



Produced by Laura McDonald (http://www.girlebooks.com) and
Marc D'Hooghe (http:www.freeliterature.org)





THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RUeGEN

BY

THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"


New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.


1904



[Illustration: map of Ruegen]


CONTENTS


THE FIRST DAY--From Miltzow to Lauterbach

THE SECOND DAY--Lauterbach and Vilm

THE THIRD DAY--From Lauterbach to Goehren

THE FOURTH DAY--From Goehren to Thiessow

THE FOURTH DAY (continued)--At Thiessow

THE FIFTH DAY--From Thiessow to Sellin

THE FIFTH DAY (continued)--From Sellin to Binz

THE SIXTH DAY--The Jagdschloss

THE SIXTH DAY (continued)--The Granitz Woods, Schwarze See, and Kiekoewer

THE SEVENTH DAY--From Binz to Stubbenkammer

THE SEVENTH DAY (continued)--At Stubbenkammer

THE EIGHTH DAY--From Stubbenkammer to Glowe

THE NINTH DAY--From Glowe to Wiek

THE TENTH DAY--From Wiek to Hiddensee

THE ELEVENTH DAY--From Wiek Home





THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RUeGEN




THE FIRST DAY

FROM MILTZOW TO LAUTERBACH


Every one who has been to school and still remembers what he was taught
there, knows that Ruegen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and
that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania.

Round this island I wished to walk this summer, but no one would walk
with me. It is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the
life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on
anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a
thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. If you
drive you are bound by a variety of considerations, eight of the most
important being the horses' legs. If you bicycle--but who that loves to
get close to nature would bicycle? And as for motors, the object of a
journey like mine was not the getting to a place but the going there.

Successively did I invite the most likely of my women friends, numbering
at least a dozen, to walk with me. They one and all replied that it
would make them tired and that it would be dull; and when I tried to
remove the first objection by telling them how excellent it would be for
the German nation, especially those portions of it that are still to
come, if its women walked round Ruegen more often, they stared and
smiled; and when I tried to remove the second by explaining that by our
own spirits are we deified, they stared and smiled more than ever.

Walking, then, was out of the question, for I could not walk alone. The
grim monster Conventionality whose iron claws are for ever on my
shoulder, for ever pulling me back from the harmless and the wholesome,
put a stop to that even if I had not been afraid of tramps, which I was.
So I drove, and it was round Ruegen that I drove because one hot
afternoon when I was idling in the library, not reading but fingering
the books, taking out first one and then another, dipping into them,
deciding which I would read next, I came across Marianne North's
_Recollections of a Happy Life_, and hit upon the page where she begins
to talk of Ruegen. Immediately interested--for is not Ruegen nearer to me
than any other island?--I became absorbed in her description of the
bathing near a place called Putbus, of the deliciousness of it in a
sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about
on its crystal surface, and beautiful jelly-fish, stars of purest
colours, floated with you. I threw down the book to ransack the shelves
for a guide to Ruegen. On the first page of the first one I found was
this remarkable paragraph:--

'Hearest thou the name Ruegen, so doth a wondrous spell come over thee.
Before thine eyes it rises as a dream of far-away, beauteous fairylands.
Images and figures of long ago beckon thee across to the marvellous
places where in grey prehistoric times they dwelt, and on which they
have left the shadow of their presence. And in thee stirs a mighty
desire to wander over the glorious, legend-surrounded island. Cord up,
then, thy light bundle, take to heart Shylock's advice to put money in
thy purse, and follow me without fear of the threatening sea-sickness
which may overtake thee on the short crossing, for it has never yet done
any one more harm than imposing on him a rapidly-passing discomfort.'

