many flowers that even the ruts were blue with chickory. On the right, over the cornfields, lay the Baltic. I could still see Arkona in front of me on the dim edge of the world. Down at our feet stretched the calm silver of the Jasmunder Bodden, the biggest of those inland seas that hollow out the island into a mere frame; and a tongue of pine-forest, black and narrow, curved northwards between its pale waters and the vigorous blue of the sea. I stopped the carriage as I love to do in lonely places, and there was no sound but a faint whispering in the corn.
We drove down over stones between grassy banks to a tiny village with a very ancient church and the pleasing name of Bobbin. I looked wistfully up at the church on its mound as we passed below it. It was very old — six centuries the guide-book said — and fain would I have gone into it; but I knew it would be locked, and did not like to disturb the parson for the key. The parson himself came along the road at that moment, and he looked so kind, and his eye was so mild that I got out and inquired of him with what I hope was an engaging modesty whether the guide-book were correct about the six centuries. He was amiability itself. Not only, he said, was the church ancient, but interesting. Would I like to see it? ‘Oh please.’ Then would I come to the parsonage while he got the key? ‘Oh thank you.’
The Bobbin parsonage is a delightful little house of the kind that I dream of for my declining years, with latticed windows and a vine. It stands in a garden so pretty, so full of narrow paths disappearing round corners, that I longed far more to be shown where they led to than to be shown the inside of the church. Several times I said things that ought to have resulted in my being taken along them, but the parson heeded not; his talk was and remained wholly church. A friendly dog lay among croquet hoops on the lawn, a pleasant, silent dog, who wagged his tail when I came round the corner and saw no reason why he should bark and sniff. No one else was to be seen. The house was so quiet it seemed asleep while I waited in the parlour. The parson took me down a little path to the church, talking amiably on the way. He was proud, he said, of his church, very proud on week-days; on Sundays so few people came to the services that his pride was quenched by the aspect of the empty seats. A bell began to toll as we reached the door. In answer to my inquiring look he said it was the Gebetglocke, the prayer-bell, and was rung three times a day, at eight, and twelve, and four, so that the scattered inhabitants of the lonely country-side, the sower in the field, the housewife among her pots, the fisherman on the Bodden, or over there, in quiet weather, on the sea, might hear it and join together spiritually at those hours in a common prayer. ‘And do they?’ I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and murmured of hopes.
It is the quaintest church. The vaulted chancel is the oldest part, and there is an altarpiece put there by the Swedish Field-Marshal Wrangel, who in the seventeenth century lived in a turreted Schloss near by that I had seen from the hills. A closed-in seat high up on the side of the chancel was where he sat; it has latticed windows and curiously-painted panels, with his arms in the middle panel and those of Prince Putbus, to whom the Schloss now belongs, on either side. The parson took me up into the gallery and showed me a picture of John the Baptist’s head, just off, with Herodias trying to pull out its tongue. I said I thought it nasty, and he told me it had been moved up there because the lady downstairs over whose head it used to hang was made ill by it every Sunday. Had the parishioners up in the gallery thicker skins, I asked? But there was no question of skins, because the congregation never overflowed into the galleries. There is another picture up there, the Supper at Emmaus, with the Scripture account written underneath in Latin. The parson read this aloud, and his eyes, otherwise so mild, woke into gleams of enthusiasm. It sounded very dignified and compressed to ears accustomed to Luther’s lengthy rendering of the same thing. I remarked how beautiful it was, and with a pleased smile he at once read it again, and then translated it into Greek, lingering lovingly over each of the beautiful words. I sat listening in the cool of the dusty little gallery, gazing out at the summer fields and the glistening water of the Bodden through the open door. His gentle voice made a soft droning in the emptiness. A swallow came in and skimmed about anxiously, trying to get out again.
‘The painted pulpit was also given by Wrangel,’ said the parson, as we went downstairs.
‘He seems to have given a great deal.’
‘He needed to, to make good all his sins,’ he replied with a smile. ‘Many were the sins he committed.’
I smiled too. Posterity in the shape of the parishioners of Bobbin have been direct gainers by Wrangel’s sins.
‘Good, you see, comes out of evil,’ I observed.
He shook his head.
‘Well, painted pulpits do then,’ I amended; for who that is in his senses would contradict a parson?
I gave a last glance at the quaint pulpit across which a shaft of coloured sunlight lay, inquired if I might make an offering for the poor of Bobbin, made it, thanked my amiable guide, and was accompanied by him out into the heat that danced among the tombstones down to the carriage. To the last he was mild and kind, tucking the Holland cover round me with the same solicitude that he might have shown in a January snowstorm.
