Chapter 8: The Jagdschloss

She was asleep next morning when I looked into her bedroom, so I shut the door softly, and charging Gertrud not to disturb her, went out for a walk. It was not quite eight and people had not got away from their coffee yet, so I had it to myself, the walk along the shore beneath the beeches, beside the flashing morning sea. The path runs along for a little close to the water at the foot of the steep beech-grown hill that shuts the west winds out of Binz—a hill steep enough and high enough to make him pant grievously who goes up it after dinner; then on the right comes a deep narrow cutting running up into the woods, cut, it seems, entirely out of smoothest, greenest moss, so completely are its sides covered with it. Standing midway up this cutting in the soft gloom of its green walls, with the branches of the beeches meeting far away above, and down at the bottom the sheet of shining water, I found absolutely the most silent bit of the world I have ever been in. The silence was wonderful. There seemed positively to be no sound at all. No sound came down from the beech leaves, and yet they were stirring; no sound came up from the water, not a ripple, not a splash; I heard no birds while I stood there, nor any hum of insects. It might have been the entrance to some holy place, so strange and solemn was the quiet; and looking from out of its shadows to the brightness shining at the upper end where the sun was flooding the bracken with happy morning radiance, I felt suddenly that my walk had ceased to be a common thing, and that I was going up into the temple of God to pray.

I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the soul by the trying to do one’s duty or the patient enduring of having somebody else’s duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them wonder at the meanness of the day just past, at the worthlessness of the things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than a little while alone at night with the stars. What are perfunctory bedroom prayers hurried through in an atmosphere of blankets, to this deep abasement of the spirit before the majesty of heaven? And as a consecration of what should be yet one more happy day, of what value are those hasty morning devotions, disturbed by fears lest the coffee should be getting cold and that person, present in every household, whose property is always to reprove, be more than usually provoked, compared to going out into the freshness of the new day and thanking God deliberately under His own wide sky for having been so good to us? I know that when I had done my open-air Te Deum up there in the sun-flooded space among the shimmering bracken I went on my way with a lightheartedness never mine after indoor religious exercises. The forest was so gay that morning, so sparkling, so full of busy, happy creatures, it would have been a sorry heart that did not feel jolly in such society. In that all-pervading wholesomeness there was no room for repentance, no place for conscience-stricken beating of the breast; and indeed I think we waste a terrible amount of time repenting. The healthy attitude, the only reasonable one towards a fault made or a sin committed is surely a vigorous shake of one’s moral shoulders, vigorous enough to shake it off and out of remembrance. The sin itself was a sad waste of time and happiness, and absolutely no more should be wasted in lugubriously reflecting on it. Shall we, poor human beings at such a disadvantage from the first in the fight with Fate through the many weaknesses and ailments of our bodies, load our souls as well with an ever-growing burden of regret and penitence? Shall we let a weight of vivid memories break our hearts? How are we to get on with our living if we are continually dropping into sloughs of bitter and often unjust self-reproach? Every morning comes the light, and a fresh chance of doing better. Is it not the sheerest folly and ingratitude to let yesterday spoil the God-given to-day?

There had been a heavy dew, and the moss along the wayside was soaked with it, and the leaves of the slender young beeches sparkled with it, and the bracken bending over the path on either side left its wetness on my dress as I passed. Nowhere was there a single bit of gloom where you could sit down and be wretched. The very jays would have laughed you out of countenance if you had sat there looking sorrowful. Sometimes the path was narrow, and the trees shut out the sky; sometimes it led me into the hot sunshine of an open, forest-fringed space; once it took me along the side of a meadow sloping up on its distant side to more forest, with only a single row of great beeches between me and the heat and light dancing over the grass; and all the way I had squirrels for company, chattering and enjoying themselves as sensible squirrels living only in the present do; and larks over my head singing in careless ecstasy just because they had no idea they were probably bad larks with pasts; and lizards, down at my feet, motionless in the hot sun, quite unaware of how wicked it becomes to lie in the sun doing nothing directly you wear clothes and have consciences. As for the scent of the forest, he who has been in it early after a dewy night knows that, and the effect it has on the spirits of him who smells it; so I need not explain how happy I was and how invigorated as I climbed up a long hill where the wood was thick and cool, and coming out at the top found I had reached a place of turf and sunshine, with tables in the shade at the farther side, and in the middle, coffee-pot in hand, a waiter.

This waiter came as a shock. My thoughts had wandered quite into the opposite channel to the one that ends in waiters. There he stood, however, solitary and suggestive, in the middle of the sunny green, a crumpled waiter in regard to shirt-front, and not a waiter, I should say, of more than bi-weekly washings; but his eye was persuasive, steam came out of the spout of his coffee-pot, and out of his mouth as I walked towards him issued appropriate words about the weather. I had meant to go back to breakfast with Charlotte, and there was no reason at all why I should cross the green and walk straight up to the waiter; but there was that in his eye which made me feel that if I did not drink his coffee not only had I no business on the top of the hill but I was unspeakably base besides. So I sat down at one of the tables beneath the beeches—there were at least twelve tables, and only one other visitor, a man in spectacles—and the waiter produced a tablecloth that made me shiver, and poured me out a cup of coffee and brought me a roll of immense resistance—one of yesterday’s, I imagined, the roll cart from Binz not having had time yet to get up the hill. He fetched this roll from a pretty house with latticed windows standing on the side of the green, and he fixed me with his hungry eye and told me the house was an inn, and that it was not only ready but anxious to take me as a lodger for any period I might choose. I excused myself on the plea of its distance from the water. He said that precisely this distance was its charm. ‘The lady,’ he continued, with a wave of his coffee-pot that immediately caused a thin streak of steam to rise from the grass—’the lady can see for herself how idyllic is the situation.’

The lady murmured assent; and in order to avoid his hungry eye busied herself dividing her roll among some expectant fowls who, plainly used to the business, were crowding round her; so that the roll’s staleness, perhaps intentional, ended by being entirely to the good of the inn.

By the time the fowls were ready for more the waiter, who had nothing pressing on hand, had become a nuisance too great to be borne. I would have liked to sit there and rest in the shade, watching the clouds slowly appear above the tree-tops opposite and sail over my head and out of sight, but I could not because of the waiter. So I paid him, got up, once more firmly declined either to take or look at rooms at the inn, and wished him a good morning instinct with dignity and chill.