Diary of a Pilgrimage

MONDAY, JUNE 9TH

A Long Chapter, but happily the Last. – The Pilgrims’ Return. – A Deserted Town. – Heidelberg. – The Common, or Bed, Sheet, Considered as a Towel. – B. Grapples with a Continental Time Table. – An Untractable Train. – A Quick Run. – Trains that Start from Nowhere. – Trains that Arrive at Nowhere. – Trains that Don’t Do Anything. – B. Goes Mad. – Railway Travelling in Germany. – B. is Taken Prisoner. – His Fortitude. – Advantages of Ignorance. – First Impressions of Germany and of the Germans.

We are at Ostend. Our pilgrimage has ended. We sail for Dover in three hours’ time. The wind seems rather fresh, but they say that it will drop towards the evening. I hope they are not deceiving us.

We are disappointed with Ostend. We thought that Ostend would be gay and crowded. We thought that there would be bands and theatres and concerts, and busy table-d’hôtes, and lively sands, and thronged parades, and pretty girls at Ostend.

I bought a stick and a new pair of boots at Brussels on purpose for Ostend.

There does not seem to be a living visitor in the place besides ourselves – nor a dead one either, that we can find. The shops are shut up, the houses are deserted, the casino is closed. Notice-boards are exhibited outside the hotels to the effect that the police have strict orders to take into custody anybody found trespassing upon or damaging the premises.

We found one restaurant which looked a little less like a morgue than did the other restaurants in the town, and rang the bell. After we had waited for about a quarter of an hour, an old woman answered the door, and asked us what we wanted. We said a steak and chipped potatoes for two, and a couple of lagers. She said would we call again in about a fortnight’s time, when the family would be at home? She did not herself know where the things were kept.

We went down on to the sands this morning. We had not been walking up and down for more than half an hour before we came across the distinct imprint of a human foot. Someone must have been there this very day! We were a good deal alarmed. We could not imagine how he came there. The weather is too fine for shipwrecks, and it was not a part of the coast where any passing trader would be likely to land. Besides, if anyone has landed, where is he? We have been able to find no trace of him whatever. To this hour, we have never discovered who our strange visitant was.

It is a very mysterious affair, and I am glad we are going away.

We have been travelling about a good deal since we left Munich. We went first to Heidelberg. We arrived early in the morning at Heidelberg, after an all-night journey, and the first thing that the proprietor of the Royal suggested, on seeing us, was that we should have a bath. We consented to the operation, and were each shown into a little marble bath-room, in which I felt like a bit out of a picture by Alma Tadema.

The bath was very refreshing; but I should have enjoyed the whole thing much better if they had provided me with something more suitable to wipe upon than a thin linen sheet. The Germans hold very curious notions as to the needs and requirements of a wet man. I wish they would occasionally wash and bath themselves, and then they would, perhaps, obtain more practical ideas upon the subject. I have wiped upon a sheet in cases of emergency, and so I have upon a pair of socks; but there is no doubt that the proper thing is a towel. To dry oneself upon a sheet needs special training and unusual agility. A Nautch Girl or a Dancing Dervish would, no doubt, get through the performance with credit. They would twirl the sheet gracefully round their head, draw it lightly across their back, twist it in waving folds round their legs, wrap themselves for a moment in its whirling maze, and then lightly skip away from it, dry and smiling.

But that is not the manner in which the dripping, untaught Briton attempts to wipe himself upon a sheet. The method he adopts is, to clutch the sheet with both hands, lean up against the wall, and rub himself with it. In trying to get the thing round to the back of him, he drops half of it into the water, and from that moment the bathroom is not big enough to enable him to get away for an instant from that wet half. When he is wiping the front of himself with the dry half, the wet half climbs round behind, and, in a spirit of offensive familiarity, slaps him on the back. While he is stooping down rubbing his feet, it throws itself with delirious joy around his head, and he is black in the face before he can struggle away from its embrace. When he is least expecting anything of the kind, it flies round and gives him a playful flick upon some particularly tender part of his body that sends him springing with a yell ten feet up into the air. The great delight of the sheet, as a whole, is to trip him up whenever he attempts to move, so as to hear what he says when he sits down suddenly on the stone floor; and if it can throw him into the bath again just as he has finished wiping himself, it feels that life is worth living after all.

We spent two days at Heidelberg, climbing the wooded mountains that surround that pleasant little town, and that afford, from their restaurant or ruin-crowned summits, enchanting, far-stretching views, through which, with many a turn and twist, the distant Rhine and nearer Neckar wind; or strolling among the crumbling walls and arches of the grand, history-logged wreck that was once the noblest castle in all Germany.

