High Germany.
The sun was shining brightly when Mr Noon awoke in his bedroom in the ancient and beer-brewing city of Munich, capital of Bavaria, queen of the lovely southern lands of Germany. Does not the Marienkirche lift her twin brown cupolas capped with green copper over roofs and palaces and look pleasantly round her this morning? For behold, the snow is melting, and is piled in heaps in the thawing streets. Behold, the sun is shining, and the time of the singing of the birds has almost come. Behold, the long, watchful line of the ice-pale Alps stands like a row of angels with flaming swords in the distance, barring us from the paradise of the South. Behold the land of the thawing snow stretches northward and westward to the lakes like chrysoprase this morning, and the foothills of more Alps, and the rolling plains of Germany, and the islands of the west. Yes, the islands of the west, meaning the British Isles. We will say Islands of the Blest, if you wish it, gentle reader.
Well then, here you are and the rolling plains of Germany, and the islands of the Blest. Yes, the islands of the Blest, meaning the British Isles. Now you’ve got it.
After which I hope I can say what I like. For if that sop doesn’t sweeten Cerberus, I hope it’ll choke him.
No, I’m not going to tell you how Mr Noon got out of the Eakrast bedroom; I am not. Eat the sop I’ve given you, and don’t ask for more till I’ve got up the steep incline of the next page and have declined like a diminished traveller over the brow of the third.
You’ll not hear another word about Emmie. In fact there is no Emmie. I saw someone coming down the street when I was in Woodhouse last Christmas, and I thought I knew her walk. She was in a pale-coloured fur coat and a cap of black-seal-fur, and she had a little girl by the hand, a little girl clad in a white curly-woolly coat and white woollen gaiters. “Dear me,” thought I, “what a lot of gentry crops up in Woodhouse nowadays.”
So I crossed the road, beaming becomingly.
“Why how are you E”
But the child raised its round blue eyes, and I saw a chorister hovering.
“Mrs Whiffen,” I concluded.
“Quite well thanks. How are you?”
How brisk, how sharp, how rapped out, how coined in the mint of the realm! If the head of King George had been embossed on every one of her words, as it is on pennies, it could not have given a sounder ring of respectability and genuine currency. I felt like a man who is caught trying to change a bad shilling, and hurriedly fished a few half-pence of well-worn small-talk out of my purse, and rushed the risky shilling back to cover. I wouldn’t have pronounced the name Emmie, not for worlds, in the presence of that fur coat and infant.
There! I said you wouldn’t hear another word about Emmie, and you haven’t. If I have mentioned Mrs Whiffen, as she sauntered down Knarborough Road in a pale-coloured fur coat and a black seal-coney cap, leading a little woolly-curly, gaitered girl by the hand, I have done so designedly, to prevent your thinking, gentle reader, that I have no presentable acquaintances at all.
And Mr Noon! You have heard that he awoke in his bedroom in the ancient, royal, and beer-brewing city of Munich. Well, and what by that? Is there anything wrong with it? I expect you are waiting for me to continue that the bedroom was a room in a brothel: or in a third-rate and shady hotel: or in a garret, or in a messy artistic-bohemian house where a lot of lousy painters and students worked their abominations. Oh, I know you, gentle reader. In your silent way you would like to browbeat me into it. But I’ve kicked over the traces at last, and I shall kick out the splashboard of this apple-cart if I have any more expectations to put up with.
Mr Noon awoke in none of these places. He awoke in a very nice bedroom with a parquet floor and very nice Biedermeier furniture of golden-coloured satin-wood or something of that sort, with a couple of handsome dark-red-and-dark-blue oriental rugs lying on the lustrous amber polish of the parquet floor. He awoke with his nose trying to emerge over the white cumulous cloud of his swollen but downy overbolster. He awoke with the sun coming through the double windows, with a handful of gentian looking very blue on his round Biedermeier table, and a servant in a dark-red cotton dress entering with a cup of eight-o’clock tea. He sat up quite comfortably in bed to take his tea, and said Guten Morgen to Julie. I say he sat up comfortably because the air in the room was dulcet and warm, for the house had central heating.
Now, gentle reader, I had better give you time to readjust yourself. You had better go upstairs and change your dress and above all, your house shoes. You had better tell the maid to light the drawing-room fire, or light it yourself if there is nothing else for it. In the Isles of the Blest every house has its drawing-room, and the drawing-room fire is always lighted to receive company.
“Let your light so shine—”
And while you are changing your dress let me explain that we stand upon another footing now. Not that we have lost a leg in Badajos’s breaches, but that we have gone up a peg or two. Man is mercurial, and goes up and down in the social scale like a barometer in the weather. This I hope you will allow, gentle reader, even if you be at the moment perched high upon Mount Batten, or on that Windsorial eminence which you share with nothing but soap.
What is man, his days are as grass. Though he rise today above the vulgar democratic leaves of grass as high as a towering stalk of fools-parsley, tomorrow the scythe of the mower will leave him as low as the dandelion. What is a social status nowadays? The wind passeth over it and it is gone, though the place thereof may see it again next summer, even the crown of the cow-parsnip soaring above the herd of green.
While you are changing your dress, gentle reader, don’t get in a stew because you have never heard of Biedermeier or because you don’t know what Bavaria is doing in connection with such a disreputable land as Germany. Bavaria can’t help it, and Biedermeier doesn’t matter. We can’t all be born in the Isles of the Blest; only a few of us fortunate ones: Te Deum laudamus.
