Part 30 (1/2)
Above this malevolent clock was a huge scaffold beam, crossing the entire width of the church, and supporting four huge figures, carved with some skill; the most immodest Adam and Eve I ever beheld; a bishop and a Saint John and a Mary,--these latter kneeling in adoration of a crucifixion above. The whole combination--the guilty Adam and Eve, the pompous bishop, the repulsive crucifixion, the puppet clock with its restless eyes and skeleton, and the loud tick-tock, tick-tock, of the pendulum,--all made up a scene of grotesqueness and irreverence mingled with superst.i.tion and devotion, such as could not be found anywhere except in a German church of the twelfth century. It was a relief to turn from it and go into the little chapel, where stands the altar-piece made sacred as well as famous by the hands of that tender spiritual painter, Memling. These altar-pieces look at first sight so much like decorated wardrobes that it is jarring. I wish they had fas.h.i.+oned them otherwise. In this one, for instance, it is almost a pain to see on the outside doors of what apparently is a cupboard one of Memling's angels (the Gabriel) and the Mary listening to his message. Throwing these doors back, you see life-size figures of four saints,--John, Jerome, Blasius, and aegidius.
The latter is a grand dark figure, with a head and face to haunt one.
Opening these doors again, you come to the last,--a landscape with the crucifixion in the foreground, and other scenes from the Pa.s.sion of the Saviour. This is less distinctively Memling-like; in fact, the only ones of them all which one would be willing to say positively no man's hand but Memling's had touched, are the two tender angels in white on the outside shutters.
We left Lubeck very early in the morning. As we drove to the station, the milkmen and milkwomen were coming in, in their pretty carts, full of white wooden firkins, bra.s.s bound, with queer long spouts out on one side; bra.s.s measures of different sizes, and bra.s.s dippers, all s.h.i.+ning as if they had been fresh scoured that very morning, made the carts a pretty spectacle. And the last thing of all which I stopped to look at in Lubeck was the best of all,--an old house with a turreted bay-window on the corner, and this inscription on the front between the first and second stories of the house:--
”North and south, the world is wide: East and west, home is best.”
It was in Platt Deutsch; and oddly enough, the servant of the house, who was at the door, did not know what it meant; and the first two men we asked did not know what it meant,--stared at it stupidly, shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was a lovely motto for a house, but not a good one for wanderers away from home to look at. It brought a sudden sense of homesickness, like an odor of a flower or a bar of music which has an indissoluble link with home.
It took a whole day to go from Lubeck to Ca.s.sel, but the day did not seem long. It was a series of pictures, and poor Brita's raptures over it all were at once amusing and pathetic. As soon as we began to see elevated ground, she became excited. ”Oh, oh, ma'am,” she exclaimed, ”talk about scenery in Denmark! It is too flat. I am so used to the flat country, the least hill is beautiful.” ”Do you not call this grand?” she would say, at the sight of a hill a hundred or two feet high. It was a good lesson of the meaning of the word _relative_.
After all, one can hardly conceive what it must be to live sixty-four years on a dead level of flatness. A genuine mountain would probably be a terror to a person who had led such a life. Brita's face, when I told her that I lived at the foot of mountains more than twelve times as high as any she had seen, was a study for incredulity and wonder. I think she thought I was lying. It was the hay harvest. All the way from Lubeck to Ca.s.sel were men and women, all hard at work in the fields; the women swung their scythes as well as the men, but looked more graceful while raking. Some wore scarlet handkerchiefs over their heads, some white; all had bare legs well in sight. At noon we saw them in groups on the ground, and towards night walking swiftly along the roads, with their rakes over their shoulders. I do not understand why travellers make such a to-do always about the way women work in the fields in Germany. I am sure they are far less to be pitied than the women who work in narrow, dark, foul streets of cities; and they look a thousand times healthier. Our road lay for many hours through a beautiful farm country: red brick houses and barns with high thatched roofs, three quarters of the whole building being thatched roof; great sweeps of meadow, tracts of soft pines, kingdoms of beeches,--the whole forest looking like a rich yellow brown moss in the distance, and their mottled trunks fairly s.h.i.+ning out in the cross sunbeams, as if painted; wide stretches of brown opens, with worn paths leading off across them; hedges everywhere, and never a fence or a wall; mountain-ash trees, scarlet full; horse-chestnuts by orchards; towns every few minutes, and our train halting at them all long enough for the whole town to make up their minds whether they could go or not, pack their bags, and come on board; bits of marsh, with labyrinths of blue water in and out in it, so like tongues of the sea that, forgetting where I was, I said, ”I wonder if that is fresh water.” ”It must be, ma'am,” replied the observant Brita, ”inasmuch as the white lilies are floating beautiful and large in it.”
