Edelgard most inconsiderately leaving me to bear the entire burden of opening and shutting our things
Edelgard most inconsiderately leaving me to bear the entire burden of opening and shutting our things
reserving what I had to say for a more private moment I got the bags shut as well as I could, directed the most stupid porter (who was also apparently deaf, for each time I said anything to him he answered perfectly irrelevantly with the first letter of the alphabet) I have ever met to conduct me and the luggage to the refreshment room, and far too greatly displeased with Edelgard to take any further notice of her, walked on after the man leaving her to follow or not as she chose.
I think people must have detected as I strode along that I was a Prussian officer, for so many looked at me with interest. I wished I had had my uniform and spurs on, so that for once the non-martial island could have seen what the real thing is like. It was strange to me to be in a crowd of nothing but civilians. In spite of the early hour every arriving train disgorged myriads of them of both sexes. Not the flash of a button was to be seen; not the clink of a sabre to be heard; but, will it be believed? at least every third person arriving carried a bunch of flowers, often wrapped in tissue paper and always as carefully as though it had been a specially goodbelegtes Brödchen. That seemed to me very characteristic of the effeminate and non-military nation. In Prussia useless persons like old women sometimes transport bunches of flowersfrom one point to another—but that a man should be seen doing so, a man going evidently to his office, with his bag of business papers and his grave face, is a sight I never expected to see. The softness of this conduct greatly struck me. I could understand a packet of some good thing to eat between meals being brought, some tit-bit from the home kitchen—but a bunch of flowers! Well, well; let them go on in their effeminacy. It is what has always preceded a fall, and the fat little land will be a luscious morsel some day for muscular continental (and almost certainly German) jaws.
We had arranged to go straight that very day to the place in Kent where the caravans and Frau von Eckthum and her sister were waiting for us, leaving the sights of London for the end of our holiday, by which time our already extremely good though slow and slightly literary English (by which I mean that we talked more as the language is written than other people do, and that we were singularly pure in the matter of slang) would have developed into an up-to-date agility; and there being about an hour and a half’s time before the train for Wrotham started—which it conveniently did from the same station we arrived at—our idea was to have breakfast first and then, perhaps, to wash. This we accordingly did in the station restaurant, and made the astonishingacquaintance of British coffee and butter. Why, such stuff would not be tolerated for a moment in the poorest wayside inn in Germany, and I told the waiter so very plainly; but he only stared with an extremely stupid face, and when I had done speaking said “Eh?”
It was what the porter had said each time I addressed him, and I had already, therefore, not then knowing what it was or how it was spelt, had about as much of it as I could stand.
“Sir,” said I, endeavoring to annihilate the man with that most powerful engine of destruction, a witticism, “what has the first letter of the alphabet to do with everything I say?”
“Eh?” said he.
“Suppose, sir,” said I, “I were to confine my remarks to you to a strictly logical sequence, and when you say A merely reply B—do you imagine we should ever come to a satisfactory understanding?”
“Eh?” said he.
“Yet, sir,” I continued, becoming angry, for this was deliberate impertinence, “it is certain that one letter of the alphabet is every bit as good as another for conversational purposes.”
“Eh?” said he; and began to cast glances about him for help.
“This,” said I to Edelgard, “is typical. It is what you must expect in England.”
The head waiter here caught one of the man’s glances and hurried up.
“This gentleman,” said I, addressing the head waiter and pointing to his colleague, “is both impertinent and a fool.”
“Yes, sir. German, sir,” said the head waiter, flicking away a crumb.
Well, I gave neither of them a tip. The German was not given one for not at once explaining his inability to get away from alphabetical repartee and so shamefully hiding the nationality he ought to have openly rejoiced in, and the head waiter because of the following conversation:
“Can’t get ’em to talk their own tongue, sir,” said he, when I indignantly inquired why he had not. “None of ’em will, sir. Hear ’em putting German gentry who don’t know English to the greatest inconvenience. ‘Eh?’ this one’ll say—it’s what he picks up his first week, sir. ‘A thousand damns,’ say the German gentry, or something to that effect. ‘All right,’ says the waiter—that’s what he picks up his second week—and makes it worse. Then the German gentry gets really put out, and I see ’em almost foamin’ at the mouth. Impatient set of people, sir——”
“I conclude,” said I, interrupting him with a frown, “that the object of these poor exiled fellows is to learn the language as rapidly as possible and get back to their own country.”
“Or else they’re ashamed of theirs, sir,” said he, scribbling down the bill. “Rolls, sir? Eight, sir? Thank you, sir——”
“Ashamed?”
“Quite right, sir. Nasty cursin’ language. Not fit for a young man to get into the habit of. Most of the words got a swear about ’em somewhere, sir.”
“Perhaps you are not aware,” said I icily, “that at this very moment you are speaking to a German gentleman.”
“Sorry, sir. Didn’t notice it. No offence meant. Two coffees, four boiled eggs, eight—you did say eight rolls, sir? Compliment really, you know, sir.”
“Compliment!” I exclaimed, as he whisked away with the money to the paying desk; and when he came back I pocketed, with elaborate deliberation, every particle of change.
“That is how,” said I to Edelgard while he watched me, “one should treat these fellows.”
To which she, restored by the hot coffee to speaking point, replied (rather stupidly I thought),
“Is it?”
SHE became, however, more normal as the morning wore on, and by about eleven o’clock was taking an intelligent interest in hop-kilns.