Let me re-introduce you, by your leave, to Mr Noon. Kindly forget that it ever rhymed with spoon. In German a spoon is a Loffel, and Noon is now. It isn’t my fault that Noon is Now in German — but so it is. So pray cast out of your mind that spoon association, and be prepared for the reincarnation of Mr Now. Noon is Now. That is, he is at his zenith, and you, gentle reader, may even belong to the afternoon.
“Gentle reader, may I introduce you — Mr Noon.”
Bow, gentle reader, bow across space to Munich, ancient capital of ancient kings, known to the British youth on the beautiful postage-stamps. Beautiful postage-stamps of Bavaria, Bayern so beautifully lettered, do they now stamp black ink words of obliteration across you? Ah well, they didn’t in Mr Noon’s day. And therefore, gentle reader, be on your best behaviour at once, for the ancient and royal court is only just round the corner, and who knows what Kammerjunker or what Lady in Waiting may be casting a supercilious eye over your manners.
“The Herr Professor is already there,” said the maidservant, tapping and entering once more as Mr Noon tied his bow tie: the identical tie he had tied for Patty and for Emmie.
“Right,” said Mr Noon.
And in another moment he was striding across the amber flooring of the hall, to the breakfast room.
“Ha! There you are. Julie! Julie!” sang the Herr Professor, covering his fretful impatience with a certain jocularity. He was a smallish man with white hair and big white moustache and little white imperial and very blue eyes and a face not very old. In fact he was just over fifty, and restless and fidgetty. He had spent ten years in England, so spoke English well, if in the rather hard-breathing, German fashion. How Gilbert came to be living in his flat I shan’t tell you. I am sick of these explanations. Sufficient that the Herr Professor was called Alfred Kramer, and that he held a chair in the university.
He had brought various little English fads with him to Munich, and one of these was Quaker Oats. Julie appeared with the plates of Quaker Oats, and the two men sat down opposite one another. The professor — we will call him Alfred and so spite all titled Germany — seemed to be pondering. He tucked his napkin under his chin and ate his porridge without saying a word. Catching sight of a spot on the linen tablecloth, he poked it with a carefully-manicured finger-nail, like a child. His eyes had a petulant look.
Gilbert, who was not to be outmatched in a game of silence, contented himself with his own thoughts. He half-divined the petulance and fussiness of his host, and therefore withheld his attention. Though he lived with the professor house-free, he gave certain valuable assistance with a book his host was providing, and felt he earned his salt. He knew that Alfred at the bottom was glad of his presence. For the fretful, petulant professor was one of those Germans who find the presence of an Englishman soothing and reassuring, seem to derive a certain stability from it. And therefore Gilbert took no notice of moods, and Alfred was careful not to be really offensive.
He was a sensitive soul, really, the fussy, rather woe-begone looking little man. And he was by nature liberal. But, in spite of his moderate riches and his position, he felt himself at some sort of disadvantage before the world, and so was often irritable and tiresome.
This was one of his mornings of tiresomeness. Gilbert had a faculty of abstraction or of vacancy, whichever you like, which made him the most feasible companion to such a man. He said nothing, but dreamed, or mused, or abstracted, whichever it was, and took his egg in its little silver cup, and helped himself to honey, and handed his cup to the professor without further thought. And if Alfred in his spirit was mortified because Gilbert’s cup came too soon, and took a bigger proportion of the coffee than the little man liked, and if his sense of proprietorship writhed to see his guest make so free in the matter of honey, still, the host with his little imperial under his thickish mouth managed to expend all his exasperation inside himself, which was a relief, really. It was a relief that the small brimstone fires of his irritable meannesses set nobody else’s corn-ricks alight. He begrudged the unearning Englishman his bigger share of coffee, and he almost wanted to snatch the honey dish off the table. Yet all the time he knew so well that such irritability and such small meanness and grudging were beneath him, beneath his intellectual temper if not his housekeeping one, that he only bounced on his chair and spied out the spots or flaws in the fine linen cloth, or the scratches on the silver. So did the poor professor keep the smallness of the flesh in check by the greatness of the restraining mind. He told himself quite plainly that if his guest ate a pot of honey every morning — which he didn’t — what were the odds to a man with an income of two-hundred-thousand marks. No odds at all. And yet, poor Alfred, he twitched on his chair at every spoonful after the third, and the mongrel dogs of the flesh almost jerked the leash out of the controlling hand of the mind.
But not quite. Which was always a great cause of self-satisfaction to poor Alfred. He was pettyfogging in his blood, and he knew it. So he admired Gilbert’s sang froid with the honey more even than he hated it; for in the mind, at least, the little professor was a free soul, even if he had never found a von. In the mind he was superior, and he knew that it behoved him to be superior somewhere, he, with his queasy spirit. If he had given way to his own littlenesses, then he would have condemned himself to the society of natures as little as his own. Which, to a man of his squeamishness and intellectual intelligence, would have been a worse mortification than death itself. So he put up with the pin-pricks of his stingy flesh, for fear of the sword-thrust in his freer spirit. Almost he loved Gilbert for administering the pin-pricks with so cool and unconscious a hand. He loved his own little whippings, for he knew they were good for him. Perhaps if he lived to be a hundred he would be able to sit sunnily in his chair while the guest scraped the dish and licked the honey-spoon. Perhaps he would even tell Julie to put a new pot on the table. Who knows the ductibility of human forbearance.
In one direction, however, poor Alfred’s idealistic forbearance had been drawn out too fine, almost to breaking point. It is curious how much easier it is to be idealistic over big things than over little: how much easier it is to give a hundred pounds for the Home for the One-legged, than to see a guest take ten spoonfuls of honey: how much easier it is to die a heroic death than to get over one’s foibles.