”Oh,” she suddenly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, ”how strange it was! Napoleon III. he thought he would get a good bit of this beautiful Germany for a birthday present, and be in Berlin on his birthday; and instead of that the Prussians were in Berlin on his birthday.”
At Luneburg we came into the heather. I thought I knew heather, but I was to discover my mistake. All the heather of my life heretofore--English, Scotch, Norwegian--had been no more than a single sprig by the side of this. ”The dreary Luneburg Heath,” the discriminating Baedeker calls it. The man who wrote that phrase must have been not only color-blind, he must have been color-dead! If a mountain is ”dreary”
when it turns purple pink or pink purple five minutes before the rising sun is going to flash full on its eastern front, then the Luneburg Heath is ”dreary.” Acres of heather, miles of heather; miles after miles, hour after hour, of swift railroad riding, and still heather! The purple and the pink and the browns into which the purple and pink blended and melted, s.h.i.+fted every second, and deepened and paled in the light and the shadow, as if the earth itself were gently undulating. Two or three times, down vistas among the low birches, I saw men up to their knees in the purple, apparently reaping it with a sickle. A German lady in the car explained that they cut it to strew in the sheep-stalls for the sheep to sleep on, and that the sheep ate it: bed, bed-blanket, and breakfast all in one! Who would not be a sheep? Here and there were little pine groves in this heath; the pine and the birch being the only trees which can keep any footing against heather when it sets out to usurp a territory, and even they cannot grow large or freely. Three storks rose from these downs as we pa.s.sed, and flew slowly away, their great yellow feet s.h.i.+ning as if they had on gold slippers.
”The country people reckon it a great blessing, ma'am, if a stork will build its nest on their roof,” said Brita. ”I dare say it is thought so in America the same.” ”No, Brita, we have no storks in America,” I said. ”I dare say some other bird, then, you hold the same,” she replied, in a tone so taking it for granted that no nation of people could be without its sacred domestic bird that I was fain to fall back on the marten as our nearest approach to such a bird; and I said boastfully that we built houses for them in our yards, that they never built on roofs.
At Celle, when she caught sight of the castle where poor Caroline Matilda died, she exclaimed, ”Oh, ma'am, that is where our poor queen died. It was the nasty Queen Dowager did it; it was, indeed, ma'am.
And the king had opened the ball with her that very night that he signed the order to send her away. They took her in her ball-dress, just as she was. If they had waited till morning the Danes would have torn her out of the wagon, for they wors.h.i.+pped her. She screamed for her baby, and they just tossed it to her in the wagon; and she was only twenty.”
Pages of guide-book could not have so emphasized the tragedy of that old gray castle as did Brita's words and her tearful eyes, and ”nasty old Queen Dowager.” I suppose the truth will never be known about that poor young queen; history whiffles round so from century to century that it seems hardly worth while to mind about it. At any rate, it can't matter much to either Caroline or Struensee, her lover, now.
Ca.s.sel at nine o'clock. Friendly faces and voices and hands, and the very air of America in every room. It was like a dream; and like a dream vanished, after twenty-four hours of almost unceasing talk and reminiscence and interchange. ”Blessings brighten,” even more than ”when they take their flight,” when they pause in their flight long enough for us to come up with them and take another look at them.