These objects, recurring at frequent intervals as one travels through the county of Kent, are striking and picturesque additions to the landscape, and as our guide-book described them very fully I was able to talk a good deal about them. Kent pleased me very well. It looked as if there were money in it. Many thriving villages, many comfortable farmhouses, and many hoary churches peeping slyly at us through surrounding groups of timber so ancient that its not yet having been cut down and sold is in itself a testimony to the prevailing prosperity. It did not need much imagination to picture the comfortable clergyman lurking in the recesses of his snug parsonage and rubbing his well-nourished hands at life. Well, let him rub. Some day perhaps—and who knows how soon?—we shall have a decent Lutheran pastor in his black gown preaching the amended faith in every one of those churches.
Shortly, then, Kent is obviously flowing with milk and honey and well-to-do inhabitants; and when on referring to our guide-book I found it described as the Garden of England I was not in the least surprised, and neither was Edelgard. In this county, as we knew, part at any rate of our gipsying was to take place, for the caravans were stationed at a village about three miles from Wrotham, and we were very well satisfied that we were going to examine it more closely, because though no one could call the scenery majestic it yet looked full of promise of a comfortable nature. I observed for instance that the roads seemed firm and good, which was clearly important; also that the villages were so plentiful that there would be no fear of our ever getting beyond the reach of provisions. Unfortunately, the weather was not true August weather, which I take it is properly described by the word bland. This is not bland. The remains of the violent wind that had blown us across from Flushing still hurried hither and thither, and gleams of sunshine only too frequently gave place to heavy squalls of rain and hail. It was more like a blustering October day than one in what is supposed to be the very height and ripeness of summer, and we could only both hope, as the carriage windows banged and rattled, that our caravan would be heavy enough to withstand the temptation to goon by itself during the night, urged on from behind by the relentless forces of nature. Still, each time the sun got the better of the inky clouds and the Garden of England laughed at us from out of its bravery of graceful hop-fields and ripening corn, we could not resist a feeling of holiday hopefulness. Edelgard’s spirits rose with every mile, and I, having readily forgiven her on her asking me to and acknowledging she had been selfish, was quite like a boy; and when we got out of the train at Wrotham beneath a blue sky and a hot sun with the hail-clouds retreating over the hills and found we would have to pack ourselves and our many packages into a fly so small that, as I jocularly remarked in English, it was not a fly at all but an insect, Edelgard was so much entertained that for several minutes she was perfectly convulsed with laughter.
By means of the address neatly written in Latin characters on an envelope, we had no difficulty in getting the driver to start off as though he knew where he was going, but after we had been on the way for about half an hour he grew restless, and began to twist round on his box and ask me unintelligible questions. I suppose he talked and understood onlypatois, for I could not in the least make out what he meant, and when I requested him to be more clear I could see by his foolish face that he was constitutionally unable to be it. A second exhibition of the addressed envelope, however, soothed him for a time, and we continued to advance up and down chalky roads, over the hedges on each side of which leapt the wind and tried to blow our hats off. The sun was in our eyes, the dust was in our eyes, and the wind was in our faces. Wrotham, when we looked behind, had disappeared. In front was a chalky desolation. We could see nothing approaching a village, yet Panthers, the village we were bound for, was only three miles from the station, and not, observe, three full-blooded German miles, but the dwindled and anæmic English kind that are typical, as so much else is, of the soul and temper of the nation. Therefore we began to be uneasy, and to wonder whether the man were trustworthy. It occurred to me that the chalk pits we constantly met would not be bad places to take us into and rob us, and I certainly could not speak English quickly enough to meet a situation demanding rapid dialogue, nor are there any directions in my German-English Conversational Guide as to what you are to say when you are being murdered.
Still jocose, but as my hearers will notice, jocose with a tinge of grimness, I imparted these two linguistic facts to Edelgard, who shuddered and suggested renewed applications of the addressed envelope to the driver. “Also it ispast dinner time,” she added anxiously. “I know becausemein Magen knurrt.”
By means of repeated calls and my umbrella I drew the driver’s attention to us and informed him that I would stand no further nonsense. I told him this with great distinctness and the deliberation forced upon me by want of practice. He pulled up to hear me out, and then, merely grinning, drove on. “The youngest Storchwerderdroschkedriver,” I cried indignantly to Edelgard, “would die of shame on his box if he did not know every village, nay, every house within three miles of it with the same exactitude with which he knows the inside of his own pocket.”
Then I called up to the man once more, and recollecting that nothing clears our Hermann’s brain at home quicker than to address him asEselI said, “Ask, ass.”
He looked down over his shoulder at me with an expression of great surprise.
“What?” said he.
“What?” said I, confounded by this obtuseness. “What? The way, of course.”
He pulled up once more and turned right round on his box.
“Look here——” he said, and paused.
“Look where?” said I, very naturally supposing he had something to show me.
“Who are you talkin’ to?” said he.
The question on the face of it was so foolish that a qualm gripped my heart lest we had to do with a madman. Edelgard felt the same, for she drew closer to me.
Luckily at that moment I saw a passer-by some way down the road, and springing out of the fly hastened to meet him in spite of Edelgard’s demand that I should not leave her alone. On reaching him I took off my hat and courteously asked him to direct us to Panthers, at the same time expressing my belief that the flyman was not normal. He listened with the earnest and strained attention English people gave to my utterances, an attention caused, I believe, by the slightly unpractised pronunciation combined with the number and variety of words at my command, and then going up (quite fearlessly) to the flyman he pointed in the direction entirely opposed to the one we were following and bade him go there.
