The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. Elizabeth von ArnimЧитать онлайн книгу.
is covered with coarse grass and stones and little shells. Clumps of wild fruit trees scattered about it here and there look as if they knew what roughing it is like. The sea washes over it in winter when the wind is strong from the east, and among the trees are frequent skeletons, dead fruit trees these many seasons past, with the tortured look peculiar to blasted trees, menacing the sky with gaunt, impotent arms. After struggling along this bit, stopping every few minutes to shake the shells out of my shoes, I came to uneven ground, soft green grass, and beautiful trees—a truly lovely part at the foot of the southern hill. Here I sat down for a moment to take the last shells out of my shoes and to drink things in. I had not seen a soul since the bathing girls, and supposed that most of the people staying at the inn would not care on hot afternoons to walk over the prickly grass and shells that must be walked over before reaching the green coolness of the end. And while I was comfortably supposing this and shaking my shoe slowly up and down and thinking how delightful it was to have the charming place to myself, I saw a young man standing on a rock under the east cliff of the hill in the very act of photographing the curving strip of land, with the sea each side of it, and myself in the middle.
Now I am not of those who like being photographed much and often. At intervals that grow longer I go through the process at the instant prayers of my nearest and dearest; but never other than deliberately, after due choice of fitting attitude and garments. The kodak and the instantaneous photograph taken before one has had time to arrange one's smile are things to be regarded with abhorrence by every woman whose faith in her attractions is not unshakeable. Movements so graceful that the Early Victorians would have described them as swan-like—those Early Victorians who wore ringlets, curled their upper lips, had marble brows, and were called Georgiana—movements, I say, originally swan-like in grace, are translated by the irreverent snap-shot into a caricature that to the photographed appears not even remotely like, and fills the photographed's friends with an awful secret joy. 'What manner of young man is this?' I asked myself, examining him with indignation. He stood on the rock a moment, looking about as if for another good subject, and finally his eye alighted on me. Then he got off his rock and came towards me. 'What manner of young man is this?' I again asked myself, putting on my shoe in haste and wrath. He was coming to apologise, I supposed, having secured his photograph.
He was. I sat gazing severely at Thiessow, There is no running away from vain words or from anything else on an island. He was a tall young man, and there was something indefinable and reassuring about his collar.
'I am so sorry,' he said with great politeness. 'I did not notice you. Of course I did not intend to photograph you. I shall destroy the film.'
At this I felt hurt. Being photographed without permission is bad, but being told your photograph is not wanted and will be destroyed is worse. He was a very personable young man, and I like personable young men; from the way he spoke German and from his collar I judged him English, and I like Englishmen; and he had addressed me as gnädiges Fräulein, and what mother of a growing family does not like that?
'I did not see you,' I said, not without blandness, touched by his youth and innocence, 'or I should have got out of your way.'
'I shall destroy the film,' he again assured me; and lifted his cap and went back to the rocks.
Now if I stayed where I was he could not photograph the strip again, for it was so narrow that I would have been again included, and he was evidently bent on getting a picture of it, and fidgeted about among the rocks waiting for me to go. So I went; and as I climbed up the south hill under the trees I mused on the pleasant slow manners of Englishmen, who talk and move as though life were very spacious and time may as well wait. Also I wondered how he had found this remote island. I was inclined to wonder that I had found it myself; but how much more did I wonder that he had found it.
There are many rabbit-holes under the trees at the south end of Vilm, and I disturbed no fewer than three snakes one after the other in the long grass. They were of the harmless kind, but each in turn made me jump and shiver, and after the third I had had enough, and clambered down the cliff on the west side and went along at the foot of it towards the farthest point of the island, with the innocent intention of seeing what was round the corner. The young man was round the corner, and I walked straight into another photograph; I heard the camera snap at the very instant that I turned the bend.
This time he looked at me with something of a grave inquiry in his eye.
'I assure you I do not want to be photographed,' I said hastily.
'I hope you believe that I did not intend to do it again,' he replied.
'I am very sorry,' said I.
'I shall destroy the film,' said he.
'It seems a great waste of films,' said I.
The young man lifted his cap; I continued my way among the rocks eastward; he went steadily in the opposite direction; round the other side of the hill we met again.
'Oh,' I cried, genuinely disturbed, 'have I spoilt another?'
The young man smiled—certainly a very personable young man—and explained that the light was no longer strong enough to do any more. Again in this explanation did he call me gnädiges Fräulein, and again was I touched by so much innocence. And his German, too, was touching; it was so conscientiously grammatical, so laboriously put together, so like pieces of Goethe learned by heart.
By this time the sun hung low over the houses of Putbus, and the strip of sand with its coarse grass and weatherbeaten trees was turned by the golden flush into a fairy bridge, spanning a mystic sea, joining two wonderful, shining islands. We walked along with all the radiance in our faces. It is, as I have observed, impossible to get away from any one on an island that is small enough. We were both going back to the inn, and the strip of land is narrow. Therefore we went together, and what that young man talked about the whole way in the most ponderous German was the Absolute.
I can't think what I have done that I should be talked to for twenty minutes by a nice young man who mistook me for a Fräulein about the Absolute. He evidently thought—the innocence of him!—that being German I must, whatever my sex and the shape of my head, be interested. I don't know how it began. It was certainly not my fault, for till that day I had had no definite attitude in regard to it. Of course I did not tell him that. Age has at least made me artful. A real Fräulein would have looked as vacant as she felt, and have said, 'What is the Absolute?' Being a matron and artful, I simply looked thoughtful—quite an easy thing to do—and said, 'How do you define it?'
He said he defined it as a negation of the conceivable. Continuing in my artfulness I said that there was much to be said for that view of it, and asked how he had reached his conclusions. He explained elaborately. Clearly he took me to be an intelligent Fräulein, and indeed I gave myself great pains to look like one.
It appeared that he had a vast admiration for everything German, and especially for German erudition. Well, we are very erudite in places. Unfortunately no erudition comes up my way.
My acquaintances do not ask the erudite to dinner, one of the reasons, as insufficient as the rest, being that they either wear day clothes in the evening, or, if worldly enough to dress, mar the effect by white satin ties with horse-shoe pins in them; and another is that they are Liberals, and therefore uninvitable. When the unknown youth, passing naturally from Kant and the older philosophers to the great Germans now living, enthusiastically mentioned the leading lights in science and art and asked if I knew them or had ever seen them—the mere seeing of them he seemed to think would be a privilege—I could only murmur no. How impossible to explain to this scion of an unprejudiced race the limitless objection of the class called Junker—I am a female Junker—to mix on equal terms with the class that wears white satin ties in the evening. But it is obvious that a man who can speak with the tongue of angels, who has put his seal on his century, and who will be remembered when we have returned, forgotten, to the Prussian dust from which we came—or rather not forgotten because we were at no time remembered, but simply ignored—it is obvious that such a man may wear what tie he pleases when he comes to dine, and still ought to be received on metaphorical knees of reverence and gratitude. Probably, however, if we who live in the country and think no end of ourselves did invite such a one, and whether there were hostesses on knees waiting for