Glowe, my destination, is not far from Bobbin. On the way we passed the Schloss with the four towers where the wicked Wrangel committed all those sins that presently crystallised into a painted pulpit. The Schloss, called the Spyker Schloss, is let to a farmer. We met him riding home, to his coffee, I suppose, it being now nearly five, and I caught a glimpse of a beautiful old garden with ancient pyramids of box, many flowers, broad alleys, and an aggressively new baby in a perambulator beneath the trees, rending the holy quiet of the afternoon with its shrieks. They pursued us quite a long way along the bald high road that brought us after another mile to Glowe.
Glowe is a handful of houses built between the high road and the sea. There is nothing on the other side of the road but a great green plain stretching to the Bodden. We stopped at the first inn we came to — it was almost the first house — a meek, ugly little place, with the following severe advice to tourists hanging up in the entrance: —
Sag was Du willst kurz und bestimmt.
Lass alle schöne Phrasen fehlen;
Wer nutzlos unsere Zeit uns nimmt
Bestiehlt uns — und Du sollst nicht stehlen.
Accordingly I was very short with the landlord when he appeared, left out most of my articles, all of my adjectives, clipped my remarks of weaknesses such as please and thank you, and became at last ferociously monosyllabic in my effort to give satisfaction. My room was quite nice, with two windows looking across the plain. Cows were tethered on it almost to where the Bodden glittered in the sun, and it was scattered over with great pale patches of clover. On the left was the Spyker Schloss, with the spire of Bobbin church behind it. Far away in front, blue with distance but still there, rose as usual the round tower of the ubiquitous Jagdschloss. I leaned out into the sunshine, and the air was full of the freshness of the pines I had seen from the heights, and the freshness of the invisible sea. Some one downstairs was playing sadly on a cello, tunes that reeked of Weltschmerz, and overhead the larks shrilled an exquisite derision.
I thought I would combine luncheon, tea, and dinner in one meal, and so have done with food for the day, so I said to the landlord, still careful to be kurz und bestimmt: ‘Bring food.’ I left it to him to decide what food, and he brought me fried eels and asparagus first, sausages with cranberries second, and coffee with gooseberry jam last. It was odd and indigestible, but quite clean. Afterwards I went down to the shore through an ear-wiggy, stuffy little garden at the back, where mosquitoes hummed round the heads of silent bath-guests sitting statuesquely in tiny arbours, and flies buzzed about me in a cloud. On the shore the fishermen’s children were wading about and playing in the parental smacks. The sea looked so clear that I thought it would be lovely to have yet another bathe; so I sent a boy to call Gertrud, and set out along the beach to the very distant and solitary bathing-house. It was clean and convenient, but there were more local children playing in it, darting in and out of the dusky cells like bats. No one was in charge, and rows of towels and clothes hung up on hooks only asking to be used. Gertrud brought my things and I got in. The water seemed desperately cold and stinging, colder far than the water at Stubbenkammer that morning, almost intolerably cold; but perhaps it only seemed so because of the eels and cranberries that had come too. The children were deeply interested, and presently undressed and followed me in, one girl bathing only in her pinafore. They were very kind to me, showed me the least stony places, encouraged me when I shivered, and made a tremendous noise, — I concluded for my benefit, because after every outburst they paused and looked at me with modest pride. When I got out they got out too and insisted on helping Gertrud wring out my things. I distributed pfennings among them when I was dressed, and they clung to me closer than ever after that, escorting me in a body back to the inn, and hardly were they to be persuaded to leave me at the door.
That evening was one of profound peace. I sat at my bedroom window, my body and soul in a perfect harmony of content. My body had been so much bathed and walked about all day that it was incapable of intruding its shadow on the light of the soul, and remained entirely quiescent, pleased to be left quiet and forgotten in an easy-chair. The light of my soul, feeble as it had been since Thiessow, burned that night clear and steady, for once more I was alone and could breathe and think and rejoice over the serenity of the next few days that lay before me like a fair landscape in the sun. And when I had come to the end of the island and my drive I would go home and devote ardent weeks to bringing Charlotte and the Professor together again. If necessary I would even ask her to come and stay with me, so much stirred was I by the desire to do good. Match-making is not a work I have cared about since one that I made with infinite enthusiasm resulted a few months later in reproaches of a bitter nature being heaped on my head by the persons matched; but surely to help reunite two noble souls, one of which is eager to be reunited and the other only does not know what it really wants, is a blessed work? Anyhow the contemplation of it made me glow.