We stood in awed admiration before the “Great Tun,” which is the chief object of interest in Heidelberg. What there is of interest in the sight of a big beer-barrel it is difficult, in one’s calmer moments, to understand; but the guide book says that it is a thing to be seen, and so all we tourists go and stand in a row and gape at it. We are a sheep-headed lot. If, by a printer’s error, no mention were made in the guide book of the Colosseum, we should spend a month in Rome, and not think it worth going across the road to look at. If the guide book says we must by no means omit to pay a visit to some famous pincushion that contains eleven million pins, we travel five hundred miles on purpose to see it!

From Heidelberg we went to Darmstadt. We spent half-an-hour at Darmstadt. Why we ever thought of stopping longer there, I do not know. It is a pleasant enough town to live in, I should say; but utterly uninteresting to the stranger. After one walk round it, we made inquiries as to the next train out of it, and being informed that one was then on the point of starting, we tumbled into it and went to Bonn.

From Bonn (whence we made one or two Rhine excursions, and where we ascended twenty-eight “blessed steps” on our knees – the chapel people called them “blessed steps;” we didn’t, after the first fourteen) we returned to Cologne. From Cologne we went to Brussels; from Brussels to Ghent (where we saw more famous pictures, and heard the mighty “Roland” ring “o’er lagoon and lake of sand”). From Ghent we went to Bruges (where I had the satisfaction of throwing a stone at the statue of Simon Stevin, who added to the miseries of my school-days, by inventing decimals), and from Bruges we came on here.

Finding out and arranging our trains has been a fearful work. I have left the whole business with B., and he has lost two stone over it. I used to think at one time that my own dear native Bradshaw was a sufficiently hard nut for the human intellect to crack; or, to transpose the simile, that Bradshaw was sufficient to crack an ordinary human nut. But dear old Bradshaw is an axiom in Euclid for stone-wall obviousness, compared with a through Continental time-table. Every morning B. has sat down with the book before him, and, grasping his head between his hands, has tried to understand it without going mad.

“Here we are,” he has said. “This is the train that will do for us. Leaves Munich at 1.45; gets to Heidelberg at 4 – just in time for a cup of tea.”

“Gets to Heidelberg at 4?” I exclaim. “Does the whole distance in two and a quarter hours? Why, we were all night coming down!”

“Well, there you are,” he says, pointing to the time-table. “Munich, depart 1.45; Heidelberg, arrive 4.”

“Yes,” I say, looking over his shoulder; “but don’t you see the 4 is in thick type? That means 4 in the morning.”

“Oh, ah, yes,” he replies. “I never noticed that. Yes, of course. No! it can’t be that either. Why, that would make the journey fourteen hours. It can’t take fourteen hours. No, of course not. That’s not meant for thick type, that 4. That’s thin type got a little thick, that’s all.”

“Well, it can’t be 4 this afternoon,” I argue. “It must be 4 to-morrow afternoon! That’s just what a German express train would like to do – take a whole day over a six hours’ job!”

He puzzles for a while, and then breaks out with:

“Oh! I see it now. How stupid of me! That train that gets to Heidelberg at 4 comes from Berlin.”

He seemed quite delighted with this discovery.

“What’s the good of it to us, then?” I ask.

That depresses him.

“No, it is not much good, I’m afraid,” he agrees. “It seems to go straight from Berlin to Heidelberg without stopping at Munich at all. Well then, where does the 1.45 go to? It must go somewhere.”

Five minutes more elapse, and then he exclaims:

“Drat this 1.45! It doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Munich depart 1.45, and that’s all. It must go somewhere!”

Apparently, however, it does not. It seems to be a train that starts out from Munich at 1.45, and goes off on the loose. Possibly, it is a young, romantic train, fond of mystery. It won’t say where it’s going to. It probably does not even know itself. It goes off in search of adventure.

“I shall start off,” it says to itself, “at 1.45 punctually, and just go on anyhow, without thinking about it, and see where I get to.”

Or maybe it is a conceited, headstrong young train. It will not be guided or advised. The traffic superintendent wants it to go to St. Petersburg or to Paris. The old grey-headed station-master argues with it, and tries to persuade it to go to Constantinople, or even to Jerusalem if it likes that better – urges it to, at all events, make up its mind where it is going – warns it of the danger to young trains of having no fixed aim or object in life. Other people, asked to use their influence with it, have talked to it like a father, and have begged it, for their sakes, to go to Kamskatka, or Timbuctoo, or Jericho, according as they have thought best for it; and then, finding that it takes no notice of them, have got wild with it, and have told it to go to still more distant places.

