The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. Elizabeth von Arnim. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Elizabeth von Arnim
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Языкознание
Год издания: 0
isbn: 4057664595898
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       Elizabeth Von Arnim

      The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664595898

       THE FIRST DAY

       FROM MILTZOW TO LAUTERBACH

       THE SECOND DAY

       LAUTERBACH AND VILM

       THE THIRD DAY

       FROM LAUTERBACH TO GÖHREN

       THE FOURTH DAY

       FROM GÖHREN 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, SCHWARZER SEE, AND KIEKÖWER

       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

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      Every one who has been to school and still remembers what he was taught there, knows that Rügen 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 Rügen 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 Rügen 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 Rügen. Immediately interested—for is not Rügen 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 Rügen. On the first page of the first one I found was this remarkable paragraph:—

      'Hearest thou the name Rügen, 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