“I won’t take him nowhere,” said the flyman with strange passion; “he calls me a ass.”
“It is not your fault,” said I (very handsomely, I thought). “You are what you were made. You cannot help yourself.”
“I won’t take him nowhere,” repeated the flyman, with, if anything, increased passion.
The passer-by looked from one to another with a faint smile.
“The expression,” said he to the flyman, “is,you see, merely a term of recognition in the gentleman’s country. You can’t reasonably object to that, you know. Drive on like a sensible man, and get your fare.”
And lifting his hat to Edelgard he continued his passing by.
Well, we did finally arrive at the appointed place—indeed, my hearers next winter will know all the time that we must have, or why should I be reading this aloud?—after being forced by the flyman to walk the last twenty minutes up a hill which, he declared, his horse would not otherwise be able to ascend. The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle—a hard one to encounter when it is long past dinner-time. I am aware that by English clocks it was not past it, but what was that to me? My watch showed that in Storchwerder, the place our inner natures were used to, it was half-past two, a good hour beyond the time at which they are accustomed daily to be replenished, and no arbitrary theory, anyhow no perilously near approach to one, will convince a man against the evidence of his senses that he is not hungry because a foreign clock says it is not dinner-time when it is.
Panthers, we found on reaching the top of the hill and pausing to regain our composure, is but a house here and a house there scattered over a
The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle
The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle
bleak, ungenial landscape. It seemed an odd, high up district to use as a terminus for caravans, and I looked down the steep, narrow lane we had just ascended and wondered how a caravan would get up it. Afterward I found that they never do get up it, but arrive home from the exactly opposite direction along a fair road which was the one any but an imbecile driver would have brought us. We reached our destination by, so to speak, its back door; and we were still standing on the top of the hill doing what is known as getting one’s wind, for I am not what would be called an ill-covered man but rather, as I jestingly tell Edelgard, a walking compliment to her good cooking, and she herself was always of a substantial build, not exaggeratedly but agreeably so—we were standing, I say, struggling for breath when some one came out quickly from a neighbouring gate and stopped with a smile of greeting upon seeing us.
It was the gaunt sister.
We were greatly pleased. Here we were, then, safely arrived, and joined to at least a portion of our party. Enthusiastically we grasped both her hands and shook them. She laughed as she returned our greetings, and I was so much pleased to find some one I knew that though Edelgard commented afterward somewhat severely on her dress because it was so short thatit nowhere touched the ground, I noticed nothing except that it seemed to be extremely neat, and as for not touching the ground Edelgard’s skirt was followed wherever she went by a cloud of chalky dust which was most unpleasant.
Now why were we so glad to see this lady again? Why, indeed, are people ever glad to see each other again? I mean people who when they last saw each other did not like each other. Given a sufficient lapse of time, and I have observed that even those who parted in an atmosphere thick with sulphur of implied cursings will smile and genially inquire how the other does. I have observed this, I say, but I cannot explain it. There had, it is true, never been any sulphur about our limited intercourse with the lady on the few occasions on which proper feeling prevailed enough to induce her to visit her flesh and blood in Prussia—our attitude toward her had simply been one of well-bred chill, of chill because no thinking German can, to start with, be anything but prejudiced against a person who commits the unpatriotism—not to call it by a harsher name—of selling her inestimable German birthright for the mess of an English marriage. Also she was personally not what Storchwerder could like, for she was entirely wanting in the graces and undulations of form which are the least one has a right to expect of a being professing to be a woman. Also she had a way of talking which disconcerted Storchwerder, and nobody likes being disconcerted. Our reasons for joining issue with her in the matter of caravans were first, that we could not help it, only having discovered she was coming when it was too late; and secondly, that it was a cheap and convenient way of seeing a new country. She with her intimate knowledge of English was to be, we privately told each other, our unpaid courier—I remember Edelgard’s amusement when the consolatory cleverness of this way of looking at it first struck her.
But I am still at a loss to explain how it was that when she unexpectedly appeared at the top of the hill at Panthers we both rushed at her with an effusiveness that could hardly have been exceeded if it had been Edelgard’s grandmother Podhaben who had suddenly stood before us, an old lady of ninety-two of whom we are both extremely fond, and who, as is well known, is going to leave my wife her money when she (which I trust sincerely she will not do for a long time yet) dies. I cannot explain it, I say, but there it is. Rush we did, and effusive we were, and it was reserved for a quieter moment to remember with some natural discomposure that we had showed far more enthusiasm than she had. Not that she was not pleasant, but there is a gapbetween pleasantness and enthusiasm, and to be the one of two persons who is most pleased is to put yourself in the position of the inferior, of the suppliant, of him who hopes, or is eager to ingratiate himself. Will it be believed that when later on I said something to this effect about some other matter in general conversation, the gaunt sister immediately cried, “Oh, but that’s not generous.”
“What is not generous?” I asked surprised, for it was the first day of the tour and I was not then as much used as I subsequently became to her instant criticism of all I said.
“That way of thinking,” said she.
Edelgard immediately bristled—(alas, what would make her bristle now?)
“Otto is the most generous of men,” she said. “Every year on Sylvester evening he allows me to invite six orphans to look at the remains of our Christmas tree and be given, before they go away, doughnuts and grog.”