This seemed to me very irresistible. Surely a place that inspired such a
mingling of the lofty and the homely in its guide-books must be well
worth seeing? There was a drought just then going on at home. My eyes
were hot with watching a garden parch browner day by day beneath a sky
of brass. I felt that it only needed a little energy, and in a few hours
I too might be floating among those jelly-fish, in the shadow of the
cliffs of the legend-surrounded island. And even better than being
surrounded by legends those breathless days would it be to have the sea
all round me. Such a sea too! Did I not know it? Did I not know its
singular limpidity? The divineness of its blue where it was deep, the
clearness of its green where it was shallow, lying tideless along its
amber shores? The very words made me thirsty--amber shores; lazy waves
lapping them slowly; vast spaces for the eye to wander over; rocks, and
seaweed, and cool, gorgeous jelly-fish. The very map at the beginning of
the guide-book made me thirsty, the land was so succulently green, the
sea all round so bland a blue. And what a fascinating island it is on
the map--an island of twists and curves and inland seas called Bodden;
of lakes, and woods, and frequent ferries; with lesser islands dotted
about its coasts; with bays innumerable stretching their arms out into
the water; and with one huge forest, evidently magnificent, running
nearly the whole length of the east coast, following its curves, dipping
down to the sea in places, and in others climbing up chalk cliffs to
crown them with the peculiar splendour of beeches.

It does not take me long to make up my mind, still less to cord up my
light bundle, for somebody else does that; and I think it was only two
days after I first found Marianne North and the guide-book that my maid
Gertrud and I got out of a suffocating train into the freshness that
blows round ryefields near the sea, and began our journey into the
unknown.

It was a little wayside station on the line between Berlin and
Stralsund, called Miltzow, a solitary red building on the edge of a
pine-wood, that witnessed the beginning of our tour. The carriage had
been sent on the day before, and round it, on our arrival, stood the
station authorities in an interested group. The stationmaster,
everywhere in Germany an elaborate, Olympic person in white gloves,
actually helped the porter to cord on my hold-all with his own hands,
and they both lingered over it as if loth to let us go. Evidently the
coachman had told them what I was going to do, and I suppose such an
enterprising woman does not get out at Miltzow every day. They packed us
in with the greatest care, with so much care that I thought they would
never have done. My hold-all was the biggest piece of luggage, and they
corded it on in an upright position at our feet. I had left the choosing
of its contents to Gertrud, only exhorting her, besides my pillow, to
take a sufficiency of soap and dressing-gowns. Gertrud's luggage was
placed by the porter on her lap. It was almost too modest. It was one
small black bag, and a great part of its inside must, I knew, be taken
up by the stockings she had brought to knit and the needles she did it
with; yet she looked quite as respectable the day we came home as she
did the day we started, and every bit as clean. My dressing-case was put
on the box, and on top of it was a brown cardboard hat-box containing
the coachman's wet-weather hat. A thick coat for possible cold days made
a cushion for my back, and Gertrud's waterproof did the same thing for
hers. Wedged in between us was the tea-basket, rattling inharmoniously,
but preventing our slipping together in sloping places. Behind us in the
hood were the umbrellas, rugs, guide-books, and maps, besides one of
those round shiny yellow wooden band-boxes into which every decent
German woman puts her best hat. This luggage, and some mysterious
bundles on the box that the coachman thought were hidden by his legs but
which bulged out unhideable on either side, prevented our looking
elegant; but I did not want to look elegant, and I had gathered from the
remarks of those who had refused to walk that Ruegen was not a place
where I should meet any one who did.

Now I suppose I could talk for a week and yet give no idea whatever of
the exultation that filled my soul as I gazed on these arrangements. The
picnic-like simplicity of them was so full of promise. It was as though
I were going back to the very morning of life, to those fresh years when
shepherd boys and others shout round one for no reason except that they
are out of doors and alive. Also, during the years that have come after,
years that may properly be called riper, it has been a conviction of
mine that there is nothing so absolutely bracing for the soul as the
frequent turning of one's back on duties. This was exactly what I was
doing; and oh ye rigid female martyrs on the rack of daily
exemplariness, ye unquestioning patient followers of paths that have
been pointed out, if only you knew the wholesome joys of sometimes being
less good!

The point at which we were is the nearest from which Ruegen can be
reached by persons coming up from the south and going to drive. No one
ever gets out there who is bound for Ruegen, because no one ever drives
to Ruegen. The ordinary tourist, almost exclusively German, goes first to
Stralsund, is taken across the narrow strip of water, train and all, on
the steam ferry, and continues without changing till he reaches the open
sea on the other side of the island at Sassnitz. Or he goes by train
from Berlin to Stettin and then by steamer down the Oder, crosses the
open sea for four hours, and arrives, probably pensive for the boats are
small and the waves are often big, at Goehren, the first stopping-place
on the island's east coast.