How thin Alfred’s idealism had stretched his human sensibility at one point, and that the most important, the following conversations will show.
“Na!” said the professor suddenly, breaking the spell. “What are you going to do today?”
The day was Sunday, when everybody must do something.
“Nothing in particular,” said Gilbert. He had a few acquaintances with whom he might talk his head off, in the Court Brewery or the Hahn Cafe. Or he could go to Pinakotheks or Glyptotheks or to music. All remained to be seen.
“I am going to work,” said the professor crossly.
“You don’t want me, do you?” said Gilbert.
“No — no. No — no. I have something prepared in my mind—” the professor emphasised this word in a fine resonant voice, and put his finger-tip to his fine forehead, as if the something prepared was a rare old cup of tea for the universe. But alas, the professor was only nervously joking. Though he worked and fussed and wrote and theorised and popped up hither and thither like some unexpected rabbit in the warren of learning and theory, it was all artificial to him. He was missing something. He was missing something. What was it? It was life. He was missing life, with his books and his theory and papers. The mental part of him was overstrained and ennuyé, and yet what was he to do. He was damned to theorise.
For sure he had a drop too much of Jewish blood in his veins, and so we must not take him as typical of the sound and all-too-serious German professors for whom the word is God, though the Word is not with God, but with them, the professors thereof.
Alfred — we can’t help saying poor Alfred — boomed out the Word with the best of them. And since he was a very shrewd little person, with generation after generation of Rabbinical training behind him, he could lick the usual German professor with his left hand, at intellectualising. And he knew it. Hence the boom of his voice:
“I’m going to work.”
But Gilbert belonged to his private life, and so he did not mind letting Gilbert hear the half-jocular frisky boom, he did not mind revealing to his young acquaintance that he was going to let himself off in a whoop of self-importance, and that he knew it.
So off he trotted to his study, after having informed Julie that he was working, and that niemand and nichts, nothing and nobody should disturb him. For the Word was with him that morning.
Once in his study the frisky jocularity and importance fell from him. Out of his depression he had worked it all up, for Gilbert’s sake. The whoop would not come off. Alas, he felt dry and anxious. Books, books, books! Blotting paper, and paper, and gold pen. The neat and spotless and roomy writing desk, the date calendar, the nibs, the reference books, the god-knows-what of a rich learned man in his study. Ach Gott, there it all was, and he was missing something.
Alfred looked at it all, and the little tense pleat came childishly between his forehead. He sighed, and said: “Ach!
Ach jeh! Wo ist ?” And he fiddled among the pens and among the papers, though he had lost nothing and was looking for nothing. His nervous anticipation of authorship was all a fraud. Now he was in the study he seemed to have shrunk, to have gone littler: for he was little to start with. A great nervous weight was upon him. Books, paper, pens, ink. Books! walls and bastions, buttresses and gables of books!
Imagine it, for a white-haired little man of fifty-three, who has booked it all his life, and who has moreover twenty-three Rabbinical ancestors in a straight line behind him! For a little man who suddenly imagines Life to be something and the Word a mere bauble in the hands of buffoons like himself. Finds himself strangely anxious, books showering down on his head like the ruins of Carthage, while all the time he wants life, life, whatever life may be. Finds himself anxious — to be with young people, to share their existence, their youth.
He sighed again and dipped his pen, seated himself like a little boy in his chair, and drew his paper to him. He arranged it, he squared it, he settled it in the centre of his blotting paper with the nicest precision, touching it along the edges with his nervous, fussy fingertips. That was life. To take a sheet of paper, to arrange it, to settle it, to open the ink-pot, to put the sealing-wax in its right place — all that was life. But to write, to put down words! Alas, to the poor professor this was anti-life itself, the most foolish of papery illusions. That Life with a big L was also an illusion of his, he had not yet realised.
So he fidgetted and sighed and scribbled a dozen words in his bad handwriting and reached for a reference book and it wasn’t there because it never was there but on the fourth shelf of the B block and so he frowned and felt he might get in a temper with Julie and he got up and hunted for the book and found it where he knew it was and busily rattled the leaves over looking for his reference: found it, and hastily scribbled it down on his paper. And that was the only bit of his morning’s work which he enjoyed.
He was scribbling a few more irritable words when he heard a step in the hall. Yes! And the clink of a walking-stick being taken from the hall-stand. Ach! — the unbearable — there was Gilbert going out: going out to the morning, and to life.
“Gilbert! Gil — bert!” he sang, in his resonant, musical voice. And he listened, his blue eyes round and childish and vaguely desperate. We must mention that he was the youngest child of elderly parents.
He was just starting out of his chair when he heard Gilbert’s step on the polished parquet floor, so he settled himself and poised his pen, like a man torn between two desires. The serious thought-line was adjusted in his brows.
“Ach Gilbert, weiss’ du — ?” he began in his breathless, anxious German. Then he changed to English. He liked flourishing his English. “Ach, I can’t find the second volume of Ammermeister’s Theorie des Unbewussten. It ought to be on the second shelf. Do you know where it is?”
Gilbert was dressed for out-doors, overcoat and stick and hat on his head. Life — life!
He strolled to the second shelf of the D block and produced the book.
“Oh yes! How silly of me. Thank you. Thank you!” — and then the anxious-theoretic-author voice changed to one more flippant: “Where are you going?”
“A walk.”
“Where will you go?”
“Just a stroll.”
“In the country — or in Munich?”
