At that instant her eye caught sight of an oar lying horizontally along the edge of the boat and wedged into it, but the twin oar was missing. An audacious plan began to take shape in her mind. She remembered to have seen an old key hanging up inside the bathing-house, which apparently belonged to the boat. She would make Elly fetch it.
Elly was horrified. "What are you going to do?"
Hertha banged with her fist on the side of the boat. When she commanded, she expected blind obedience. A few seconds later the little implement, covered with rust, was thrown into her lap.
A sudden furious ardour came over her. With the unfastened lock still in her hand, she tore the oar out of its old resting-place, and dug it with all her strength deep in the morass, from which glittering bubbles came gurgling to the surface. Poor Elly's lamentations died away unheeded. The boat began slowly to break through the reeds and sedges, and to drift up the stream.
Hertha calculated that if she kept to the calm shallows near the bank and worked her way up to a point where she would have left the island a hundred paces behind her, she might hope by skilful steering and even with only one oar to master the current, and reach her goal by a circuitous route.
When she saw that she was really making progress, she uttered a cry of triumph, and worked on with yet hotter zeal.
Meanwhile Elly, like a motherless chicken, ran wildly up and down amongst the reeds and rushes on the bank, getting her shoes stuck in the slime, and falling over willow-stumps. She wrung her hands, and implored Hertha to come back, but for answer was laughed to scorn.
But Hertha's Nemesis soon overtook her. The boat that unintentionally she had launched into a whirling side-current began to turn round of itself. For a few moments it stayed motionless, as if not sure what to do next, then began to glide, at first slowly, and afterwards more and more rapidly towards the valley. It passed the bathing-house and the island, and descended gaily in mid-stream.
Elly saw how Hertha lost her grasp of the oar and threw it away, how she spread out her arms, and called out some words quite unintelligible, so that she did not know whether they meant triumph or despair. She went back to her cart, sat down on the grass beside the pony to await coming events, and wept.
Thus it happened that when supper was ready at Halewitz, neither of the girls put in an appearance. Leo tried to laugh away his mother's uneasiness, but at once ordered the mare to be resaddled, which stood sweating in the stable, put a flask of brandy in his pocket, whistled for his namesake, and started off two minutes later over the dewy meadows to the river.