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'hotes, 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.