But to all counsel and entreaty it has turned a deaf ear.

“You leave me alone,” it has replied; “I know where I’m going to. Don’t you worry yourself about me. You mind your own business, all of you. I don’t want a lot of old fools telling me what to do. I know what I’m about.”

What can be expected from such a train? The chances are that it comes to a bad end. I expect it is recognised afterwards, a broken-down, unloved, friendless, old train, wandering aimless and despised in some far-off country, musing with bitter regret upon the day when, full of foolish pride and ambition, it started from Munich, with its boiler nicely oiled, at 1.45.

B. abandons this 1.45 as hopeless and incorrigible, and continues his search.

“Hulloa! what’s this?” he exclaims. “How will this do us? Leaves Munich at 4, gets to Heidelberg 4.15. That’s quick work. Something wrong there. That won’t do. You can’t get from Munich to Heidelberg in a quarter of an hour. Oh! I see it. That 4 o’clock goes to Brussels, and then on to Heidelberg afterwards. Gets in there at 4.15 to-morrow, I suppose. I wonder why it goes round by Brussels, though? Then it seems to stop at Prague for ever so long. Oh, damn this timetable!”

Then he finds another train that starts at 2.15, and seems to be an ideal train. He gets quite enthusiastic over this train.

“This is the train for us, old man,” he says. “This is a splendid train, really. It doesn’t stop anywhere.”

“Does it get anywhere?” I ask.

“Of course it gets somewhere,” he replies indignantly. “It’s an express! Munich,” he murmurs, tracing its course through the timetable, “depart 2.15. First and second class only. Nuremberg? No; it doesn’t stop at Nuremberg. Wurtzburg? No. Frankfort for Strasburg? No. Cologne, Antwerp, Calais? Well, where does it stop? Confound it! it must stop somewhere. Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen? No. Upon my soul, this is another train that does not go anywhere! It starts from Munich at 2.15, and that’s all. It doesn’t do anything else.”

It seems to be a habit of Munich trains to start off in this purposeless way. Apparently, their sole object is to get away from the town. They don’t care where they go to; they don’t care what becomes of them, so long as they escape from Munich.

“For heaven’s sake,” they say to themselves, “let us get away from this place. Don’t let us bother about where we shall go; we can decide that when we are once fairly outside. Let’s get out of Munich; that’s the great thing.”

B. begins to grow quite frightened. He says:

“We shall never be able to leave this city. There are no trains out of Munich at all. It’s a plot to keep us here, that’s what it is. We shall never be able to get away. We shall never see dear old England again!”

I try to cheer him up by suggesting that perhaps it is the custom in Bavaria to leave the destination of the train to the taste and fancy of the passengers. The railway authorities provide a train, and start it off at 2.15. It is immaterial to them where it goes to. That is a question for the passengers to decide among themselves. The passengers hire the train and take it away, and there is an end of the matter, so far as the railway people are concerned. If there is any difference of opinion between the passengers, owing to some of them wishing to go to Spain, while others want to get home to Russia, they, no doubt, settle the matter by tossing up.

B., however, refuses to entertain this theory, and says he wishes I would not talk so much when I see how harassed he is. That’s all the thanks I get for trying to help him.

He worries along for another five minutes, and then he discovers a train that gets to Heidelberg all right, and appears to be in most respects a model train, the only thing that can be urged against it being that it does not start from anywhere.

It seems to drop into Heidelberg casually and then to stop there. One expects its sudden advent alarms the people at Heidelberg station. They do not know what to make of it. The porter goes up to the station-master, and says:

“Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a strange train in the station.”

“Oh!” answers the station-master, surprised, “where did it come from?”

“Don’t know,” replies the man; “it doesn’t seem to know itself.”

“Dear me,” says the station-master, “how very extraordinary! What does it want?”

“Doesn’t seem to want anything particular,” replies the other. “It’s a curious sort of train. Seems to be a bit dotty, if you ask me.”

“Um,” muses the station-master, “it’s a rum go. Well, I suppose we must let it stop here a bit now. We can hardly turn it out a night like this. Oh, let it make itself comfortable in the wood-shed till the morning, and then we will see if we can find its friends.”

At last B. makes the discovery that to get to Heidelberg we must go to Darmstadt and take another train from there. This knowledge gives him renewed hope and strength, and he sets to work afresh – this time, to find trains from Munich to Darmstadt, and from Darmstadt to Heidelberg.

