Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (376 page)

Towards three o’clock we worked our way round to the station, and began looking for our train. We hunted all over the place, but could not find it anywhere. The central station at Munich is an enormous building, and a perfect maze of passages and halls and corridors. It is much easier to lose oneself in it, than to find anything in it one may happen to want. Together and separately B. and I lost ourselves and each other some twenty-four times. For about half an hour we seemed to be doing nothing else but rushing up and down the station looking for each other, suddenly finding each other, and saying, “Why, where the dickens have you been? I have been hunting for you everywhere. Don’t go away like that,” and then immediately losing each other again.

And what was so extraordinary about the matter was that every time, after losing each other, we invariably met again — when we did meet — outside the door of the third-class refreshment room.

We came at length to regard the door of the third-class refreshment room as “home,” and to feel a thrill of joy when, in the course of our weary wanderings through far-off waiting-rooms and lost-luggage bureaus and lamp depots, we saw its old familiar handle shining in the distance, and knew that there, beside it, we should find our loved and lost one.

When any very long time elapsed without our coming across it, we would go up to one of the officials, and ask to be directed to it.

“Please can you tell me,” we would say, “the nearest way to the door of the third-class refreshment room?”

When three o’clock came, and still we had not found the 3.10 train, we became quite anxious about the poor thing, and made inquiries concerning it.

“The 3.10 train to Ober-Ammergau,” they said. “Oh, we’ve not thought about that yet.”

“Haven’t thought about it!” we exclaimed indignantly. “Well, do for heaven’s sake wake up a bit. It is 3.5 now!”

“Yes,” they answered, “3.5 in the afternoon; the 3.10 is a night train. Don’t you see it’s printed in thick type? All the trains between six in the evening and six in the morning are printed in fat figures, and the day trains in thin. You have got plenty of time. Look around after supper.”

I do believe I am the most unfortunate man at a time-table that ever was born. I do not think it can be stupidity; for if it were mere stupidity, I should occasionally, now and then when I was feeling well, not make a mistake. It must be fate.

If there is one train out of forty that goes on “Saturdays only” to some place I want to get to, that is the train I select to travel by on a Friday. On Saturday morning I get up at six, swallow a hasty breakfast, and rush off to catch a return train that goes on every day in the week “except Saturdays.”

I go to London, Brighton and South Coast Railway-stations and clamour for South-Eastern trains. On Bank Holidays I forget it is Bank Holiday, and go and sit on draughty platforms for hours, waiting for trains that do not run on Bank Holidays.

To add to my misfortunes, I am the miserable possessor of a demon time-table that I cannot get rid of, a Bradshaw for August, 1887. Regularly, on the first of each month, I buy and bring home with me a new Bradshaw and a new A.B.C. What becomes of them after the second of the month, I do not know. After the second of the month, I never see either of them again. What their fate is, I can only guess. In their place is left, to mislead me, this wretched old 1887 corpse.

For three years I have been trying to escape from it, but it will not leave me.

I have thrown it out of the window, and it has fallen on people’s heads, and those people have picked it up and smoothed it out, and brought it back to the house, and members of my family—”friends” they call themselves — people of my own flesh and blood — have thanked them and taken it in again!

I have kicked it into a dozen pieces, and kicked the pieces all the way downstairs and out into the garden, and persons — persons, mind you, who will not sew a button on the back of my shirt to save me from madness — have collected the pieces and stitched them carefully together, and made the book look as good as new, and put it back in my study!

It has acquired the secret of perpetual youth, has this time-table. Other time-tables that I buy become dissipated-looking wrecks in about a week. This book looks as fresh and new and clean as it did on the day when it first lured me into purchasing it. There is nothing about its appearance to suggest to the casual observer that it is not this month’s Bradshaw. Its evident aim and object in life is to deceive people into the idea that it is this month’s Bradshaw.

It is undermining my moral character, this book is. It is responsible for at least ten per cent. of the bad language that I use every year. It leads me into drink and gambling. I am continually finding myself with some three or four hours to wait at dismal provincial railway stations. I read all the advertisements on both platforms, and then I get wild and reckless, and plunge into the railway hotel and play billiards with the landlord for threes of Scotch.

I intend to have that Bradshaw put into my coffin with me when I am buried, so that I can show it to the recording angel and explain matters. I expect to obtain a discount of at least five-and-twenty per cent. off my bill of crimes for that Bradshaw.

The 3.10 train in the morning was, of course, too late for us. It would not get us to Ober-Ammergau until about 9 a.m. There was a train leaving at 7.30 (I let B. find out this) by which we might reach the village some time during the night, if only we could get a conveyance from Oberau, the nearest railway-station. Accordingly, we telegraphed to Cook’s agent, who was at Ober-Ammergau (we all of us sneer at Mr. Cook and Mr. Gaze, and such-like gentlemen, who kindly conduct travellers that cannot conduct themselves properly, when we are at home; but I notice most of us appeal, on the quiet, to one or the other of them the moment we want to move abroad), to try and send a carriage to meet us by that train; and then went to an hotel, and turned into bed until it was time to start.