“Oh, I shan’t go out into the country. Isn’t there too much snow?”
“We-ell!” the professor pursed his lips. “For young and adventurous persons like me—” he boomed jocularly— “there is not too much. I tell you, I like it. I like these days when the snow is melting, and you have patches, patches of the world coming through. I like it. I like the sun, even when it makes me feel my rheumatism. Ah, when we get old, we like even our Schmerzen — Well? Don’t we? You are young still. Only wait — only wait. — But seriously, I like these days among the best of the year. The snow is going, going, the sun is come, come, and gentian and the pink flowers are on the patches. Ah—” — and here he looked through the double windows at the trees of the Ludwigshohe as they stood bare-twigged in the sunshine— “I am tempted. I am tempted. What do you say? What do you say to my lazy and unworthy suggestion? My lazy and unworthy suggestion! What?”
“I’ve not heard it,” said Gilbert.
“No, you haven’t,” said the professor. “But you shall. What do you say if we go into the country and look at my little piece of land where I am going to build my little wooden house, my dog-kennel I shall call it. I shall call it the dog-kennel. I shall call it Vow-Wow. Vow-wow-wow!” and the professor rubbed his hands and imitated a dog barking. Then he glanced again brightly at Gilbert.
“What? What do you say? Shall we run away from work—” boom that word as he did— “and go and look at my house? Yes? Shall we?”
“I should like to,” said Gilbert decidedly.
“Yes, you would! Then we will go. We will go and look at the land for my little Vow-Wow—” He fell into a sort of students’ chant as he jumped from his chair and pressed the bell for Julie.
“But now then, when is there a train?”
He darted his nose into a time-table.
“Sonntag — Sonntag — Sonntag — Isartalbahn — Isartalbahn — Ommerhausen — Ommerhausen — Yes, we have it — halbneun — a quarter to eleven — a quarter to eleven — Sundays — yes. Will that do? Yes? Will it?” he looked up excitedly at Gilbert.
“Just right,” said Gilbert.
“Yes.”
Enter Julie. The professor countermanded dinner, and ordered boots and wraps.
“We will run away from work like two bad boys—” boom the word boys— “and we will look at the seat for my little Vow-Wow. Seat you say? — or site? Site of course. And we’ll be Off to Philadelphia in the mo-orning.” Chant the last words all out of tune.
They set off, the professor in knee-breeches and cloak, Gilbert in mountain-boots and English leather gaiters. Alfred was as happy as a school-boy. He rattled away in English as they sat in the little train running down the Isar valley. They travelled third class, in those wooden carriages where one can see the heads of one’s fellow-travellers in the other compartments. Students were there with guitars and little accordions, there were snatches of song. Soldiers in Bavarian blue leaned out of the carriage windows in spite of the cold air, and with frost-reddened faces watched the landscape and shouted in Bavarian dialect the length of the carriage.
The train ran comfortably beside the high-road, whose snow was melted, or lay in mounds at the road-side. Students in groups were strolling down the road, between the high, wind-tired pear trees and apple trees. Men from the mountains, in short leathern trousers and bare knees, like footballers, short little embroidered jackets, and a chamois-tail in their green hats, jumped on the train at the station. There was a sparkle and crackle of energy everywhere on the sunny Sunday morning after the winter.
And Gilbert loved it: he loved the snow-ruddy men from the Alp foot-hills, so hardy-seeming, with their hard, handsome knees like Highlanders, and their large blue eyes, and their curiously handsome plastique, form and mould. He loved the peasant women trudging along the road from church, in their full blue dresses and dark silk aprons and funny cup-and-saucer black hats. They all stood to look at the little train, which rattled along beside the road, unfenced and unhampered, as tram-cars run in England, and everybody made jokes to them or about them.
Alfred and Gilbert got down at Ommerhausen and quickly left the muddy village. The peasants, pious catholics, were coming from mass, from the church which reared high its white neck, capped by a small, black, Byzantine-looking cupola. The churches are so characteristic that the sight of one will send the whole violent nostalgia of the Bavarian highlands into the heart even of a stranger. So Gilbert, in the midst of Bavaria, was seized with the strange passion for the place. He went with Alfred across the levels, where the snow lay only in pieces here and there: over the rushing little streams, towards the nestling village of Genbach, whose white farms with their great roofs and low balconies clustered round the toy-looking church. It was a tiny village — not more than a dozen houses on the slope of a hill, near the edge of the forest.
The sun was hot. Alfred had taken off his cloak and slung it through his little knapsack. Gilbert did the same with his overcoat — and took off his cap and stuffed it in his pocket. Then the two men turned round to survey the world.
The great Isar valley lay beneath them in the spring morning, the pale, icy green river winding its way from the far Alps, coming as it were down the long stairs of the far foothills, between shoals of pinkish sand, a wide, pale river-bed coming from far off, with the river twisting from side to side between the dark pine-woods. The mountains, a long rank, were bright in heaven, glittering their snow under the horizon. Villages with the white-and-black churches lay in the valley and on the opposite hill-slope. It was a lovely, ringing, morning-bright world, for the Englishman vast and glamorous. The sense of space was an intoxication for him. He felt he could walk without stopping on to the far north-eastern magic of Russia, or south to Italy. All the big, spreading glamour of mediaeval Europe seemed to envelop him.
“Na! Isn’t it beautiful?” said the professor.
“Beautiful,” said Gilbert.
