Rendered desperate, however, by our sufferings, the little Hessian princes produced a butterfly net and managed after some trouble to catch a good many of the Unken, which floated on the top of the pond, and were practically invisible except for a tiny green spot which projected over each eye. The princes speedily became very expert at locating them, and enjoyed excellent sport every day after dinner, catching over a hundred in two or three days. The horrid, slimy, glutinous things—which the Princess handled without any qualms—were a bright flame-colour underneath and deep black above. They were carefully transferred in a water-can to the Haff, which was not far away, and every one felt much benefited by their change of quarters.
The chief charm of Cadinen was its idyllic simplicity. There were no tourists, no “respectable” people, just simple workers in the fields and crowds of barefooted, sunburnt children. Pigs, sheep, and chickens pervaded the place, all of them belonging to His Majesty, who had purchased the whole estate just as it stood and proceeded with characteristic energy to improve it. Gradually he changed the prevailing simplicity of everything, and built new stables as well as a large automobile garage, containing ample accommodation for grooms and chauffeurs. He pulled down the old picturesque houses, where the children and pigs and chickens had lived together in happy amity, and erected some very pretty gabled cottages, the plans of which had been sent to him from England—charming cottages, with roses climbing over the door and wire netting round the grass plot to keep out the hens, not forgetting a nice convenient pigsty at the back—but the barefooted peasant women with the handkerchiefs tied over their heads never looked very much at home in them, and were always sighing after the old, dirty, insanitary houses around whose memory their heart-fibres still clung.
The Emperor was very angry and impatient one day with a woman who expressed some of this regret, and told her she was ungrateful; yet it was obviously not ingratitude that prompted her to speak, but rather a wistful retrospect, a sorrowful longing for the scenes associated with all the joys she had ever known. Even the duck-pond, that enchanted spot where the Princess from her window watched every evening the farm horses as they waded in and drank delicately just in the yellow and scarlet glory of the sunset, where the herd of cows came and stood in the water, switching their tails and taking long, deliberate draughts every evening after milking-time—all was done away with, the pond filled up, the green levelled and kept smoothly rolled. No children or dogs played on it any more, the horses and cattle went another way home, and sentries, those adjutants of royalty, were posted where erstwhile the geese had waddled across the grass.
Fortunately it was some time before all these improvements were made. No sentries marred those early years in Cadinen. Only one or two green Gendarms wandered about the place or sat somnolently in the sunshine. The clink of the blacksmith’s shop penetrated the open windows of the schoolroom as the Princess read with her tutor. The blacksmith was a most delightful man, who had been at sea and travelled far afield, and was still young and handsome, with a pleasant-faced wife and two little children, one of whom, Lenchen, squinted most frightfully, but was a great friend of the Princess.
“Every year it seems to me that Lenchen squints worse,” she would sigh after the first interview; “but perhaps it is because I haven’t seen her for so long. She is going to be operated on next winter. She would be quite pretty if her eyes were right.”
A village forge has been from time immemorial an irresistible attraction to children, and it was surprising how all roads in Cadinen seemed somehow to lead past the blacksmith’s, who was always either fitting shoes on horses, or mending a ploughshare, or doing something interesting of that kind.
“So useful,” said the Princess as she gazed—“so much better than learning the date of the Silesian Wars, isn’t it?”
Sometimes she helped to blow the bellows.
A tiny chapel, capable of holding about twenty people, had been built on the top of a very steep hill in the “park.” Every Sunday morning we toiled pantingly up to Gottes-Dienst. A stalwart clergyman came over from Elbing to hold the service, and always stood at the door of the church and shook hands with each worshipper, saying, “God greet you.” He seemed almost a size too large for the chapel, so tall and broad was he. From the doorway was a wide view over the Haff, which was always muddy in colour except at sunrise, when it was blue, and at sunset, when it turned yellow and pink and sometimes blood-red; but beyond it there was always a clear strip of deeper blue—the waters of the Baltic, or Ost-See (East Sea) as it is called in Germany. We grew to know the Haff very well, for every afternoon the children were taken across it in a little steamer to bathe at a tiny place called Kahlberg, which lay on the farther shore.
This small steamer, called the Radaune, was hired from somebody in Danzig for a few weeks every summer, and manned by three mariners whom the children considered with much reason to be the cleverest and most delightful men they had ever met. One named Vigand was captain and steersman, another attended to the machinery, and a third just hovered generally around, fetching out camp-stools and answering questions, at which he showed himself most fluent and explanatory.