We had another grand railway-ride from Munich to Oberau. We passed by the beautiful lake of Starnberg just as the sun was setting and gilding with gold the little villages and pleasant villas that lie around its shores. It was in the lake of Starnberg, near the lordly pleasure-house that he had built for himself in that fair vale, that poor mad Ludwig, the late King of Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor King! Fate gave him everything calculated to make a man happy, excepting one thing, and that was the power of being happy. Fate has a mania for striking balances. I knew a little shoeblack once who used to follow his profession at the corner of Westminster Bridge. Fate gave him an average of sixpence a day to live upon and provide himself with luxuries; but she also gave him a power of enjoying that kept him jolly all day long. He could buy as much enjoyment for a penny as the average man could for a ten-pound note — more, I almost think. He did not know he was badly off, any more than King Ludwig knew he was well off; and all day long he laughed and played, and worked a little — not more than he could help — and ate and drank, and gambled. The last time I saw him was in St. Thomas’s Hospital, into which he had got himself owing to his fatal passion for walking along outside the stone coping of Westminster Bridge. He thought it was “prime,” being in the hospital, and told me that he was living like a fighting-cock, and that he did not mean to go out sooner than he could help. I asked him if he were not in pain, and he said “Yes,” when he “thought about it.”

Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a “fighting-cock” for three days more. Then he died, cheerful up to the last, so they told me, like the plucky little English game-cock he was. He could not have been more than twelve years old when he crowed his last. It had been a short life for him, but a very merry one.

Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have gone into partnership, and so have shared between them the shoeblack’s power of enjoying and the king’s stock of enjoyments, what a good thing it would have been for both of them — especially for King Ludwig. He would never have thought of drowning himself then — life would have been too delightful.

But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh at men, and to make of life a paradox. To the one, she played ravishing strains, having first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf. To the other, she piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle, and he thought it was music, and danced!

A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw back to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish young lovers ended their disappointments, and, finding they could not be wedded together in life, wedded themselves together in death. The story, duly reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign intelligence, read more like some old Rhine-legend than the record of a real occurrence in this prosaic nineteenth century.

He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when proposed to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law, refused his consent. The Count then went abroad to try and make, or at all events improve, his fortune. He went to America, and there he prospered. In a year or two he came back, tolerably rich — to find, however, that he was too late. His lady, persuaded of his death, had been urged into a marriage with a rich somebody else. In ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented himself with continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich somebody else to pay for her keep. This young couple, however, a little lighter headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever it may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which the air around them seemed filled, went down one stormy night together to the lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by turning her grim comedy into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.

Soon after losing sight of Starnberg’s placid waters, we plunged into the gloom of the mountains, and began a long, winding climb among their hidden recesses. At times, shrieking as if in terror, we passed some ghostly hamlet, standing out white and silent in the moonlight against the shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark, still lake, or mountain torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long white streak across the blackness of the night.

We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town which possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and which, until a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed forward to Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to Ober-Ammergau. It was a tolerably steep climb up the road from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to Ammergau — so steep, indeed, that one stout pilgrim not many years ago, died from the exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged mountaineer and pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side, for no horses could do more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.

Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more pampered, and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and interest of his journey more and more curtailed and spoilt. In a few years’ time, he will be packed in cotton-wool in his own back-parlour, labelled for the place he wants to go to, and unpacked and taken out when he gets there. The railway now carries him round Mount Ettal to Oberau, from which little village a tolerably easy road, as mountain roadways go, of about four or five English miles takes him up to the valley of the Ammer.

It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station; but the place was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary occasions it is at mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims thronged the little hotel, wondering, as also did the landlord, where they were all going to sleep; and wondering still more, though this latter consideration evidently did not trouble their host, how they were going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in the morning in time for the play, which always begins at 8 a.m.

Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for them at five; and others, who could not secure carriages, and who had determined to walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake them at 2.30, and ordering breakfast for a quarter-past three sharp. (I had no idea there were such times in the morning!)

We were fortunate enough to find our land-lord, a worthy farmer, waiting for us with a tumble-down conveyance, in appearance something between a circus-chariot and a bath-chair, drawn by a couple of powerful-looking horses; and in this, after a spirited skirmish between our driver and a mob of twenty or so tourists, who pretended to mistake the affair for an omnibus, and who would have clambered into it and swamped it, we drove away.

Higher and higher we climbed, and grander and grander towered the frowning moon-bathed mountains round us, and chillier and chillier grew the air. For most of the way we crawled along, the horses tugging us from side to side of the steep road; but, wherever our coachman could vary the monotony of the pace by a stretch-gallop — as, for instance, down the precipitous descents that occasionally followed upon some extra long and toilsome ascent — he thoughtfully did so. At such times the drive became really quite exciting, and all our weariness was forgotten.

The steeper the descent, the faster, of course, we could go. The rougher the road, the more anxious the horses seemed to be to get over it quickly. During the gallop, B. and I enjoyed, in a condensed form, all the advantages usually derived from crossing the Channel on a stormy day, riding on a switchback railway, and being tossed in a blanket — a hard, nobbly blanket, full of nasty corners and sharp edges. I should never have thought that so many different sensations could have been obtained from one machine!

About half-way up we passed Ettal, at the entrance to the Valley of the Ammer. The great white temple, standing, surrounded by its little village, high up amid the mountain solitudes, is a famous place of pilgrimage among devout Catholics. Many hundreds of years ago, one of the early Bavarian kings built here a monastery as a shrine for a miraculous image of the Virgin that had been sent down to him from Heaven to help him when, in a foreign land, he had stood sore in need, encompassed by his enemies. Maybe the stout arms and hearts of his Bavarian friends were of some service in the crisis also; but the living helpers were forgotten. The old church and monastery, which latter was a sort of ancient Chelsea Hospital for decayed knights, was destroyed one terrible night some hundred and fifty years ago by a flash of lightning; but the wonder-working image was rescued unhurt, and may still be seen and worshipped beneath the dome of the present much less imposing church which has been reared upon the ruins of its ancestor.