“What! Grog for orphans?” cried the gaunt sister, neither silenced nor impressed; and there ensued a warm discussion on, as she put it, (a) the effect of grog on orphans, (b) the effect of grog on doughnuts, (c) the effect of grog on combined orphans and doughnuts.
But I not only anticipate, I digress.
Inside the gate through which this lady hademerged stood the caravans and her gentle sister. I was so much pleased at seeing Frau von Eckthum again that at first I did not notice our future homes. She was looking remarkably well and was in good spirits, and, though dressed in the same way as her sister, by adding to the attire all those graces so peculiarly her own the effect she produced was totally different. At least, I thought so. Edelgard said she saw nothing to choose between them.
After the first greetings she half turned to the row of caravans, and with a little motion of the hand and a pretty smile of proprietary pride said, “There they are.”
There, indeed, they were.
There were three; all alike, sober brown vehicles, easily distinguishable, as I was pleased to notice, from common gipsy carts. Clean curtains fluttered at the windows, the metal portions were bright, and the names painted prettily on them were the Elsa, the Ilsa, and the Ailsa. It was an impressive moment, the moment of our first setting eyes upon them. Under those frail roofs were we for the next four weeks to be happy, as Edelgard said, and healthy and wise—“Or,” I amended shrewdly on hearing her say this, “vice versa.”
Frau von Eckthum, however, preferred Edelgard’s prophecy, and gave her an appreciativelook—my hearers will remember, I am sure, how agreeably her dark eyelashes contrast with the fairness of her hair. The gaunt sister laughed, and suggested that we should paint out the names already on the caravans and substitute in large letters Happy, Healthy, and Wise, but not considering this particularly amusing I did not take any trouble to smile.
Three large horses that were to draw them and us stood peacefully side by side in a shed being fed with oats by a weather-beaten person the gaunt sister introduced as old James. This old person, a most untidy, dusty-looking creature, touched his cap, which is the inadequate English way of showing respect to superiors—as inadequate at its end of the scale as the British army is at the other—and shuffled off to fetch in our luggage, and the gaunt sister suggesting that we should climb up and see the interior of our new home with some difficulty we did so, there being a small ladder to help us which, as a fact, did not help us either then or later, no means being discovered from beginning to end of the tour by which it could be fixed firmly at a convenient angle.
I think I could have climbed up better if Frau von Eckthum had not been looking on; besides, at that moment I was less desirous of inspecting the caravans than I was of learning when, where, and how we were going to haveour delayed dinner. Edelgard, however, behaved like a girl of sixteen once she had succeeded in reaching the inside of the Elsa, and most inconsiderately kept me lingering there too while she examined every corner and cried with tiresome iteration that it waswundervoll,herrlich, andputzig.
“I knew you’d like it,” said Frau von Eckthum from below, amused apparently by this kittenish conduct.
“Like it?” called back Edelgard. “But it is delicious—so clean, so neat, so miniature.”
“May I ask where we dine?” I inquired, endeavouring to free the skirts of my new mackintosh from the door, which had swung to (the caravan not standing perfectly level) and jammed them tightly. I did not need to raise my voice, for in a caravan even with its door and windows shut people outside can hear what you say just as distinctly as people inside, unless you take the extreme measure of putting something thick over your head and whispering. (Be it understood I am alluding to a caravan at rest: when in motion you may shout your secrets, for the noise of crockery leaping and breaking in what we learned—with difficulty—to allude to as the pantry will effectually drown them.)
The two ladies took no heed of my question, but coming up after us—they never could havegot in had they been less spare—filled the van to overflowing while they explained the various arrangements by which our miseries on the road were to be mitigated. It was chiefly the gaunt sister who talked, she being very nimble of tongue, but I must say that on this occasion Frau von Eckthum did not confine herself to the attitude I so much admired in her, the ideal feminine one of smiling and keeping quiet. I, meanwhile, tried to make myself as small as possible, which is what persons in caravans try to do all the time. I sat on a shiny yellow wooden box that ran down one side of our “room” with holes in its lid and a flap at the end by means of which it could, if needed, be lengthened and turned into a bed for a third sufferer. (On reading this aloud I shall probably substitute traveller for sufferer, and some milder word such as discomfort for the word miseries in the first sentence of the paragraph.) Inside the box was a mattress, also extra sheets, towels, etc., so that, the gaunt sister said there was nothing to prevent our having house-parties for week-ends. As I do not like such remarks even in jest I took care to show by my expression that I did not, but Edelgard, to my surprise, who used always to be the first to scent the vicinity of thin ice, laughed heartily as she continued her frantically pleased examination of the van’s contents.
It is not to be expected of any man that heshall sit in a cramped position on a yellow box at an hour long past his dinner time and take an interest in puerilities. To Edelgard it seemed to be a kind of a doll’s house, and she, entirely forgetting the fact of which I so often reminded her that she will be thirty next birthday, behaved in much the same way as a child who has just been presented with this expensive form of toy by some foolish and spendthrift relation. Frau von Eckthum, too, appeared to me to be less intelligent than I was accustomed to suppose her. She smiled at Edelgard’s delight as though it pleased her, chatting in a way I hardly recognized as she drew my wife’s attention to the objects she had not had time to notice. Edelgard’s animation amazed me. She questioned and investigated and admired without once noticing that as I sat on the lid of the wooden box I was obviously filled with sober thoughts. Why, she was so much infatuated that she actually demanded at intervals that I too should join in this exhibition of childishness; and it was not until I said very pointedly that I, at least, was not a little girl, that she was recalled to a proper sense of her behaviour.