After the sun had dropped behind the black line of pines on the right the plain seemed to wrap itself in peace. The road beneath my window was quite quiet except for the occasional clatter past of a child in wooden shoes. Of all the places I had stayed at in Rügen this place was the most countrified and innocent. Idly I sat there, enjoying the soft dampness of the clover-laden air, counting how many stars I could see in the pale sky, watching the women who had been milking the cows far away across the plain come out of the dusk towards me carrying their frothing pails. It must have been quite late, for the plain had risen up in front of my window like a great black wall, when I heard a rattle of wheels on the high road in the direction of Bobbin. At first very faint it grew rapidly louder. ‘What a time to come along this lonely road,’ I thought; and wondered how it would be farther along where the blackness of the pines began. But the cart pulled up immediately beneath my window, and leaning out I saw the light from the inn door stream on to a green hat that I knew, and familiar shoulders draped in waterproof clothing.
‘Why, what in the world — —’ I exclaimed.
The Professor looked up quickly. ‘Lot left Sassnitz by steamer this morning,’ he cried in English and in great jubilation. ‘She took a ticket for Arkona. I received full information in Sassnitz, and started at once. This horned cattle of a coachman, however, will drive me no farther. I therefore appeal to thee to take me on in thy carriage.’
‘What, never to-night?’
‘To-night? Certainly to-night. Who knows where she will go to-morrow?’
‘But Arkona is miles away — we should never get there — it would kill the horses’ ——
‘Tut, tut, tut,’ was all the answer I got, ejected with a terrific impatience; and much accompanying clinking of money made it evident that the person described as horned cattle was being paid.
I turned and stared at Gertrud, who had been arrested by this conversation in the act of arranging my bed, with a stare of horror. Then in a flash I saw which was the one safe place, and I flung myself all dressed into the bed. ‘Go down, Gertrud,’ I said, pulling the bedclothes up to my chin, ‘and say what you like to the Professor. Tell him I am in bed and nothing will get me out of it. Tell him I’ll drive him to-morrow to any place on earth. Yes — tell him that. Tell him I promise, I promise faithfully, to see him through. Go on, and lock me in.’ For I heard a great clamour on the stairs, and who knows what an agitated wise man may not do, and afterwards pretend he was in an abstraction?
But I had definitely pledged myself to a course of active meddling.
THE NINTH DAY
FROM GLOWE TO WIEK
The landlord was concerned, Gertrud told me, when he heard we were going to drive to Arkona at an hour in the morning known practically only to birds. Professor Nieberlein, after fuming long and audibly in the passage downstairs, had sent her up with a request, made in his hearing, that the carriage might be at the door for that purpose at four o’clock.
‘At that hour there is no door,’ said the landlord.
‘Tut, tut,’ said the Professor.
The landlord raised his hands and described the length and sandiness of the way.
‘Three o’clock, then,’ was all the Professor said to that, calling after Gertrud.
‘Oh, oh!’ was my eloquent exclamation when she came in and told me; and I pulled the bedclothes up still higher, as though seeking protection in them from the blows of Fate.
‘It is possible August may oversleep himself,’ suggested Gertrud, seeing my speechless objection to starting for anywhere at three o’clock.
‘So it is; I think it very likely,’ I said, emerging from the bedclothes to speak earnestly. ‘Till six o’clock, I should think he would sleep — at least till six; should not you, Gertrud?’
‘It is very probable,’ said Gertrud; and went away to give the order.
August did. He slept so heavily that eight o’clock found the Professor and myself still at Glowe, breakfasting at a little table in the road before the house on flounders and hot gooseberry jam. The Professor was much calmer, quite composed in fact, and liked the flounders, which he said were as fresh as young love. He had been very tired after his long day and the previous sleepless night, and when he found I was immovable he too had gone to bed and overslept himself Immediately on seeing him in the morning I told him what I felt sure was true — that Charlotte, knowing I would come to Arkona in the course of my drive round the coast, had gone on there to wait for me. ‘So there is really no hurry,’ I added.
‘Hurry? certainly not,’ he said, gay and reasonable after his good night. ‘We will enjoy the present, little cousin, and the admirable flounders.’ And he told me the story of the boastful man who had vaunted the loftiness of his rooms to a man poorer than himself except in wit; and the poorer man, weary of this talk of ceilings, was goaded at last to relate how in his own house the rooms were so low that the only things he could ever have for meals were flounders; and though I had heard the story before I took care to exhibit a decent mirth in the p
roper place, ending by laughing with all my heart only to see how the Professor laughed and wiped his eyes.
It was a close day of sunless heat. The sky was an intolerable grey glare. There was no wind, and the flies buzzed in swarms about the horses’ heads as we drove along the straight white road between the pines towards Arkona. Gertrud was once more relegated to a cart, but she did not look nearly so grim as before; she obviously preferred the Professor to his wife, which was a lapse from the normal discretion of her manners, Gertruds not being supposed to have preferences, and certainly none that are obvious.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 313