We were not ordinary tourists, and having got to Miltzow were to be
independent of all such wearinesses as trains and steamers till the day
we wanted to come back again. From Miltzow we were going to drive to a
ferry three miles off at a place called Stahlbrode, cross the mile of
water, land on the island's south shore, and go on at once that
afternoon to the jelly-fish of Miss North's Putbus, which were beckoning
me across to the legend-surrounded island far more irresistibly than any
of those grey figures the guide-book talked about.

The carriage was a light one of the victoria genus with a hood; the
horses were a pair esteemed at home for their meekness; the coachman,
August, was a youth who had never yet driven straight on for an
indefinite period without turning round once, and he looked as though he
thought he were going to enjoy himself. I was sure I was going to enjoy
myself. Gertrud, I fancy, was without these illusions; but she is old,
and has got out of the habit of being anything but resigned. She was the
sop on this occasion thrown to the Grim One of the iron claws, for I
would far rather have gone alone. But Gertrud is very silent; to go with
her would be as nearly like being alone as it is possible to be when you
are not. She could, I knew, be trusted to sit by my side knitting,
however bumpy the road, and not opening her lips unless asked a
question. Admirable virtue of silence, most precious, because most rare,
jewel in the crown of female excellences, not possessed by a single one
of those who had refused to walk! If either of them had occupied
Gertrud's place and driven with me would she not, after the way of
women, have spent the first half of the time telling me her secrets and
the other half being angry with me because I knew them? And then
Gertrud, after having kept quiet all day, would burst into activities at
night, unpack the hold-all, produce pleasant things like slippers, see
that my bed was as I like it, and end by tucking me up in it and going
away on tiptoe with her customary quaint benediction, bestowed on me
every night at bedtime: 'The dear God protect and bless the gracious
one,' says Gertrud as she blows out the candle.

'And may He also protect and bless thee,' I reply; and could as ill
spare my pillow as her blessing.

It was half-past two in the afternoon of the middle Friday in July when
we left the station officials to go back to their dull work and trotted
round the corner into the wide world. The sky was a hot blue. The road
wound with gentle ups and downs between fields whitening to harvest.
High over our heads the larks quivered in the light, shaking out that
rapturous song that I can never hear without a throb of gratitude for
being alive. There were no woods or hills, and we could see a long way
on either side, see the red roofs of farms clustered wherever there was
a hollow to protect them from the wild winds of winter, see the straight
double line of trees where the high road to Stralsund cut across ours,
see a little village a mile ahead of us with a venerable church on a
mound in the middle of it gravely presiding over the surrounding wide
parish of corn. I think I must have got out at least six times during
the short drive between Miltzow and the ferry pretending I wanted
flowers, but really to enjoy the delight of loitering. The rye was full
of chickory and poppies, the ditches along the road where the spring
dampness still lingered were white with the delicate loveliness of
cow-parsley, that most spiritual of weeds. I picked an armful of it to
hold up against the blue of the sky while we were driving; I gave
Gertrud a bunch of poppies for which she thanked me without enthusiasm;
I put little posies of chickory at the horses' ears; in fact I felt and
behaved as if I were fifteen and out for my first summer holiday. But
what did it matter? There was nobody there to see.

Stahlbrode is the most innocent-looking place--a small cluster of
cottages on grass that goes down to the water. It was quite empty and
silent. It has a long narrow wooden jetty running across the marshy
shore to the ferry, and moored to the end of this jetty lay a big
fishing-smack with furled brown sails. I got out and walked down to it
to see if it were the ferry-boat, and whether the ferryman was in it.
Both August and the horses had an alarmed, pricked-up expression as they
saw me going out into the jaws of the sea. Even the emotionless Gertrud
put away her stocking and stood by the side of the carriage watching me.
The jetty was roughly put together, and so narrow that the carriage
would only just fit in. A slight wooden rail was all the protection
provided; but the water was not deep, and heaved limpidly over the
yellow sand at the bottom. The shore we were on was flat and vividly
green, the shore of Ruegen opposite was flat and vividly green; the sea
between was a lovely, sparkling blue; the sky was strewn across with
loose clusters of pearly clouds; the breeze that had played so gently
among the ears of corn round Miltzow danced along the little waves and
splashed them gaily against the wooden posts of the jetty as though the
freshness down there on the water had filled it with new life. I found
the boat empty, a thing of steep sides and curved bottom, a thing that
was surely never intended for the ferrying across of horses and
carriages. No other boat was to be seen. Up the channel and down the
channel there was nothing visible but the flat green shores, the dancing
water, the wide sky, the bland afternoon light.

