STEPHEN POWERS.
[Country life in Prussia is well delineated in the following description of a journey on foot from Wittenberg to Potsdam. It is not an alluring picture, and brings us into the presence of a stolid generation such as would scarcely be looked for in the rural districts of that active realm.]
Once out of Wittenberg, I journeyed on along the ancient royal highway, between the ever-welcome colonnades of stately poplars, planted that the royal head might never be scorched by the too ardent sun of summer. The sun shone as brightly as it ever does in blue old Germany, but what a weary, weary land to my eyes, on the pitiless cold May-day, was that sandy champaign, almost utterly naked in its hopeless sterility, and diversified only now and then by a bald-headed knoll, swelling broadly up with a thousand acres! So indescribably blue and cold and pinched was it, without any vegetation but a forest of cultivated pines, which, after a quarter of a century, had struggled up with their wretched, scraggy stems only fifteen feet! The very soil looked blue and thin and skinny, and the rye looked blue, and so meagre and chilled that it could not conceal the ground or the knees of the men who plucked up the weeds.
All the dismal immensity of this fenceless, hedgeless, houseless waste, except an acre of rye in a thousand, was given up to the sorrel, the lichens, and the quitches. The very air seemed poor and attenuated like thin skimmed milk. All the houses were clustered together in little villages far apart, where they huddled close, as if for warmth; the dead, dull peat-fires gave forth no cheerful wreathing smoke; and in all the desolate waste there was scarcely a soul abroad. The faces of the yellow-haired children, who were occasionally watching some geese, were mottled with blue and purple and goose-pimples, and if a man ventured abroad to pluck up weeds in the stunted rye, which seemed to shiver with a kind of rustling, starved chilliness, his hands were bluer than the air. So utterly worn out, so bluish-wan and starved with the lapse of untold centuries, seemed all the earth and the air of that Germany which I looked out upon on that dismal May forenoon.
Lamartine says the blood of the Germans is blue, but that of these Brandenburgers must certainly be sour.
It will readily be believed that I did not undertake a pilgrimage through this inexpressibly bleak region in pursuit of fine landscapes. I wished only to visit, by their own firesides and in their own fields, that sturdy, grim, Puritanic race of Brandenburgers, to whom Prussia is primarily indebted for all her greatness.
It was weary hours after the middle of the day before the spires of Wittenberg disappeared below a sand-hill. The afternoon was far spent, and I began to cast longing glances ahead in search of an eligible tavern, for I thoroughly agree with Dr. Johnson that “there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”
I had come up with a thumping lout of a young peasant, who strode along with his “clouted shoon,” measuring about a yard and a quarter at a stride, whose voice blubbered and gurgled up out of his stomach in such a manner that the fierce wind whisked it away, and left me nothing but an occasional horse-laugh (whereupon I would also laugh, though I had not the remotest notion of the matters whereof he was discoursing); and by his advice I passed several inns, though I found afterwards, to my sorrow, he was looking only for the cheapest. At last we came to one which was meaner than all the others, but I was too weary to go a step farther. It bore the pretentious name of the inn of the Green Linden. It was a mere hovel, built of cobbles and mud-stuccoed, tawny-yellow within, greenish-yellowish without, with an earthen floor and benches around the walls. Above the door were twined some sprigs of Whitsuntide birch, which I had seen during the day on the peasants’ hats, wagons, and everywhere.
Around a pine table were eight or ten men and hobbledehoys, each with a Schoppen of terribly stiff beer before him, and most of them smoking the long goosenecked porcelain pipe, while four of them were intent on cards. The men were hard, gristly-faced, sour-blooded fellows, who only muttered now and then a monosyllable, which I could seldom understand; while the youths looked on with the most vacuous, loamy countenances imaginable. So intent were they on the miserable game that they gave no heed to our arrival, and when I endeavored to ascertain who was the landlord, I received only a blank stare or a gesture of impatience. I sat down and waited, and I confess for a few minutes my enthusiasm for the Prussian people fell absolutely to the freezing-point.
After about half an hour the landlord seemed to be disturbed in his mind by a suspicion that I was a foreigner, drew near and ascertained that fact, whereupon he brought me some vile black coffee and some good wheaten Semmel, and then returned to his occupation. The players continued at their game far into the night, and though the stakes were of the most trifling nature, often only a half-penny, they displayed a fierce and obstinate eagerness which was surprising. They would rise up on their feet, lean far across the table and smite it with appalling violence. When they at last desisted, and were preparing to disperse, they collected about me, and, finding I was an American, listened to me awhile with a kind of drowsy, immovable passiveness, while the smoke lazily swirled above their heads. Unlike the lively Swabians and the joyous drinkers of the sunny wine of Freiburg, they scarcely asked any questions or expressed any interest beyond grunting their assent or wonder.
