The Benefactress. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ themselves to touch the horrid-looking food offered, and turning her back in impatient disgust on two stout German ladies who had got in at Oberhausen, and who were enjoying their lunch quite unmoved by her contempt—one eating a chicken from beginning to end without a fork, and the other taking repeated sips of an obviously satisfactory nature from a big wine bottle, which was used, in the intervals, as a support to her back.

      By the time Berlin was reached, these ladies, having been properly fed all day, were very cheerful, whereas Susie's party was speechless from exhaustion; especially poor Miss Leech, who was never very strong, and so nearly fainted that Susie was obliged to notice it, and expressed a conviction to Anna in a loud and peevish aside that Miss Leech was going to be a nuisance.

      "It is strange," thought Anna, as she crept into bed, "how travelling brings out one's worst passions."

      It is indeed strange; for it is certain that nothing equals the expectant enthusiasm and mutual esteem of the start except the cold dislike of the finish. Many are the friendships that have found an unforeseen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive it. But if Horace Walpole and Grey fell out, if Byron and Leigh Hunt were obliged to part, if a host of other personages, endowed with every gift that makes companionship desirable, could not away with each other after a few weeks together abroad, is it to be wondered at that weaker vessels such as Susie and Anna, Letty and Miss Leech, should have found the short journey from London to Berlin sufficient to enable them to see one another's failings with a clearness of vision that was startling?

      On the lawyer, a keen-eyed man with a conspicuously fine face, Anna made an entirely favourable impression. When he saw this gracious young lady, so simple and so friendly, and looked into her frank and charming eyes, he perfectly understood that old Joachim should have been bewitched. But after a little conversation, it appeared that she had no present intention of carrying out her uncle's wishes, but, setting them coolly aside, proposed to spend all the good German money she could extract from her property in that replete and bloated land, England.

      This annoyed him; first because he hated England and then because his father had managed old Joachim's affairs before he himself had stepped into the paternal shoes, and the feeling of both father and son for the old man had been considerably warmer than is usual between lawyer and client. Still he could not believe, judging after the manner of men, that anything so pretty could also be unkind; and scrutinising Lady Estcourt, because she was unattractive and had a sharp little face and a restless little body, he was convinced that she it was who was the cause of this setting aside of a dead benefactor's wishes. Susie, for her part, patronised him because his collar turned down.

      Whenever Letty thought afterwards of Berlin, she thought of it as a place where all the houses are museums, and where you drink so many cups of chocolate with whipped cream on the top that you see things double for the rest of the time.

      Anna thought of it as a charming place, where delightful lawyers fill your purse with money.

      Susie thought of it with satisfaction as the one place abroad where, by dint of sternest economy, walks from sight to sight in the rain, and promiscuous cakes instead of the more satisfactory but less cheap meals Letty called square, she had successfully defended herself from being, as she put it, fleeced.

      To Miss Leech, it was merely a place where your feet get wet, and your clothes are spoilt.

      Early the next morning they started for Kleinwalde.

      CHAPTER V

      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?" СКАЧАТЬ