I turned back thoughtfully to the cottages. Suppose the ferry were only
used for ferrying people? If so, we were in an extremely tiresome fix. A
long way back against the sky I could see the line of trees bordering
the road to Stralsund, and the whole dull, dusty distance would have to
be driven over if the Stahlbrode ferry failed us. August took off his
hat when I came up to him, and said ominously, 'Does the gracious one
permit that I speak a few words?'

'Speak them, August.'

'It is very windy.'

'Not very.'

'It is far to go on water.'

'Not very.'

'Never yet have I been on the sea.'

'Well, you are going on it now.'

With an expression made up of two parts fright and one resignation he
put on his hat again and relapsed into a silence that was grim. I took
Gertrud with me to give me a countenance and walked across to the inn, a
new red-brick house standing out boldly on a bit of rising ground, end
ways on to the sea. The door was open and we went in, knocking with my
sunshade on the floor. We stirred up no life of any sort. Not even a dog
barked at us. The passage was wide and clean with doors on each side of
it and an open door at either end--the one we had come in by followed by
the afternoon sun, and the other framing a picture of sky with the sea
at the bottom, the jetty, the smack with folded sails, and the coast of
Ruegen. Seeing a door with _Gaststube_ painted on it I opened it and
peeped in. To my astonishment it was full of men smoking in silence, and
all with their eyes fixed on the opening door. They must have heard us.
They must have seen us passing the window as we came up to the house. I
concluded that the custom of the district requires that strangers shall
in no way be interfered with until they actually ask definite questions;
that it was so became clear by the alacrity with which a yellow-bearded
man jumped up on our asking how we could get across to Ruegen, and told
us he was the ferryman and would take us there.

'But there is a carriage--can that go too?' I inquired anxiously,
thinking of the deep bottom and steep sides of the fishing-smack.

'_Alles, Alles_,' he said cheerily; and calling to a boy to come and
help he led the way through the door framing the sea, down a tiny, sandy
garden prickly with gooseberry bushes, to the place where August sat
marvelling on his box.

'Come along!' he shouted as he ran past him.

'What, along that thing of wood?' cried August. 'With my horses? And my
newly-varnished carriage?'

'Come along!' shouted the ferryman, half-way down the jetty.

'Go on, August,' I commanded.

'It can never be accomplished,' said August, visibly breaking out into a
perspiration.

'Go on,' I repeated sternly; but thought it on the whole more discreet
to go on myself on my own feet, and so did Gertrud.

'If the gracious one insists----' faltered August, and began to drive
gingerly down to the jetty with the face of one who thinks his last hour
well on the way.

As I had feared, the carriage was very nearly smashed getting it over
the sides of the smack. I sat up in the bows looking on in terror,
expecting every instant to see the wheels wrenched off, and with their
wrenching the end of our holiday. The optimistic ferryman assured us
that it was going in quite easily--like a lamb, he declared, with great
boldness of imagery. He sloped two ineffectual planks, one for each set
of wheels, up the side of the boat, and he and August, hatless,
coatless, and breathless, lifted the carriage over on to them. It was a
horrid moment. The front wheels twisted right round and were as near
coming off as any wheels I saw in my life. I was afraid to look at
August, so right did he seem to have been when he protested that the
thing could not be accomplished. Yet there was Ruegen and here were we,
and we had to get across to it somehow or turn round and do the dreary
journey to Stralsund.

The horses, both exceedingly restive, had been unharnessed and got in
first. They were held in the stern of the boat by two boys, who needed
all their determination to do it. Then it was that I was thankful for
the boat's steep sides, for if they had been lower those horses would
certainly have kicked themselves over into the sea; and what should I
have done then? And how should I have faced him who is in authority over
me if I returned to him without his horses?

'We take them across daily,' the ferryman remarked, airily jerking his
thumb in the direction of the carriage.