Ca.s.sel is the healthiest town in all Germany; and when you see it you do not wonder. High and dry and clear, and several hundred feet up above the plain, it has off-looks to wide horizons in all directions.
To the east and south are beautiful curves of high hills, called mountains here; thickly wooded, so that they make solid s.p.a.ces of color, dark green or purple or blue, according to the time calendar of colors of mountains at a distance. (They have their time-tables as fixed as railway trains, and much more to be depended on.) There is no town in Germany which can compare with Ca.s.sel as a home for people wis.h.i.+ng to educate children cheaply and well, and not wis.h.i.+ng to live in the fas.h.i.+ons and ways and close air of cities. It has a picture-gallery second to only one in Germany; it has admirable museums of all sorts; it has a first-rate theatre; good masters in all branches of study are to be had at low rates; living is cheap and comfortable (for Germany). The water is good; the climate also (for Germany); and last, not least, the surrounding country is full of picturesque scenery,--woods, high hills, streams; just such a region as a lover of Nature finds most repaying and enjoyable. In the matter of society, also, Ca.s.sel is especially favored, having taken its tone from the days of the Electors, and keeping still much of the old fine breeding of culture and courtesy.
It is a misfortune to want to go from Ca.s.sel to Munich in one day. It can be done; but it takes fourteen hours of very hard work,--three changes,--an hour's waiting at one place, and half an hour at another, and the road for the last half of the day so rough that it could honestly be compared to nothing except horseback riding over bowlders at a rapid rate. This is from Gemunden to Munich: if there is any other way of getting there, I think n.o.body would go by this; so I infer that there is not. You must set off, also, at the unearthly hour of 5 A.M.,--an hour at which all virtues ooze out of one; even honesty out of cabmen, as I found at Ca.s.sel, when a man to whom I had paid four marks--more than twice the regular fare--for bringing us a five minutes' distance to the railway station, absolutely had the face to ask three marks more. Never did I so long for a command of the German tongue. I only hope that the docile Brita translated for me literally what I said, as I handed him twelve cents more, with, ”I gave one dollar because you had to get up so early in the morning. You know very well that even half that sum is more than the price at ordinary times. I will give you this fifty pfennigs for yourself, and not another pfennig do you get!” I wish that the man that invented the word _pfennig_ had to ”do a pour of it for one tousand year,” as dear old Dr. Prohl said of the teapot that would not pour without spilling.
I think it is the test-word of the German language. The nearest direction I could give for p.r.o.nouncing it would be: fill your mouth with hasty-pudding, then say _purr-f-f-f-f-f_, and then gulp the pudding and choke when you come to the _g_,--that's a _pfennig_; and the idea of such a name as that for a contemptible thing of which it takes one hundred to make a quarter of a dollar! They do them up in big nickel pieces too,--heavy, and so large that in the dark you always mistake them for something else. Ten hundredths of a quarter!--you could starve with your purse loaded down with them.
In the station, trudging about as cheerily as if they were at home, was a poor family,--father, mother, and five little children,--evidently about to emigrate. Each carried a big bundle; even the smallest toddler had her parcel tied up in black cloth with a big cord. The mother carried the biggest bundle of all,--a baby done up in a bedquilt, thick as a comforter; the child's head was pinned in tight as its feet,--not one breath of air could reach it.
”Going to America, ma'am,” said Brita, ”I think they must be. Oh, ma'am, there was five hundred sailed in one s.h.i.+p for America, last summer,--all to be Mormons; and the big fellow that took them, with his gold spectacles, I could have killed him. They'll be wretched enough when they come to find what they've done. Brigham Young's dead, but there must be somebody in his place that's carrying it on the same. They'd not be allowed to stay in Denmark, ma'am,--oh, no, they've got to go out of the country.”