The bigness: that was what he loved so much. The bigness, and the sense of an infinite multiplicity of connections. There seemed to run gleams and shadows from the vast spaces of Russia, a yellow light seemed to struggle through the great Alp-knot from Italy, magical Italy, while from the north, from the massive lands of Germany, and from far-off Scandinavia one could feel a whiteness, a northern, sub-arctic whiteness. Many magical lands, many magical peoples, all magnetic and strange, uniting to form the vast patchwork of Europe. The glamorous vast multiplicity, all made up of differences, mediaeval, romantic differences, this seemed to break his soul like a chrysalis into a new life.
For the first time he saw England from the outside: tiny she seemed, and tight, and so partial. Such a little bit among all the vast rest. Whereas till now she had seemed all-in-all in herself. Now he knew it was not so. Her all-in-allness was a delusion of her natives. Her marvellous truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal. They were just a piece of local pattern, in what was really a vast, complicated, far-reaching design.
So he watched the glitter of the range of Alps towards the Tyrol: he saw the pale-green Isar climbing down her curved levels, coming towards him, making for Munich and then Austria, the Danube, the enormous meanderings of the Danube. He saw the white road, which seemed to him to lead to Russia. And he became unEnglished. His tight and exclusive nationality seemed to break down in his heart. He loved the world in its multiplicity, not in its horrible oneness, uniformity, homogeneity. He loved the rich and free variegation of Europe, the manyness. His old obtuseness, which saw everything alike, in one term, fell from his eyes and from his soul, and he felt rich. There were so many, many lands and peoples besides himself and his own land. And all were magically different, and it was so nice to be one among many, to feel the horrible imprisoning oneness and insularity collapsed, a real delusion broken, and to know that the universal ideals and morals were after all only local and temporal.
Gilbert smoked his pipe, and pondered. He seemed to feel a new salt running vital in his veins, a new, free vibration in all his nerves, like a bird that has got out of a cage, and even out of the room wherein the cage hung.
He trudged with the professor up a slope to a brow of the hill. And there, in an angle of the forest, was Alfred’s new bit of land. It faced the south-west, looked right across the wide valley to the hills and the high peaks in heaven. Behind, on two sides, was forest of fir and great beech-trees. A snug place with a great scoop of the world in front.
“You know,” said the professor, as they paraded round the split-wood fence, “I have one hobby, and that is houses. My brother has the same. I have a house in Gottingen and a house in Maulberg and a house on the Starnbergersee. Now I am going to have my little Vow-Wow. And I shall have it here.”
They walked through a tuft of snow to a spot on the brow of the slope.
“Here!” said Alfred. “What do you think?”
Gilbert stood and looked out at the snow peaks that bounded the far horizon, one looking over the other’s shoulder in the remote sky. And as he looked he seemed rooted to the spot.
“Yes,” he said. “Build it here.”
“You know,” said Alfred, “it is a model I saw at the exhibition — a little model wooden house. I have signed the contract, and everything will be complete by June, and it will cost ten thousand Marks. It is not cheap, but not so very dear. Hein? And it will be my little Vow-Wow.”
“But what will you do with it?” asked Gilbert.
“What shall I do with it? I shall use it for a summer-house for myself, and the children will stay with me, and my wife — and it will be very nice. What? Don’t you think? Eh?”
“Yes,” said Gilbert. “I do.”
“And if you like you can stay here too.”
“I wish I may.”
“You wish you may — Well, you shall. In June: in June all will be ready. I shall give you a room of your own.”
Gilbert had spied sparks of blue in the steep bank facing the sun, just below where he was standing. He went down and saw, for the first time in his life, blue gentian flowers open after the snow. They were low in the rough grass on the bank, and so blue, again his heart seemed to break one of its limits, and take a larger swing. So blue, so much more than heaven blue: blue from the whiteness of snow and the intensity of ice. He touched the perfect petals with his finger.
“The first gentian! Yes?” said Alfred, coming jerkily down and picking a few buds. “I must take them to show Marianne.”
Gilbert heard a noise. He looked up. A deer was running across the little clearing. It must have leaped from out of the fir-trees over the split-wood fence. Now it ran swiftly, on slender legs, straight to the fence on the beech side of the forest. It put its head back, and with the swift, frail feet ran along the side of the fence, seeking a way out. It started as Gilbert rose, twitching with alarm, and turning on its light haunches, ran quickly, almost without weight, back along the fence. It was puzzled finding no exit.
“Na, a Rehbock!” said Alfred. “You see, it must have jumped over the fence. There! I thought the fence was high enough. But the children will like it. Won’t they, don’t you think?”
Gilbert was watching the animal, the delicate white marking of the rump, on which the tail lay in a pattern; the flatness of the haunches, the beautiful softness of the ruddy fleece. The little stag swerved, became frightened at the continual obstacle, turned, and came running forward again.
“Shall I open the gate for him and let him out?” said Alfred, going forward.
The deer was now terrified. It laid back its head and bounded by the fence. In a sudden gust of terror it sprang like the wind at the fence, showing its whitish belly, lifting its little feet clear, and alighting with a jerk like a puff of wind in the free forest, where it galloped away through the great beech-trunks, scarcely visible over the beech-leaves patched with snow. It was gone like a bit of magic, and Gilbert felt himself possessed.
The two men went back into the village to the inn, where they sat at the bare wooden benches and ate boiled pork and sauerkraut and good black bread and mountain butter and a delicious ring of cake, and drank beer, while the peasants and farmers and foresters smoked big pipes and talked, and were festive.
After dinner they rose again.
“Now we will walk to the Starnberg lake and see my wife and my mother-in-law. Yes? Shall we do so? Can you walk so far?”
“How far?”