“Here we are,” he cries, after a few minutes’ hunting. “I’ve got it!” (He is of a buoyant disposition.) “This will be it. Leaves Munich 10, gets to Darmstadt 5.25. Leaves Darmstadt for Heidelberg 5.20, gets to – ”

“That doesn’t allow us much time for changing, does it?” I remark.

“No,” he replies, growing thoughtful again. “No, that’s awkward. If it were only the other way round, it would be all right, or it would do if our train got there five minutes before its time, and the other one was a little late in starting.”

“Hardly safe to reckon on that,” I suggest; and he agrees with me, and proceeds to look for some more fitable trains.

It would appear, however, that all the trains from Darmstadt to Heidelberg start just a few minutes before the trains from Munich arrive. It looks quite pointed, as though they tried to avoid us.

B.’s intellect generally gives way about this point, and he becomes simply drivelling. He discovers trains that run from Munich to Heidelberg in fourteen minutes, by way of Venice and Geneva, with half-an-hour’s interval for breakfast at Rome. He rushes up and down the book in pursuit of demon expresses that arrive at their destinations forty-seven minutes before they start, and leave again before they get there. He finds out, all by himself, that the only way to get from South Germany to Paris is to go to Calais, and then take the boat to Moscow. Before he has done with the timetable, he doesn’t know whether he is in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, nor where he wants to get to, nor why he wants to go there.

Then I quietly, but firmly, take the book away from him, and dress him for going out; and we take our bags and walk to the station, and tell a porter that, “Please, we want to go to Heidelberg.” And the porter takes us one by each hand, and leads us to a seat and tells us to sit there and be good, and that, when it is time, he will come and fetch us and put us in the train; and this he does.

That is my method of finding out how to get from one place to another. It is not as dignified, perhaps, as B.’s, but it is simpler and more efficacious.

It is slow work travelling in Germany. The German train does not hurry or excite itself over its work, and when it stops it likes to take a rest. When a German train draws up at a station, everybody gets out and has a walk. The engine-driver and the stoker cross over and knock at the station-master’s door. The station-master comes out and greets them effusively, and then runs back into the house to tell his wife that they have come, and she bustles out and also welcomes them effusively, and the four stand chatting about old times and friends and the state of the crops. After a while, the engine-driver, during a pause in the conversation, looks at his watch, and says he is afraid he must be going, but the station-master’s wife won’t hear of it.

“Oh, you must stop and see the children,” she says. “They will be home from school soon, and they’ll be so disappointed if they hear you have been here and gone away again. Lizzie will never forgive you.”

The engine-driver and the stoker laugh, and say that under those circumstances they suppose they must stop; and they do so.

Meanwhile the booking-clerk has introduced the guard to his sister, and such a very promising flirtation has been taking place behind the ticket-office door that it would not be surprising if wedding-bells were heard in the neighbourhood before long.

The second guard has gone down into the town to try and sell a dog, and the passengers stroll about the platform and smoke, or partake of a light meal in the refreshment-room – the poorer classes regaling themselves upon hot sausage, and the more dainty upon soup. When everybody appears to be sufficiently rested, a move onward is suggested by the engine-driver or the guard, and if all are agreeable to the proposal the train starts.

Tremendous excitement was caused during our journey between Heidelberg and Darmstadt by the discovery that we were travelling in an express train (they called it an “express:” it jogged along at the rate of twenty miles an hour when it could be got to move at all; most of its time it seemed to be half asleep) with slow-train tickets. The train was stopped at the next station and B. was marched off between two stern-looking gold-laced officials to explain the matter to a stern-looking gold-laced station-master, surrounded by three stern-looking gold-laced followers. The scene suggested a drum-head court-martial, and I could see that B. was nervous, though outwardly calm and brave. He shouted back a light-hearted adieu to me as he passed down the platform, and asked me, if the worst happened, to break it gently to his mother.

However, no harm came of it, and he returned to the carriage without a stain upon his character, he having made it clear to the satisfaction of the court – firstly, That he did not know that our tickets were only slow-train tickets; secondly, That he was not aware that we were not travelling by a slow train; and thirdly, That he was ready to pay the difference in the fares.

He blamed himself for having done this last, however, afterwards. He seemed to think that he could have avoided this expense by assuming ignorance of the German language. He said that two years ago, when he was travelling in Germany with three other men, the authorities came down upon them in much the same way for travelling first-class with second-class tickets.

Why they were doing this B. did not seem able to explain very clearly. He said that, if he recollected rightly, the guard had told them to get into a first-class, or else they had not had time to get into a second-class, or else they did not know they were not in a second-class. I must confess his explanation appeared to me to be somewhat lame.