At last the host and myself were left alone, and then he proceeded to prepare the only couch he could offer by shaking down on the floor a bundle of rye straw. He tucked me all up, as if I were one of his young Buben, shook the hand which I reached out from the straw, and left me with a cheerful Schlafen Sie wohl. In the adjoining room a lusty fellow stretched himself on a bench, pillowed his head on a portentous loaf of rye bread, not having even inserted that useful article of diet into a pillow-case, and there he snored—stertitque supinus—the livelong night in a tone so audible that I was greatly tempted to rise and introduce a wisp of rye straw judiciously into his windpipe.
When I sat up on my couch next morning, pulling the straw out of my hair, I said to myself, like Richard, “Oh, I have passed a miserable night!” I had not had any “fearful dreams,” nor, for that matter, any sleep, that I was aware of; neither had I any “ugly sights,” because it was too dark to see them, but I felt them. They appeared to be greatly rejoiced to be permitted, once in their lives, to extract blood out of a man’s veins instead of beer.
The next day I passed through spectacles of the most wonderfully minute and unceasing toil. In an artificial pine-forest, where the trees were become too large to be ploughed, there were men on their knees plucking the weeds between the rows; others in long sheep-skin cloaks were weeding fields of flax; a woman was culling in a royal forest the merest sprigs and leaf-stems for fuel; others along the roadside snipped off the close, short fleece of grass, and carried it in mighty bundles on their backs for the stalled cattle. Here a stalwart yeoman lazily leans his chin on his crook, guarding three sheep as they nimbly nibble! Peasant-women, going to the village to hawk their little produce, shuffled along with their wooden shoes, making a prodigious dust, chatting cheerfully with their stolid lords, though they were bowed down nearly to the earth beneath the intolerable weight of vegetables. And the infamous brutal tyrants trudged along beside the poor women, never even offering to touch the burdens with so much as one of their fingers!
I think the Prussians will certainly never “witch the world with noble horsemanship.” The horses are splendid creatures for farm-animals, strong and glossy and round, superb as the finest Clydesdales; but the owners seem to have no confidence upon their backs, and little skill in guiding them in vehicles. The Prussians are by no means a chivalric race, in the etymologic sense. In all my travels in Prussia I have yet to see a civilian on horseback outside of a city, and even there it is usually only officers who prance through the streets. The immense superiority of the Hungarian cavalry over the Prussian was abundantly demonstrated in the Bohemian campaign until the magnificent infantry battalions turned the scale; and the dreaded “three Uhlans” of Edmond About were far oftener Poles than Prussians.
It is said that the potentates of Germany, when paying a visit of ceremony to a foreign sovereign, always take with them a favorite charger or two to whose paces they are accustomed, that there may be no blunders or embarrassments in the reviews through their unskilful horsemanship. These poor peasants evince little more confidence in their skill than do their sovereigns, and the outrageously unprofessional and awkward manner in which they handle the noble brutes would enrage a lover of handsome horses beyond endurance. To save toll at the gates, they not unfrequently hitch one horse to a two-horse wagon, so that the pole bruises and thumps his legs in a shameful manner. And then to hitch the head of one gallant horse to the tail of another!
In the village of Beelitz I had an amusing adventure, resulting from my ignorance of the customs of the country, which illustrates a certain phase of Prussian society. Upon entering the village, I began to cast about me for some eligible tavern wherein I might take my customary mid-day repast. The first one I approached was the inn of the Black Horse, but there were rather too many yellow-haired, unwashed children and dingy geese about it; besides, the sign hung down from one corner. The only other inn was the White Eagle, which was scarcely any better, but it was Hobson’s choice. It was an extremely small and unpretentious edifice, though with walls nearly a man’s stature in thickness, and I could overhear the appetizing clink of knives on plates just inside the door; so, in doubt whether it was really a public tavern or not, I rapped. Only the clink of the dinner-knives responded. The operation was repeated with a certain amount of vigor. There was a kind of objurgatory remark made within, and in a moment the door was opened about two feet, and an immense brawny arm, bared to the elbow, was extended around the edge of the door. In the fingers there was clutched a bunch of some substance which appeared to solicit my closer inspection. A single glance revealed to me the interesting fact that it was bread: it was undoubtedly bread.
This was an unexpectedly prompt response to my desires, and presented an opportunity for the acquisition of a limited amount of provisions cheap, but one of which my conscience would not permit me to avail myself. However, I scrutinized the bread with quite a lively interest. It was manifestly good bread, but was now somewhat dry: indeed, I may say it was altogether devoid of moisture. Presently the hand holding this article of diet executed a sudden movement of impatience, or as it were of beckoning or blandishment, as if I were expected to take this bread and masticate the same. But as I still hesitated, the hand was suddenly withdrawn into the tavern, there was a very audible remark made inside, and then the brawny hostess owning the hand presented herself at the door, and immediately appeared to have made an astounding discovery. Blushes and embarrassment! Stammerings! Mutual explanations! Ample and shamefaced apologies! A substantial dinner of boiled beef and cabbage! Moral: In a country where beggars are numerous never knock at the tavern door.