Chapter 5

Stralsund is an old town of gabled houses, ancient churches, and quaint, roughly paved streets, forming an island, and joined to the mainland by dikes. It looks its best in the early summer, when the green and marshy plains on whose edge it stands are strewn with kingcups, and the little white clouds hang over them almost motionless, and the cattle are out, and the larks sing, and the orange and red sails of the fishing-smacks on the narrow belt of sea that divides the town from the island of Rügen make brilliant points of contrasting colour between the blue of water and sky. There is a divine freshness and brightness about the surrounding stretches of coarse grass and common flowers at that blest season of the year. The air is full of the smell of the sea. The sun beats down fiercely on plain and city. The people come out of the rooms in which most of their life is spent, and stand in the doorways and remark on the heat. An occasional heavy cart bumps over the stones, heard in that sleepy place for several minutes before and after its passing. There is an honest, tarry, fishy smell everywhere; and the traveller of poetic temperament in search of the picturesque, and not too nice about his comforts, could not fail, visiting it for the first time in the month of June, to be wholly delighted that he had come.

But in winter, and especially in those doubly gloomy days at the end of winter, when spring ought to have shown some signs of its approach and has not done so, those days of howling winds and driving rain and frequent belated snowstorms, this plain is merely a bleak expanse of dreariness, with a forlorn old town huddling in its farthest corner.

It was at its very bleakest and dreariest on the morning that Susie and her three companions travelled across it. “What a place!” exclaimed Susie, as mile after mile was traversed, and there was still the same succession of flat ploughed fields, marshes, and ploughed fields again, with a rare group of furiously swaying pine trees or of silver birches bent double before the wind. “What a part of the world to come and live in! That old uncle of yours was as cracked as he could be to think you’d ever stay here for good. And imagine spending even a single shilling buying land here. I wouldn’t take a barrowful at a gift.”

“Well, I am taking a great many barrowfuls,” said Anna, “and I am sure Uncle Joachim was right to buy a place here—he was always right.”

“Oh, of course, it’s your duty now to praise him up. Perhaps it gets better farther on, but I don’t see how anybody can squeeze two thousand a year out of a desert like this.”

The prospect from the railway that day was certainly not attractive; but Anna told herself that any place would look dreary such weather, and was much too happy in the first flush of independence to be depressed by anything whatever. Had she not that very morning given the chambermaid at the Berlin hotel so bounteous a reward for services not rendered that the woman herself had said it was too much? Thus making amends for those innumerable departures from hotels when Susie had escaped without giving anything at all. Had she not also asked, and readily obtained, permission of Susie at the station in Berlin to pay for the tickets of the whole party? And had it not been a delightful and warming feeling, buying those tickets for other people instead of having tickets bought by other people for herself? At Pasewalk, a little town half way between Berlin and Stralsund, where the train stopped ten minutes, she insisted on getting out, defying the sleet and the puddles, and went into the refreshment room, and bought eggs and rolls and cakes, —everything she could find that was least offensive. Also a guidebook to Stralsund, though she was not going to stop in Stralsund; also some postcards with views on them, though she never used postcards with views on them, and came back loaded with parcels, her face glowing with childish pleasure at spending money.

“My dear Anna,” said Susie; but she was hungry, and ate a roll with perfect complacency, allowing Letty to do the same, although only two days had elapsed since she had so energetically lectured her on the grossness of eating in trains.

Susie was in a particularly amiable frame of mind, and in spite of the weather was looking forward to seeing the place Uncle Joachim had thought would be a fit home for his niece; and as she and Anna were sitting together at one end of the carriage, and Letty and Miss Leech were at the other, and there was no one else in the compartment, she was neither upset by the too near contemplation of her daughter, nor by the aspect of other travellers lunching. Miss Leech, always mindful of her duties, was making the most of her five hours’ journey by endeavouring, in a low voice, to clear away the haze that hung in her pupil’s mind round the details of her last winter’s German studies. “Don’t you remember anything of Professor Smith’s lectures, Letty?” she inquired. “Why, they were all about just this part of Germany, and it makes it so much more interesting if one knows what happened at the different places. Stralsund, you know, where we shall be presently, has had a most turbulent and interesting past.”