“Oh, about eight miles, eight miles. But in the wood there will be snow.”
So they set off. In the wood, as Alfred said, there was snow. Going between the great beech-trees, some of which lay prostrate, there were only patches of snow. But on the paths between the great, dry trunks of the firs there was deep snow still, heavy walking. The fir-woods were dark and vast, impenetrable, and frightening. Gilbert thought of the old Hercynian forest, and did not wonder at the Roman terror. For in the dark and bristly fir-trees, in their vast crowded ranks, the dimness and the subtly crackling silence, there was something as it were of anti-life, wolvish, magical.
Both men were tired by the time they came to the top of the last hill and looked down on the long, pale lake of Starnberg. They wound down past one of the royal castles, or villas, and waited on the little landing-stage for the steamer which was to take them to their destination. The afternoon was fading towards evening, lights were beginning to twinkle by the pleasure-lake, the cafes were already lighted up, and Alfred and Gilbert were growing cold and tired by the time they had their place on the steamer. They were going only two stations down, to pay a visit to Alfred’s mother-in-law.
It was dusk by the time they arrived and rang the bell.
“Ho Marta!” cried the professor to the maid who opened to him, a handsome girl. “Is the Baroness at home? Is anybody here?”
“Yes, Herr Professor. The Frau Professor and the Herr Professor Sartorius.”
“Ach, are they also here? Ach — so! All right. All right. We will go up. Are they taking tea? So! So. We have just come right. Two more cups. Ach! Ach! We are rather tired. We have come on foot from Ommerhausen. Yes, I will take off my shoes. I will take off my shoes. Ach! Ach!” and the professor seated himself wearily and a little stiffly in a chair in the hall, while the maid, who had taken his hat and cloak and knapsack and stick, now hurried away for shoes. “Ach! If I don’t have my rheumatism tomorrow!” The professor spoke in English now, and put his hand on his hip. “I fear it! I fear it! Oh!” and he gave a twinge with his face. “Ach, Marta, my rheumatism!” he lamented as the girl came back with patent-leather shoes. So she kneeled to unfasten his thick shoes. She was a dark, lovely girl with thick black eyebrows and a plait of black hair going right round her well-shaped head. She wore a peasant-dress of mid-blue colour with sprigged roses, close fitting at the breast, full skirted, and a fine white apron, bibless. She quickly drew off the professor’s heavy boots, hurried away with them, and came back with a pair of heelless pantoffles.
“Shoes there are no more,” she said, dangling the pantoffles. She had a rich, mantling colour under her dark skin, and that curious fecund virginity of a mountain-catholic peasant.
“Ach! Ach! Only pantoffeln! Well — what do you say?” and the professor turned boisterously to Gilbert, changing into English. “It is a choice of evils. Which do you choose? Boots or slippers with no heels? Hein? Say the word, say the word.”
For once Gilbert was embarrassed. Marta was looking at him, and dangling the Japanese slippers. She had beautiful large grey eyes, slow and steady. He was rather carried away by her. Her brightish blue dress with the rose-sprigs was so telling. He looked at the professor, who, rigged out in neat patent-leather shoes, was rather pleased with his advantage.
“Well, what do you say? Say the word! Say the word!” sang the little professor in his resonant voice, his tired pale-blue eyes looking jocular.
At that juncture they heard a door open upstairs, and looking up, saw a woman in a dull-green silk dress leaning over the rails.
“Ach, is it you, Alfred!” she said, in an odd, cultured voice, half familiar, half excited.
“Ho Louise! Ho, you are there,” sang the little professor.
“Ja! Ja! We didn’t expect you.”
“I didn’t expect myself — ha-ha. Nor did I expect you. Ludwig is also there? Yes. Ha! Well! How is everybody? Thou? The children.”
Louise was coming down the stairs, slowly. She was a very beautiful woman, with rich, pomegranate colouring and a beautifully chiselled face. Her soft dark-brown hair hung rather loose over her ears, coiled in a simple knot behind. She wore a long, beautiful scarf, frail and full of dull glimmers of greens and black and dead white. She was one of the women who naturally have a long scarf draping the shoulders, a look of wearing a robe rather than a modern dress.
“Ja — all well. You too? Good!” and Louise reached the bottom stair. She was looking at Gilbert. He had no more eyes for Marta, now Louise had come. The beauty of the mistress, rich in colour as that of the maid, had a lovely, pure, soft-cut form,- outdazzling the more oxen charm of the peasant girl. Louise knew her power.
“Mr Noon,” said Alfred in English. “You have never met my wife. Well, she is here. Louise, you know of Mr Noon, I told you of him in my letter to Dresden.”
“How do you do?” said Louise, in slow, but very charming English, giving her hand to Gilbert, and narrowing her beautiful grey eyes in an odd way of scrutiny she had. “And so you come all the way on foot? — Oh, my English, it is very bad, but you will forgive me. — Well then, come and have some tea. And bread and butter. Yes, I know you Englishmen, you want bread and butter with your tea. Come then.”
She turned to Marta, and saw the straw slippers.
“Aber — ! But what are you doing with the pantoffles, Marta?” she laughed mockingly.
“The gentleman will change his boots,” said the grave-eyed peasant girl.
“Ah — yes! Yes!” said Louise, looking at Gilbert’s wet and muddy boots.
“I’m not fit to come up either way,” said Gilbert.
“Not fit? Oh yes. Take the pantoffles. Oh, what does it matter? Yes, take them. We are simple people here. — Yes Marta,” she added in German— “take the gentleman’s boots.”
