isitors were few, and those I saw dining at the
other little tables on the verandah appeared to be quiet, inoffensive
people such as one would expect to find in a quiet, out-of-the-way
place. The sea was not visible, but I could hear it on the other side of
the belt of firs; and the verandah facing south and being hot and
airless, a longing to get into the cool water took hold of me. The
waiter said the bathing-huts were open in the afternoon from four to
five, and I went upstairs to tell Gertrud to bring my things down to the
beach at four, when she would find me lying in the sand. While I was
talking, the quiet lady in the next room began to talk too, apparently
to the chambermaid, for she talked of hot water. I broke off my own talk
short. It was not that the partition was so thin that it seemed as if
she were in the same room as myself, though that was sufficiently
disturbing--it was that I thought for a moment I knew the voice. I
looked at Gertrud. Gertrud's face was empty of all expression. The quiet
lady, continuing, told the chambermaid to let down the sun-blinds, and
the note in her voice that had struck me was no longer there. Feeling
relieved, for I did not want to come across acquaintances, I put _The
Prelude_ in my pocket and went out. The fir-wood was stuffy, and
suggested mosquitoes, but several bath-guests had slung up hammocks and
were lying in them dozing, so that there could not have been mosquitoes;
and coming suddenly out on to the sands all idea of stuffiness vanished,
for there was the same glorious, heaving, sparkling, splashing blue that
I had seen from the dunes of Goehren the evening before at sunset. The
bathing-house, a modest place with only two cells and a long plank
bridge running into deep water, was just opposite the end of the path
through the firs. It was locked up and deserted. The sands were deserted
too, for the tourists were all dozing in hammocks or in beds. I made a
hollow in the clean dry sand beneath the last of the fir trees, and
settled down to enjoy myself till Gertrud came. Oh, I was happy!
Thiessow was so quiet and primitive, the afternoon so radiant, the
colours of the sea and of the long line of silver sand, and of the soft
green gloom of the background of firs so beautiful. Commendably far away
to the north I saw the coastguard hill belonging to Goehren. On my right
the woods turned into beechwoods, and scrambled up high cliffs that
seemed to form the end of the peninsul