“Poor Otto is hungry,” she said, pausing suddenly in her wild career round the caravan and glancing at my face.
“Is he? Then he must be fed,” said the gaunt sister, as carelessly and with as little realinterest as if there were no particular hurry. “Look—aren’t these too sweet?—each on its own little hook—six of them, and their saucers in a row underneath.”
And so it would have gone on indefinitely if an extremely pretty, nice, kind little lady had not put her head in at the door and asked with a smile that fell like oil on the troubled water of my brain whether we were not dying for something to eat.
Never did the British absence of ceremony and introductions and preliminary phrases seem to me excellent before. I sprang up, and immediately knocked my elbow so hard against a brass bracket holding a candle and hanging on a hook in the wall that I was unable altogether to suppress an exclamation of pain. Remembering, however, what is due to society I very skilfully converted it into a rather precipitate and agonized answer to the little lady’s question, and she, with a charming hospitality, pressing me to come into her adjoining garden and have some food, I accepted with alacrity, only regretting that I was unable, from the circumstance of her going first, to help her down the ladder. (As a matter of fact she had in the end to help me, because the door slammed behind me and again imprisoned the skirts of my mackintosh.)
Edelgard, absorbed in delighted contemplationof a corner beneath the so-called pantry full of brooms and dusters also hanging in rows on hooks, only shook her head when I inquired if she would not come too; so leaving her to her ecstasies I went off with my new protector, who asked me why I wore a mackintosh when there was not a cloud in the sky. I avoided giving a direct answer by retorting playfully (though wholly politely), “Why not?”—and indeed my reasons, connected with creases and other ruin attendant on confinement in a hold-all, were of too domestic and private a nature to be explained to a stranger so charming. But my counter-question luckily amused her, and she laughed as she opened a small gate in the wall and led me into her garden.
Here I was entertained with the greatest hospitality by herself and her husband. The fleet of caravans which yearly pervades that part of England is stationed when not in action on their premises. Hence departs the joyful caravaner, accompanied by kind wishes; hither he returns sobered, and is received with balm and bandages—at least, I am sure he would find them and every other kind form of solace in the little garden on the hill. I spent a very pleasant and reviving half-hour in a sheltered corner of it, enjoying myal frescomeal and acquiring much information. To my question as to whether my entertainerswere to be of our party they replied, to my disappointment, that they were not. Their functions were restricted to this seeing that we started happy, and being prompt and helpful when we came back. From them I learned that our party was to consist, besides ourselves and Frau von Eckthum and that sister whom I have hitherto distinguished by the adjective gaunt, putting off the necessity as long as possible of alluding to her by name, she having, as my hearers perhaps remember, married a person with the unpronounceable one if you see it written and the unspellable one if you hear it said of Menzies-Legh—the party was to consist, I say, besides these four, of Menzies-Legh’s niece and one of her friends; of Menzies-Legh himself; and of two young men about whom no precise information was obtainable.
“But how? But where?” said I, remembering the limited accommodations of the three caravans.
My host reassured me by explaining that the two young men would inhabit a tent by night which, by day, would be carried in one of the caravans.
“In which one?” I asked anxiously.
“You must settle that among yourselves,” said he smiling.
“That’s what one does all day long caravaning,” said my hostess, handing me a cup of coffee.
“What does one do?” I asked, eager for information.
“Settle things among oneselves,” said she. “Only generally one doesn’t.”
I put it down to my want of practice in the more idiomatic involutions of the language that I did not quite follow her meaning; but as one of my principles is never to let people know that I have not understood them I merely bowed slightly and, taking out my note-book, remarked that if that were so I would permit myself to make a list of our party in order to keep its various members more distinct in my mind.
The following is the way in which we were to be divided:
1. A caravan (the Elsa), containing the Baron and Baroness von Ottringel, of Storchwerder in Prussia.
2. Another caravan (the Ailsa), containing Mr. and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, of various addresses, they being ridiculously and superfluously rich.
3. Another caravan (the Ilsa), containing Frau von Eckthum, the Menzies-Legh niece, and her (as I gathered, school) friend. In this caravan the yellow box was to be used.
4. One tent, containing two young men, name and status unknown.
The ill-dressed person, old James, was coming too, but would sleep each night with the horses,they being under his special care; and all of the party (except ourselves and Frau von Eckthum and her sister who had already, as I need not say, done so) were yet to assemble. They were expected every moment, and had been expected all day. If they did not come soon our first day’s march, opined my host, would not see us camping further away than the end of the road, for it was already past four o’clock. This reminded me that my luggage ought to be unpacked and stowed away, and I accordingly begged to be excused that I might go and superintend the operation, for I have long ago observed that when the controlling eye of the chief is somewhere else things are very apt to go irremediably wrong.
“Against stupidity,” says some great German—it must have been Goethe, and if it was not, then no doubt it was Schiller, they having, I imagine, between them said everything there is to be said—“against stupidity the very gods struggle in vain.” And I beg that this may not be taken as a reflection on my dear wife, but rather as an inference of general applicability. In any case the recollection of it sent me off with a swinging stride to the caravans.