And Marta kneeled beautifully at Gilbert’s feet. He blushed to his ears, and Louise saw it.
“No — no,” he said in his German. “I will do it.”
“Oh let her! let her!” cried Louise. “What does it matter? She is used.”
And so Gilbert sat confused whilst the beautiful, still peasant girl unfastened his thick boots and pulled them off. He pushed his feet into the straw slippers.
“And now come,” said Louise. “More cups, Marta, and some bread-and-butter — do you know?”
Gilbert paddled up in the heelless sandals, and felt a rare fool. He found himself in a long, yellow-amber-coloured room. A handsome white-haired lady with an arched nose rose from her chair and looked at Gilbert under her white, raised eyebrows, whilst she addressed Alfred in German, in a rather high voice.
“Oh yea, Alfred, and hast thou come all the way on foot, thou young fellow, thou! Hast thou no respect for thy white moustaches and little beard? Ach, the man, he runs across the land like a ferret.”
With which she turned to Gilbert. She was rather stout and handsome, in a black silk dress with a jabot of Venetian point, flaky, old lace.
“How do you do,” she sang, in slow, high-pitched English, on a note of lament. “And must we speak English? No — it is too difficolt — I can it no more. You will speak Gairman. — Come, my son-in-law has brought you through the country in the weather. Oh yea! Sit down please.”
But there was a third occupant of the room — Professor Ludwig Sartorius, from Bonn. He was a middle-aged man with a dark-brown beard streaked with grey, a bald forehead, and little, nervous, irascible dark eyes. He was well dressed in the English manner, in grey, carefully tailored and booted: and he wore a handsome tie of an orange colour. Evidently something of a gallant: but of the irascible sort. He shook hands with Gilbert, and seated himself abruptly, only getting out the usual “How do you do,” pronounced very German.
The party now settled themselves. The Baroness was at the tea-table, lighting the spirit under the silver kettle. Professor Sartorius sprang up to do it for her, as if a gun had gone off, and fumbled wildly in his well-flattened pockets for matches.
“Oh sit still, sit still, Professor Sartorius,” said the Baroness, striking her matches calmly. “I am old enough to light my own tea-kettle, at my age—” And she peered with shrewd, rather screwed-up blue eyes at the spirit-flame. It was evident there was no love lost between her and the gallant professor. He sat down looking crosser than ever, whilst poor little Alfred, with his pink face and white hair, shone like a daisy.
“Ah, Ludwig,” said the Frau Professor, “tell Alfred about Wendolf.”
The younger professor turned and began in German in a rather snarling voice. The Frau Professor — we will call her Louise, because she is Alfred’s wife, and it is shorter — settled her skirts and turned her low chair towards Gilbert. The softened light fell from behind her, and threw a shadow from her soft dark hair and her long dark lashes, upon her cheek. Marta came in with a tray, and Gilbert again turned fascinated to the full, dark, motionless face of the girl, with its unspeaking closed lips and meeting dark brows, as she stooped with the tray full under the rim of the lamp which stood on the tea-table. Mediaeval, remote, and impressive her face seemed, banded above with the black plait of hair.
Louise, sunk in her low chair, her dark-green dress with its pale, metallic lustre falling rather full round her feet, shaded her brow with her hand and watched Gilbert’s face. It looked to her young, and alert, and self-possessed, with its narrow, fine brows, and full dark-blue eyes, and pouting mouth. She watched him closely.
“You look at the maid,” she said in a mocking voice. “Is she not beautiful?”
Gilbert had been vaguely watching, not criticising, so it was in a hadn’t-thought-of-it tone he answered:
“Yes, I think she is.”
“Quite a beautiful type. She is a peasant from the mountains, and she is in love with a young forester, and she will soon marry him. She has been with me since she was almost a child, and we lo-ove her.”
Gilbert turned to Louise. She spoke the word lo-ove as if it were difficult to say, dragging it out and breaking the vowel. And she was looking up at him from under her shading hand, half-laughing, half-wistful, her grey eyes with their dark light looking soft and vulnerable. She was really very beautiful. The warmth of her colouring and the softness of her hair seemed to give her a warm, almost winsome glow. Odd, the half-laughing winsomeness, with a touch of irony and a touch of pathos. Gilbert watched her with round eyes.
“Is this your house then?” asked Gilbert.
“No, it is Mama’s. And Marta is lent. My house is at Maulberg, and my children. Today I have come to see Mama, and so I meet you. — Well — I shall be very banal, and ask you if you like Munich. Yes, you do? Oh, I am glad. Yes, I like it as much as any town in Germany, though I like Dresden almost as much. And you get on with your work? — Oh, I am glad. Yes, I am sure you will do well at Munich for a year, then I think you must go to Gottingen. Yes, Gottingen will be better for you in a year.”
“I must find some way of earning money,” said Gilbert.
“Ach, money. Do not bother, it will come.”
“What makes you know?” laughed Gilbert.
“Ah—” and she made an odd gesture of reckless indifference— “it always comes in these days. — And when you have your doctorate, you will write? — yes? You will write, and go to England to be a professor?”
“I don’t know,” said Gilbert. “What should I write — unless I try music?”
“Music! But music! But music is not pure mathematics, nor applied mathematics.” She laughed in a quick, girlish way, ironical too. “You will write music for England? — Well do! do! — And what will you write? An opera to begin with, I am sure.”
“No,” said Gilbert.
“Oh, you are joking! Everyone who writes music writes an opera in the first place. When he is an old man perhaps he will try to write just a song to sell to the music-hall, and so make money. Yes? Isn’t it so?”