“Has it?” said Letty. “Well, I can’t help it, Leechy.”

“No; but my dear, you should try to recollect something at least of what you heard at the lectures. Have you forgotten the paper you wrote about Wallenstein?”

“I remember I did a paper. Beastly hard it was, too.”

“Oh, Letty, don’t say beastly—it really isn’t a ladylike word.”

“Why, mamma’s always saying it.”

“Oh, well. Don’t you know what Wallenstein said when he was besieging Stralsund and found it such a difficult task?”

“I suppose he said too that it was beastly hard.”

“Oh, Letty—it was something about chains. Now do you remember?”

“Chains?” repeated Letty, looking bored. “Do you know, Leechy?”

“Yes, I still remember that, though I confess that I have forgotten the greater part of what I heard.”

“Then what do you ask me for, when you know I don’t know? What did he say about chains?”

“He said that he’d take the city, if it were rivetted to heaven with chains of iron,” said Miss Leech dramatically.

“What a goat.”

“Oh, hush—don’t say those horrible words. Where do you learn them? Not from me, certainly not from me,” said Miss Leech, distressed. She had a profound horror of slang, and was bewildered by the way in which these weeds of rhetoric sprang up on all occasions in Letty’s speech.

“Well, and was it?”

“Was it what, my dear?”

“Chained to heaven?”

“The city? Why, how can a city be chained to heaven, Letty?”

“Then what did he say it for?”

“He was using a metaphor.”

“Oh,” said Letty, who did not know what a metaphor was, but supposed it must be something used in sieges, and preferred not to inquire too closely.

“He was obliged to retire,” said Miss Leech, “leaving enormous numbers of slain on the field.”

“Poor beasts. I say, Leechy,” she whispered, “don’t let’s bother about history now. Go on with Mr. Jessup. You’d got to where he called you Amy for the first time.”

Mr. Jessup was the person already alluded to in these pages as the only man Miss Leech had ever loved, and his history was of absorbing interest to Letty, who never tired of hearing his first appearance on Miss Leech’s horizon described, with his subsequent advances before the stage of open courting was reached, the courting itself, and its melancholy end; for Mr. Jessup, a clergyman of the Church of England, with a vicarage all ready to receive his wife, had suddenly become a prey to new convictions, and had gone over to the Church of Rome; whereupon Miss Leech’s father, also a clergyman of the Church of England, had talked a great deal about the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, and had shut the door in Mr. Jessup’s face when next he called to explain. This had happened when Miss Leech was twenty. Now, at thirty, an orphan resigned to the world’s buffets, she found a gentle consolation in repeating the story of her ill-starred engagement to her keenly interested friend and pupil; and the oftener she repeated it the less did it grieve her, till at last she came actually to enjoy the remembrance of it, pleased to have played the principal part even in a drama that was hissed off her little stage, glad to find a sympathetic listener, dwelling much and fondly on every incident of that short period of importance and glory.

It is doubtful whether she would ever have extracted the same amount of pleasure from Mr. Jessup had he remained fixed in the faith of his fathers and married her in due season. By his secession he had unconsciously become a sort of providence to Letty and herself, saving them from endless hours of dulness, furnishing their lonely schoolroom life with romance and mystery; and if in Miss Leech’s mind he gradually took on the sweet intangibility of a pleasant dream, he was the very pith and marrow of Letty’s existence. She glowed and thrilled at the thought that perhaps she too would one day have a Mr. Jessup of her own, who would have convictions, and give up everything, herself included, for what he believed to be right.

As usual, they at once became absorbed in Mr. Jessup, forgetting in the contemplation of his excellencies everything else in the world, till they were roused to realities by their arrival at Stralsund; and Susie, thrusting books and bags and umbrellas into their passive hands, pushed them out of the carriage into the wet.

Hilton, the maid shared by Susie and Anna, had then to be found and urged to clamber down quickly on to the low platform, where she stood helplessly, the picture of injured superiority, hustled by the hurrying porters and passengers, out of whose way she scorned to move, while Anna went to look for the luggage and have it put into the cart that had been sent for it.