DARKNESS had, if not actually gathered, certainly approached within measurable distance, substantially aided by lowering storm-clouds, by the time we were ready to start. Not that we were, as a fact, ever ready to start, because the two young girls of the party, with truly British inconsideration for others, had chosen to do that which Menzies-Legh in fantastic idiom described as not turning up. I heard him say it several times before I was able, by carefully comparing it with the context, to discover his meaning. The moment I discovered it I of course saw its truth: turned up they certainly had not, and though too well-bred to say it aloud I privately applauded him every time he remarked, with an accumulating emphasis, “Bother those girls.”
For the first two hours nobody had time to bother them, and to get some notion of the busy scene the yard presented my hearers must imagine a bivouac during our manoeuvres in which the soldiers shall all be recruits just joined and where there shall be no superior to direct them. I know to imagine this requires imagination, butonly he who does it will be able to form an approximately correct notion of what the yard looked like and sounded like while the whole party (except the two girls who were not there) did their unpacking.
It will be obvious on a moment’s reflection that portmanteaus, etc., had to be opened on the bare earth in the midst, so to speak, of untamed nature, with threatening clouds driving over them, and rude winds seizing what they could of their contents and wantoning with them about the yard. It will be equally obvious that these contents had to be handed up one by one by the person below to the person in the caravan who was putting them away and the person below having less to do would be quicker in his movements, while the person above having more to do would be—I suppose naturally but I think with a little self-control it ought not to be so—quicker in her temper; and so she was, and quite unjustifiably, because though she might have the double work of sorting and putting away I, on the other hand, had to stoop so continuously that I was very shortly in a condition of actual physical distress. The young men, who might have helped and at first did help Frau von Eckthum (though I consider they were on more than delicate ground while they did it) were prevented being of use because one had brought a bullterrier, a most dangerous looking beast, and the other—probably out of compliment to us—a white Pomeranian; and the bull terrier, without the least warning or preliminary growl such as our decent German dogs emit before proceeding to action, suddenly fixed his teeth into the Pomeranian and left them there. The howls of the Pomeranian may be imagined. The bull terrier, on the other hand, said nothing at all. At once the hubbub in the yard was increased tenfold. No efforts of its master could make the bull terrier let go. Menzies-Legh called for pepper, and the women-folk ransacked the larders in the rear of the vans, but though there were cruets there was no pepper. At length the little lady of the garden, whose special gift it seemed to appear at the right moment, judging no doubt that the sounds in the yard could not altogether be explained by caravaners unpacking, came out with a pot full, and throwing it into the bull terrier’s face he was obliged to let go in order to sneeze.
During the rest of the afternoon the young men could help no one because they were engaged in the care of their dogs, the owner of the Pomeranian attending to its wounds and the owner of the bull terrier preventing a repetition of its conduct. And Menzies-Legh came up to me and said in his singularly trailing melancholyvoice, did I not think they were jolly dogs and going to be a great comfort to us.
“Oh, quite,” said I, unable exactly to understand what he meant.
Still less was I able to understand the attitude of the dogs’ masters toward each other. Not thus would our fiery German youth have behaved. Undoubtedly in a similar situation they would have come to blows, or in any case to the class of words that can only be honourably wiped out in the blood of a duel. But these lymphatic Englishmen, both of them straggly, pale persons in clothes so shabby and so much too big that I was at a loss to conceive how they could appear in them before ladies, hung on each to his dog in perfect silence, and when it was over and the aggressor’s owner, said he was sorry, the Pomeranian’s owner, instead of confronting him with the fury of a man who has been wronged and owes it to his virility not to endure it, actually tried to pretend that somehow, by some means, it was all his dog’s fault or his own in allowing him to be near the other, and therefore it was he who, in their jargon, was “frightfully sorry.” Such is the softness of this much too rich and far too comfortable nation. Merely to see it made me blush to be a man; but I became calm again on recollecting that the variety of man I happened to be was, under God, a German. And I discovered later that neither of them ever touch an honest mug of beer, but drink instead—will it be believed?—water.
Now it must not be supposed that at this point of my holiday I had already ceased to enjoy it. On the contrary, I was enjoying myself in my quiet way very much. Not only does the study of character greatly interest me, but I am blest with a sense of humour united to that toughness of disposition which stops a man from saying, however much he may want to, die. Therefore I bore the unpacking and the arranging and the advice I got from everybody and the questions I was asked by everybody and the calls here and the calls there and the wind that did not cease a moment and the rain that pelted down at intervals, without a murmur. I had paid for my holiday, and I meant to enjoy it. But it did seem to me a strange way of taking pleasure for wealthy people like the Menzies-Leghs, who could have gone to the best hotel in the gayest resort, and who instead were bent into their portmanteaus as double as I was, doing work that their footmen would have scorned; and when during an extra sharp squall we had hastily shut our portmanteaus and all scrambled into our respective—I was going to say kennels, but I will be just and say caravans, I expressed this surprise to Edelgard, she said Mrs. Menzies-Legh had told her whileI was at luncheon that both she and her sister desired for a time to remove themselves as far as possible from what she called the ministrations of menials. They wished, said Edelgard, quoting Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s words, to endeavour to fulfil the Scriptures and work with their hands the things which are good; and Edelgard, who was much amused by the reference to the Scriptures, agreed with me, who was also greatly diverted, that it is a game, this working with one’s hands, that only seems desirable to those so much surfeited with all that is worth having that they cease to be able to distinguish its value, and that it would be interesting to watch how long the two pampered ladies enjoyed playing it. Edelgard of course had no fears for herself, for she is a most admirably trainedhausfrau, and the keeping of our tiny wheeled house in order would be easy enough after the keeping in order of our flat at home and the constant supervision, amounting on washing days to goading, of Clothilde. But the two sisters had not had the advantage of a husband who kept them to their work from the beginning, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh was a ne’er-do-well, spoiled, and encouraged to do nothing whatever except, so far as I could see, practise how best to pretend she was clever.