'Do so many people drive to Ruegen?' I asked astonished, for the plank
arrangements were staringly makeshift.

'Many people?' cried the ferryman. 'Rightly speaking, crowds.'

He was trying to make me happy. At least it reassured August to hear it;
but I could not suppress a smile of deprecation at the size of the fib.

By this time we were under weigh, a fair wind sending us merrily over
the water. The ferryman steered; August stood at his horses' heads
talking to them soothingly; the two boys came and sat on some coiled
ropes close to me, leaned their elbows on their knees and their chins on
their hands, and fixing their blue fisher-boy eyes on my face kept them
there with an unwinking interest during the entire crossing. Oh, it was
lovely sitting up there in the sun, safe so far, in the delicious quiet
of sailing. The tawny sail, darned and patched in divers shades of brown
and red and orange, towered above us against the sky. The huge mast
seemed to brush along across the very surface of the little white
clouds. Above the rippling of the water we could hear the distant larks
on either shore. August had put on his scarlet stable-jacket for the
work of lifting the carriage in, and made a beautiful bit of colour
among the browns of the old boat at the stern. The eyes of the ferryman
lost all the alertness they had had on shore, and he stood at the rudder
gazing dreamily out at the afternoon light on the Ruegen meadows. How
perfect it was after the train, after the clattering along the dusty
road, and the heat and terror of getting on board. For one exquisite
quarter of an hour we were softly lapped across in the sun, and for all
that beauty we were only asked to pay three marks, which included the
horses and carriage and the labour of getting us in and out. For a
further small sum the ferryman became enthusiastic and begged me to be
sure to come back that way. There was a single house on the Ruegen shore
where he lived, he said, and from which he would watch for us. A little
dog came down to welcome us, but we saw no other living creature. The
carriage conducted itself far more like a lamb on this side, and I drove
away well pleased to have got over the chief difficulty of the tour, the
soft-voiced ferryman wishing us Godspeed, and the two boys unwinking to
the last.

So here we were on the legend-surrounded island. 'Hail, thou isle of
fairyland, filled with beckoning figures!' I murmured under my breath,
careful not to appear too unaccountable in Gertrud's eyes. With eager
interest I looked about me, and anything less like fairyland and more
like the coast of Pomerania lately left I have seldom seen. The road, a
continuation of the road on the mainland, was exactly like other roads
that are dull as far as a rambling village three miles farther on called
Garz--persons referring to the map at the beginning of this book will
see with what a melancholy straightness it proceeds to that village--and
after Garz I ceased to care what it was like, for reasons which I will
now set forth.

There was that afternoon in the market-place of Garz, and I know not
why, since it was neither a Sunday nor a holiday, a brass band playing
with a singular sonorousness. The horses having never before been
required to listen to music, their functions at home being solely to
draw me through the solitudes of forests, did not like it. I was
astonished at the vigour of the dislike they showed who were wont to be
so meek. They danced through Garz, pursued by the braying of the
trumpets and the delighted shouts of the crowd, who seemed to bray and
shout the louder the more the horses danced, and I was considering
whether the time had not come for clinging to Gertrud and shutting my
eyes when we turned a corner and got away from the noise on to the
familiar rattle of the hard country road. I gave a sigh of relief and
stretched out my head to see whether it were as straight a bit as the
last. It was quite as straight, and in the distance bearing down on us
was a black speck that swelled at an awful speed into a motor car. Now
the horses had not yet seen a motor car. Their nerves, already shaken by
the brass band, would never stand such a horrid sight I thought, and
prudence urged an immediate getting out and a rushing to their heads.
'Stop, August!' I cried. 'Jump out, Gertrud--there's a dreadful thing
coming--they're sure to bolt----'

August slowed down in apparent obedience to my order, and without
waiting for him to stop entirely, the motor being almost upon us, I
jumped out on one side and Gertrud jumped out on the other. Before I had
time to run to the horses' heads the motor whizzed past. The horses
strange to say hardly cared at all, only mildly shying as August drove
them slowly along without stopping.

'That's all right,' I remarked, greatly relieved, to Gertrud, who still
held her stocking. 'Now we'll get in again.'

But we could not get in again because August did not stop.

