and I wasn't to suppose it was my gift only, to spoil and mess up as I chose, but that it belonged to the world. When he said that, cold shivers trickled down my spine. He looked so solemn, and he made me feel so solemn, as though I were being turned, like Wordsworth in The Prelude, into a dedicated spirit.
But I expect he is right, and it is time I went where it is cooler for a little while. I've been getting steadily angrier at nothing all the week, and more and more fretted by the flies, and one daywould you believe itI actually sat down and cried with irritation because of those silly flies. I've had to promise not to touch a fiddle for the first week I'm away, and during the second week not to work more than two hours a day, and then I may come back if I feel quite well again. He says he'll be at Heringsdorf, which is a seaside place not very far away from where I shall be, for ten days himself, and will come over and see if I'm being good. He says the Koseritz's country place isn't far from where I shall be, so I shan't feel as if I didn't know a soul anywhere. The Koseritz party at which I was to play never came off. I was glad of that. I didn't a bit want to play at it, or bother about it, or anything else. The hot weather drove the Grafin into the country, Herr von Inster told me, He too seems to think I ought to go away. I saw him this afternoon after being with Kloster, and he says he'll go down to his aunt'sthat is Grafin Koseritzwhile I'm in the neighbourhood, and will ride over and see me. I'm sure you'd like him very much. My address will be:
bei Herrn Oberforster BornstedSchuppenfelde
Reg. Bez. Stettin.
My heart's love, darling mother.
Your confused and rather hustled Chris.
Oberforsterei, Schuppenfelde, July 11th, 1914
Here I am, and it is lovely. I must just tell you about it before I go to bed. We're buried in forest, eight miles from the nearest station, and that's only a Kleinbahn station, a toy thing into which a small train crawls twice a day, having been getting to it for more than three hours from Stettin. The Oberforster met me in a high yellow carriage, drawn by two long-tailed horses who hadn't been worried with much drill judging from their individualistic behaviour, and we lurched over forest tracks that were sometimes deep sand and sometimes all roots, and the evening air was so delicious after the train, so full of different scents and freshness, that I did nothing but lift up my nose and sniff with joy.
The Oberforster thought I had a cold, without at the same time having a handkerchief; and presently, after a period of uneasiness on my behalf, offered me his. "It is not quite clean," he said, "but it is better than none." And he shouted, because I was a foreigner and therefore would understand better if he shouted.
I explained as well as I could, which was not very, that my sniffs were sniffs of exultation.
"Ach so ," he said, indulgent with the indulgence one feels towards a newly arrived guest, before one knows what they are really like.
We drove on in silence after that. Our wheels made hardly any noise on the sandy track, and I suddenly discovered how long it is since I've heard any birds. I wish you had come with me here, little mother; I wish you had been on that drive this evening. There were jays, and magpies, and woodpeckers, and little tiny birds like finches that kept on repeating in a monotonous sweet pipe the opening bar of the Beethoven C minor Symphony No. 5. We met nobody the whole way except a man with a cartload of wood, who greeted the Oberforster with immense respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild strawberries. I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best leave reasoned conversation alone till I've had time to learn more German, which I'm going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster has discovered he needn't shout in order to make me understand. Sitting so close to my ear, when he shouted into it it was exactly as though some one
had hit me, and hurt just as much.
He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding ears so many Germans have. What is it that is left out of their heads, I wonder? His moustache is like the Kaiser's, and he looks rather a fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester's uniform and becoming slouch hat with a feather stuck in it. Without his hat he is less impressive, because of his head. I suppose he has to have a head, but if he didn't have to he'd be very good-looking.
This is such a sweet place, little mother. I've got the dearest little clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg's. You can't think how lovely it is being here after the long hot journey. It's no fun travelling alone in Germany if you're a woman. I was elbowed about and pushed out of the way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an ownerless trunk. Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said things. One little boyhe couldn't have been more than tenwinked at me and whispered something about kissing. The station at Stettin was horrible, much worse than the Berlin one. I don't know where they all came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and extraordinarily disreputable and insolent. To add to the confusion on the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their families and bundlesI asked my porter who they were, and he told mebeing taken from one place where they had been working in the fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them, but gentle, and, compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good many officersit was altogether the most excited station I've seen, I thinkand they stared too, but I'm certain that if I had been in a difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away. Kloster told me Germans divide women into two classes: those they want to kiss, and those they want to kick, who are all those they don't want to kiss. One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think, and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin. So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the holiness . Frau Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms, including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over every spring in thousands by German overseers. "It is a good arrangement," she said. "In case of war we would not permit their departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled." In case of war! Always that word on their tongues. Even in this distant corner of peace.