By six we were ready to start. From six to seven we bothered the girls. At seven seriousconsultations commenced as to what had better be done. Start we must, for kind though our host and hostess were I do not think they wanted us to camp in their front yard; if they did they did not say so, and it became every moment more apparent that a stormy night was drawing nearer across the hills. Menzies-Legh, with growing uneasiness, asked his wife I suppose a dozen times what on earth, as he put it, had become of the girls; whether she thought he had better go and look for them; whether she thought they had had an accident; whether she thought they had lost the address or themselves; to all of which she answered that she thought nothing except that they were naughty girls who would be suitably scolded when they did come.
The little lady of the garden came on the scene at this juncture with her usual happy tact, and suggested that it being late and we being new at it and therefore no doubt going to take longer arranging our camp this first night than we afterward would, we should start along the road to a bit of common about half a mile further on and there, with no attempt at anything like a march, settle for the night. We would then, she pointed out, either meet the girls or, if they came another way, she would send them round to us.
Such sensible suggestions could only, as the English say, be jumped at. In a moment all wasbustle. We had been sitting disconsolately each on his ladder arguing (not without touches of what threatened to become recrimination), and we now briskly put them away and prepared to be off. With some difficulty the horses, who did not wish to go, were put in, the dogs were chained behind separate vans, the ladders slung underneath (this was no easy job, but one of the straggly young men came to our assistance just as Edelgard was about to get under our caravan and find out how to do it, and showed such unexpected skill that I put him down as being probably in the bolt and screw trade), adieux and appropriate speeches were made to our kind entertainer, and off we went.
First marched old James, leading the Ilsa’s horse, with Menzies-Legh beside him, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, her head wrapped up very curiously in yards and yards of some transparent fluttering stuff of a most unpractically feminine nature and her hand grasping a walking stick of a most aggressively masculine one, marched behind, giving me who followed (to my surprise I found it was expected of me that far from sitting as I had intended to do inside our caravan I should trudge along leading our horse) much unneeded and unasked-for advice. Her absurd head arrangement, which I afterward learned was called a motor veil, prevented my seeing anything exceptegregiously long eyelashes and the tip of an inquiring and strange to say not over aristocratic nose—Edelgard’s, true to its many ancestors, is purest hook. Taller and gaunter than ever in her straight up and down sort of costume, she stalked beside me her head on a level with mine (and I am by no means a short man), telling me what I ought to do and what I ought not to do in the matter of leading a horse; and when she had done thatad nauseam,ad libitum, andad infinitum(I believe I have forgotten nothing at all of my classics) she turned to my peaceful wife sitting on the Elsa’s platform and announced that if she stayed up there she would probably soon be sorry.
In another moment Edelgard was sorry, for unfortunately my horse had had either too many oats or not enough exercise, and the instant the first van had lumbered through the gate and out of sight round the corner to the left he made a sudden and terrifying attempt to follow it at a gallop.
Those who know caravans know that they must never gallop: not, that is, if the contents are to remain unbroken and the occupants unbruised. They also know that no gate is more than exactly wide enough to admit of their passing through it, and that unless the passing throughis calculated and carried out to a nicety the caravan that emerges will not be the caravan that went in. Providence that first evening was on my side, for I never got through any subsequent gate with an equal neatness. My heart had barely time to leap into my mouth before we were through and out in the road, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, catching hold of the bridle, was able to prevent the beast’s doing what was clearly in his eye, turn round to the left after his mate with a sharpness that would have snapped the Elsa in two.
Edelgard, rather pale, scrambled down. The sight of our caravan heaving over inequalities or lurching as it was turned round was a sight I never learned to look at without a tightened feeling about the throat. Anxiously I asked Mrs. Menzies-Legh, when the horse, having reached the rear of the Ilsa, had settled down again, what would happen if I did not get through the next gate with an equal skill.
“Everything may happen,” said she, “from the scraping off of the varnish to the scraping off of a wheel.
“But this is terrible,” I cried. “What would we do with one wheel too few?”
“We couldn’t do anything till there was a new one.”
“And who would pay——”
I stopped. Aspects of the tour were revealed to me which had not till then been illuminated. “It depends,” said she, answering my unfinished question, “whose wheel it was.”
“And suppose my dear wife,” I inquired after a pause during which many thoughts surged within me, “should have the misfortune to break, say, a cup?”
“A new cup would have to be provided.”
“And would I—but suppose cups are broken by circumstances over which I have no control?”
She snatched quickly at the bridle. “Is that the horse?” she asked.
“Is what the horse?”
“The circumstances. If I hadn’t caught him then he’d have had your caravan in the ditch.”
“My dear lady,” I cried, nettled, “he would have done nothing of the sort. I was paying attention. As an officer you must admit that my ignorance of horses cannot be really as extensive as you are pleased to pretend you think.”
“Dear Baron, when does a woman ever admit?”