“I don’t know,” said Gilbert.
“Perhaps you will begin with writing a song for the music-hall, out of your mathematics? Yes? Do you think? ‘Just like the ivy on the old garden wa-all.’ So!”
“No,” laughed Gilbert. “I’ll do the opera in preference.”
“Ach yes! And then the ivy. I must sing English songs in French, and then I know they are funny. Before this I am troubled, you know. But I like the ivy —
‘Et comme le lierre Je vous grimperai—”’
“Ha-ha-ha!” rattled out Professor Sartorius, and he said in German: “That is a famous song, Louise, ‘Et comme le lierre je vous grimperai.’” He tried to put some tune to it, but was tuneless. So he rattled with laughter, and added: “But where have you found it?”
“Oh, it is English. But I am so unsure, I feel I may be moved by English, so I must put it in French to be sure.”
“What is the English, what is the English?” cried Alfred, speaking up.
“Mr Noon will sing it to us, yes?”
But Gilbert shook his head.
“Then shall I sing it? You would like? — Ya, Mama, don’t look down your nose at me.
‘Jost like the ivee
On the old garden wa-all
Cling-ging so tightly
What e’er may befall—’
Nein! Nein! I can’t sing any more.”
“What e’er may be — what?” cried Alfred.
“Be-fall!” said Louise, full-sounding.
“Yes — yes. Be-fall.”
“But finish the chorus,” said Gilbert.
“There is no je-vous-grimperai,” said Alfred, professorial.
“Ah, it is later.
‘As you grow older
I’ll be constantly true
And jost like the ivy
I’ll cling to you.’”
The professors burst into laughter.
“Nein!” said the Baroness. “No, it is too stupid. Louise, du Papagei, we are all highly-educated people here, God be praised. Mr Noon — a-nother cup of tea. Yes — Yes.”
“Aren’t German music-hall songs funny?” asked Gilbert.
“Oh yes! Oh yes! But only, you see, the funniness is different. But they are as bad. Oh yes. — You must forgive me for laughing. Only the song was told me in Dresden—” and she began to laugh— “and I thought it was so funny—”
“Yes — yes—” cried the Baroness, knitting her brows and crooking her fingers—”’I’ll cling to you.’”
“Yes, like ivy,” cried Louise, laughing till tears came to her eyes.
“On an old wall, ach yea!” cried the Baroness, also shaking with laughter.
“Constantly true!” cried Louise, suffocated.
“Constantly true!” repeated the Baroness, her fine, mephistophelian white eyebrows going up her forehead in sardonic laughter as her sides shook.
“Constant and true,” said Gilbert.
“Oh — I am wrong — I am wrong. Mama — Constant and true, do you hear,” and after making a mock-solemn face, she again laid her hand on the arm of her chair and sat weak with laughter, while the Baroness rocked behind her tea-table.
The men were more uneasy.
“Really comic,” Ludwig was murmuring in German, looking cross.
“Silly! Silly! They are too silly” said Alfred.
And Gilbert sat and looked with round eyes at the two women.
“Yes, yes,” sighed Louise. “It is too silly “ Then she changed her tone. “But you don’t mind, Mr Noon, if we laugh. Ah, one must laugh sometimes. Does it matter what at?”
“Not a bit,” said Gilbert.
“No, I think not.”
The conversation now lapsed into German, and Gilbert followed with a little difficulty. The big professor theorised on the one hand, the little professor theorised on the other, and they wrangled with a noise like tearing calico, whilst the Baroness sat in impatience, throwing in a curt phrase now and then, and Louise sat in her low chair like a lovely Athena balancing the professorial scales first this way, then that, and seeming passionately interested and looking very beautiful. Gilbert watched with wondering eyes. It all seemed so strange. And why did Louise care whether the immature manuscript of Faust, which the great Goethe had commanded to be burnt and which his tender friend had not burnt, why should anyone care whether the world saw this manuscript or did not see it? Care ethically, at least. Why should this moral debate be raging between the two professors, balanced by the beautiful woman who was all the time stealing from Athena to give to Aphrodite, or stealing from Aphrodite to give to Athena.
Gilbert sat on ignored, and began not to hear. The women were soon sensitive of this.
“Now — enough! Enough!” put in the Baroness. “Goethe should burn his own old papers. And if he didn’t, then let him not mind who scrubs the pans out with them. Let every man burn his own rubbish.”
“No, Mama, it is a genuine question,” said Louise.
“Yes, Mother-in-law,” said the little professor. “My work is my intimate property — etc. etc. etc.” We won’t hear them out, as we agree with the Baroness.
“Oh yea, one can say so much about nothing,” protested the Baroness. “Are you eating here?”
“No,” cried Louise, rising. “We must go.”
“No thank you,” cried Alfred. “We must catch the seven-fifteen train. Louise, how are you going home?”
“We came in a motor-car,” said Louise, whilst Ludwig stood with drawn brows, his little eyes darting from side to side.
A maid was sent to summon the car. Alfred and Gilbert watched Louise drive away with Professor Sartorius. Then they two prepared to catch the train for Munich.
“Ah, the Sartorius,” sang the Baroness in her high, lament-voice, “he talks so much. Alfred, when you come to tea with me please do not climb up from the ivy on the wall to the godlike Goethe. Goethe is so beautiful in himself, but not when he is torn to pieces between you and the Sartorius. Let the sartor stick to his patching, or we will call him snipper and Schneider — Sartorius.”
It was unfortunate that the “ius” of the Bonn professor’s name should always get on the nerves of the Baroness: but so it did.