All day again we journeyed through the hay harvest,--the same picturesque farm-houses, with their high roofs thatched or dark-tiled, their low walls white or red or pink, marked off into odd-shaped intervals by lattice-work of wood; no fences, no walls; only the coloring to mark divisions of crops. Town after town snugged round its church; the churches looked like hens with their broods gathered close around them, just ready to go under the wings. We had been told that we need not change cars all the way to Munich; so, of course, we had to change three times,--bundled out at short notice, at the last minute, to gather ourselves up as we might. In one of these hurried changes I dropped my stylographic pen. Angry as I get with the thing when I am writing with it, my very heart was wrung with sorrow at its loss. Without much hope of ever seeing it again, I telegraphed for it.
The station-master who did the telegraphing was profoundly impressed by Brita's description of the ”wonderful instrument” I had lost. ”A self-writing pen,”--she called it. I only wish it were! ”You shall hear at the next station if it has been found,” he said. Sure enough, at the very next station the guard came to the door. ”Found and will be sent,” he said; and from that on he regarded me with a sort of awe-stricken look whenever he entered the car. I believe he considered me a kind of female necromancer from America! and no wonder, with two self-writing pens in my possession, for luckily I had my No. 2 in my travelling-bag to show as sample of what I had lost.
At Elm we came into a fine hilly region,--hills that had to be tunnelled or climbed over by zigzags; between them were beautiful glimpses of valleys and streams. Brita was nearly beside herself, poor soul! Her ”Oh's” became something tragic. ”Oh, ma'am, it needs no judge to see that G.o.d has been here!” she cried. ”We must think on the Building-Master when we see such scenery as this.”
As we came out on the broader plains, the coloring of the villages grew colder; unlatticed white walls, and a colder gray to the roofs, the groups of houses no longer looked like crowds of furry creatures nestled close for protection. Some rollicking school girls, with long hair flying, got into our carriage, and chattered, and ate cake, and giggled; the cars rocked us to and fro on our seats as if we were in a saddle on a run-away horse in a Colorado canon. All the rough roads I have ever been on have been smooth gliding in comparison with this. At nine o'clock, Munich, and a note from the dear old ”Fraulein” to say that her house was full, but she had rooms engaged for me near by. The next day I went to see her, and found her the same old inimitable dear as ever,--the eyes and the smile not a day older, and the drollery and the mimicry all there; but, alas! old age has come creeping too close not to hurt in some ways, and an ugly rheumatism prevents her from walking and gives her much pain. I had hoped she could go to Oberammergau with me; but it is out of the question. At night she sent over to me the loveliest basket of roses and forget-me-nots and mignonette, with a card, ”Good-night, my dear lady,--I kiss you;” and I am not too proud to confess that I read it with tears in my eyes.
The dear, faithful, loving soul!
THE VILLAGE OF OBERAMMERGAU.
Mountains and valleys and rivers are in league with the sun and summer--and, for that matter, with winter too--to do their best in the Bavarian Highlands. Lofty ranges, ever green at base, ever white at top, are there tied with luminous bands of meadow into knots and loops, and knots and loops again, tightening and loosening, opening and shutting in labyrinths, of which only rivers know the secret and no man can speak the charm. Villages which find place in lands like these take rank and relation at once with the divine organic architecture already builded; seem to become a part of Nature; appear to have existed as long as the hills or the streams, and to have the same surety of continuance. How much this natural correlation may have had to do with the long, unchanging simplicities of peoples born and bred in these mountain haunts, it would be worth while to a.n.a.lyze.
Certain it is that in all peasantry of the hill countries in Europe, there are to be seen traits of countenance and demeanor,--peculiarities of body, habits, customs, and beliefs which are indigenous and lasting, like plants and rocks. Mere lapse of time hardly touches them; they have defied many centuries; only now in the mad restlessness of progress of this the nineteenth do they begin to falter. But they have excuse when Alps have come to be tunnelled and glaciers are melted and measured.