A shout from behind drowned the answer that would, I was sure, have silenced her, for I had not then discovered that no answer ever did. It was from one of the pale young men, who was making signs to us from the rear.
“Run back and see what he wants,” commanded Mrs. Menzies-Legh, marching on at my horse’s head with Edelgard, slightly out of breath, beside her.
I found that our larder had come undone and was shedding our ox-tongue, which we had hoped to keep private, on to the road in front of the eyes of Frau von Eckthum and the two young men. This was owing to Edelgard’s carelessness, and I was extremely displeased with her. At the back of each van were two lockers, one containing an oil stove and saucepans and the other, provided with air-holes, was the larder in which our provisions were to be kept. Both had doors consisting of flaps that opened outward and downward and were fastened by a padlock. With gross carelessness Edelgard, after putting in the tongue, had merely shut the larder door without padlocking it, and when a sufficient number of jolts had occurred the flap fell open and the tongue fell out. It was being followed by some private biscuits we had brought.
Naturally I was upset. Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful she recedes about a year in my esteem. It takes her a year of attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on which she previously stood. She knew this, and used to be careful to try to keep proper pace, if I may so express it, with my love, and at the date at which I have arrived in thenarrative had not yet given up trying, so that when by shouting I had made Mrs. Menzies-Legh understand that the Elsa was to be stopped Edelgard hurried back to inquire what was wrong, and was properly distressed when she saw the result of her negligence. Well, repentance may be a good thing, but our ox-tongue was gone forever; before he could be stopped the Ailsa’s horse, following close behind, had placed his huge hoof on it and it became pulp.
“How sad,” said Frau von Eckthum gazing upon this ruin. “But so nice of you, dear Baroness, to think of it. It might just have saved us all from starvation.”
“Well, it can’t now,” said one of the young men; and he took it on the point of his stick and cast it into the ditch.
Edelgard began silently to pick up the scattered biscuits. Immediately both the young men darted forward to do it for her with a sudden awakening to energy that seemed very odd in persons who slouched along with their hands in their pockets. It made me wonder whether perhaps they thought her younger than she was. As we resumed our march, I came to the conclusion that this must be so, for such activity of assistance would otherwise be unnatural, and I resolved to take the earliest opportunity of bringing the conversation round to birthdays and thencarelessly mentioning that my wife’s next one would be her thirtieth. In this department of all others I am not the man to allow buds to go unnipped.
We had not been travelling ten minutes before we came to a stony turning up to the right which old James, who was a native of those parts, said was the entrance to the common. It seemed strange to camp almost within a stone’s throw of our starting-place, but the rain was at that moment pelting down on our defenceless heads, and people hurrying to their snug homes stopped in spite of it to look at us with a wondering pity, so that we all wished to get off the road as soon as possible and into the privacy of furze bushes. The lane was in no sense a hill: it was a gentle incline, almost immediately reaching flat ground; but it was soft and stony, and the Ilsa’s horse, after dragging his caravan for a few yards up it, could get no farther, and when Menzies-Legh put the roller behind the back wheel to prevent the Ilsa’s returning thither from whence it had just come the chain of the roller snapped, the roller, released, rolled away, and the Ilsa began to move backward on top of the Elsa, which in its turn began to move backward on top of the Ailsa, which in its turn began to move backward across the road in the direction of the ditch.
It was an unnerving spectacle; for it must be borne in mind that however small the caravans seemed when you were inside them when you were outside they looked like mighty monsters, towering above hedges, filling up all but wide roads, and striking awe into the hearts even of motorists, who got out of their way with the eager politeness otherwise rude persons display when confronted by yet greater powers of being disagreeable.
Menzies-Legh and the two young men, acting on some shouted directions from old James, rushed at the stones lying about and selecting the biggest placed them, I must say with commendable promptness, behind the Ilsa’s wheels, and what promised to be an appalling catastrophe was averted. I, who was reassuring Edelgard, was not able to help. She had asked me with ill-concealed anxiety whether I thought the caravans would begin to go backward in the night when we were inside them, and I was doing my best to calm her, only of course I had to point out that it was extremely windy; and quite a dirty and undesirable workman trudging by at that moment with his bag of tools on his back and his face set homeward, she stared after him and said: “Otto, how nice to be going to a house.”
“Come, come,” said I rallying her—but undoubtedly the weather was depressing.
We had to trace up the lane to the common. This was the first time that ominous verb fell upon my ear; how often it was destined to do so will be readily imagined by those of my countrymen who have ever visited the English county of Sussex supposing, which I doubt, that such there are. Its meaning is that you are delayed for any length of time from an hour upward at the bottom of each hill while the united horses drag one caravan after another to the top. On this first occasion the tracing chains we had brought with us behaved in the same way the roller chain had and immediately snapped, and Menzies-Legh, moved to anger, inquired severely of old James how it was that everything we touched broke; but he, being innocent, was not very voluble, and Menzies-Legh soon left him alone. Happily we had another pair of chains with us. All this, however, meant great delays, and the rain had almost left off, and the sun was setting in a gloomy bank of leaden clouds across a comfortless distance and sending forth its last pale beams through thinning raindrops, by the time the first caravan safely reached the common.
If any of you should by any chance, however remote, visit Panthers, pray go to Grib’s (or Grip’s—in spite of repeated inquiries I at no time discovered which it was) Common, and picture to yourselves our first night in that bleak