'Call to him to stop,' I said to Gertrud, turning aside to pick some
unusually big poppies.

She called, but he did not stop.

'Call louder, Gertrud,' I said impatiently, for we were now a good way
behind.

She called louder, but he did not stop.

Then I called; then she called; then we called together, but he did not
stop. On the contrary, he was driving on now at the usual pace, rattling
noisily over the hard road, getting more and more out of reach.

'Shout, shout, Gertrud!' I cried in a frenzy; but how could any one so
respectable as Gertrud shout? She sent a faint shriek after the
ever-receding August, and when I tried to shout myself I was seized with
such uncontrollable laughter that nothing whatever of the nature of a
noise could be produced.

Meanwhile August was growing very small in the distance. He evidently
did not know we had got out when the motor car appeared, and was under
the pleasing impression that we were sitting behind him being jogged
comfortably towards Putbus. He dwindled and dwindled with a rapidity
distressing to witness. 'Shout, shout,' I gasped, myself contorted with
dreadful laughter, half-wildest mirth and half despair.

She began to trot down the road after him waving her stocking at his
distant back and emitting a series of shrill shrieks, goaded by the
exigencies of the situation.

The last we saw of the carriage was a yellow glint as the sun caught the
shiny surface of my bandbox; immediately afterwards it vanished over the
edge of a far-away dip in the road, and we were alone with Nature.

Gertrud and I stared at each other in speechless dismay. Then she looked
on in silence while I sank on to a milestone and laughed. There was
nothing, her look said, to laugh at, and much to be earnest over in our
tragic predicament, and I knew it but I could not stop. August had had
no instructions as to where he was driving to or where we were going to
put up that night; of Putbus and Marianna North he had never heard. With
the open ordnance map on my lap I had merely called out directions,
since leaving Miltzow, at cross-roads. Therefore in all human
probability he would drive straight on till dark, no doubt in growing
private astonishment at the absence of orders and the length of the way;
then when night came he would, I supposed, want to light his lamps, and
getting down to do so would immediately be frozen with horror at what he
saw, or rather did not see, in the carriage. What he would do after that
I could not conceive. In sheerest despair I laughed till I cried, and
the sight of Gertrud watching me silently from the middle of the
deserted road only made me less able to leave off. Behind us in the
distance, at the end of a vista of _chaussee_ trees, were the houses of
Garz; in front of us, a long way in front of us, rose the red spire of
the church of Casnewitz, a village through which, as I still remembered
from the map now driving along by itself, our road to Putbus lay. Up and
down the whiteness of this road not a living creature, either in a cart
or on its legs, was to be seen. The bald country, here very bald and
desolate, stretched away on either side into nothingness. The wind
sighed about, whisking little puffs of derisive dust into our eyes as it
passed. There was a dreadful absence of anything like sounds.

'No doubt,' said Gertrud, 'August will soon return?'

'He won't,' I said, wiping my eyes; 'he'll go on for ever. He's wound
up. Nothing will stop him.'

'What, then, will the gracious one do?'

'Walk after him, I suppose,' I said, getting up, 'and trust to something
unexpected making him find out he hasn't got us. But I'm afraid nothing
will. Come on, Gertrud,' I continued, feigning briskness while my heart
was as lead, 'it's nearly six already, and the road is long and lonely.'

'_Ach_,' groaned Gertrud, who never walks.

'Perhaps a cart will pass us and give us a lift. If not we'll walk to
that village with the church over there and see if we can get something
on wheels to pursue August with. Come on--I hope your boots are all
right.'

'_Ach_,' groaned Gertrud again, lifting up one foot, as a dog pitifully
lifts up its wounded paw, and showing me a black cashmere boot of the
sort that is soft and pleasant to the feet of servants who are not
required to use them much.

'I'm afraid they're not much good on this hard road,' I said. 'Let us
hope something will catch us up soon.'

'_Ach_,' groaned poor Gertrud, whose feet are very tender.

But nothing did catch us up, and we trudged along in grim silence, the
desire to laugh all gone.

'You must, my dear Gertrud,' I said after a while, seeking to be
cheerful,'regard this in the light of healthful exercise. You and I are
taking a pleasant afternoon walk together in Ruegen.'

Gertrud said nothing; at all