It was an unnerving spectacle
It was an unnerving spectacle
refuge. For it was a refuge—the alternative being to march along blindly till the next morning, which was, of course, equivalent to not being an alternative at all—but how bleak a one! Gray shadows were descending on it, cold winds were whirling round it, the grass was, naturally, dripping, and scattered in and out among the furze bushes were the empty sardine and other tins of happier sojourners. These last objects were explained by the presence of a hop-field skirting one side of the common, a hop-field luckily not yet in that state which attracts hop-pickers, or the common would hardly have been a place to which gentlemen care to take their wives. On the opposite side to the hop-field the ground fell away, and the tips of two hop-kilns peered at us over the edge. In front of us, concealed by the furze and other bushes of a prickly, clinging nature, lay the road, along which people going home to houses, as Edelgard put it, were constantly hurrying. All round, except on the hop-field side, we could see much farther than we wanted to across a cheerless stretch of country. The three caravans were drawn up in a row facing the watery sunset, because the wind chiefly came from the east (though it also came from all round) and the backs of the vans offered more resistance to its fury than any other side of them, there being only one small wooden window in thatportion of them which, being kept carefully shut by us during the whole tour, would have been infinitely better away.
I hope my hearersseethe caravans: if not it seems to me I read in vain. Square—or almost square—brown boxes on wheels, the door in front, with a big aperture at the side of it shut at night by a wooden shutter and affording a pleasant prospect (when there was one) by day, a much too good-sized window on each side, the bald back with no relief of any sort unless the larders can be regarded as such, for the little shutter window I have mentioned became invisible when shut, and inside an impression (I never use a word other than deliberately), an impression, then, I say, of snugness, produced by the green carpet, the green arras lining to the walls, the green eider-down quilts on the beds, the green portière dividing the main room from the small portion in front which we used as a dressing room, the flowered curtains, the row of gaily bound books on a shelf, and the polish of the brass candle brackets that seemed to hit me every time I moved. What became of this impression in the case of one reasonable man, too steady to be blown hither and thither by passing gusts of enthusiasm, perhaps the narrative will disclose.
Meanwhile the confusion on the common wasindescribable. I can even now on calling it to mind only lift up hands of amazement. To get the three horses out was in itself no easy task for persons unaccustomed to such work, but to get the three tables out and try to unfold them and make them stand straight on the uneven turf was much worse. All things in a caravan have hinges and flaps, the idea being that they shall take up little room; but if they take up little room they take up a great deal of time, and that first night when there was not much of it these patent arrangements which made each chair and table a separate problem added considerably to the prevailing chaos. Having at length set them out on wet grass, table-cloths had to be extracted from the depths of the yellow boxes in each caravan and spread upon them, and immediately they blew away on to the furze bushes. Recaptured and respread they immediately did it again. Mrs. Menzies-Legh, when I ventured to say that I would not go and fetch them next time they did it, told me to weigh them down with the knives and forks, but nobody knew where they were, and their discovery having defied our united intelligences for an immense amount of precious time was at last the result of the merest chance, for who could have dreamed they were concealed among the bedding? As for Edelgard, I completely lost control over her. She seemed to slipthrough my fingers like water. She was everywhere, and yet nowhere. I do not know what she did, but I know that she left me quite unaided, and I found myself performing the most menial tasks, utterly unfit for an officer, such as fetching cups and saucers and arranging spoons in rows. Nor, if I had not witnessed it, would I ever have believed that the preparation of eggs and coffee was so difficult. What could be more frugal than such a supper? Yet it took the united efforts for nearly two hours of seven highly civilized and intelligent beings to produce it. Edelgard said that that was why it did, but I at once told her that to reason that the crude and the few are more capable than the clever and the many was childish.
When, with immense labour and infinite conversation, this meagre fare was at last placed upon the tables it was so late that we had to light our lanterns in order to be able to see it; and my hearers who have never been outside the sheltered homes of Storchwerder and know nothing about what can happen to them when they do will have difficulty in picturing us gathered round the tables in that gusty place, vainly endeavouring to hold our wraps about us, our feet in wet grass and our heads in a stormy darkness. The fitful flicker of the lanterns played over rapidly cooling eggs and grave faces. It was indeed a bad beginning, enough to discourage the stoutest holiday-maker. This was not a holiday: this was privation combined with exposure. Frau von Eckthum was wholly silent. Even Mrs. Menzies-Legh, although she tried to laugh, produced nothing but hollow sounds. Edelgard only spoke once, and that was to say that the coffee was very bad and might she make it unaided another time, a remark and a question received with a gloomy assent. Menzies-Legh was by this time extremely anxious about the girls, and though his wife still said they were naughty and would be scolded it was with an ever-fainter conviction. The two young men sat with their shoulders hunched up to their ears in total silence. No one, however, was half so much deserving of sympathy as myself and Edelgard, who had been travelling since the previous morning and more than anybody needed good food and complete rest. But there were hardly enough scrambled eggs to go round, most of them having been broken in the jolting up the lane on to the common, and after the meal, instead of smoking a cigar in the comparative quiet and actual dryness of one’s caravan, I found that everybody had to turn to and—will it be believed?—wash up.
“No servants, you know—so free, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, pressing a cloth into one of my hands and a fork into the other, and indicating a saucepan of hot water with a meaning motion of her forefinger.
Well, I had to. My hearers must not judge me harshly. I am aware that it was conduct unbecoming in an officer, but the circumstances were unusual. Menzies-Legh and the young men were doing it too, and I was taken by surprise. Edelgard, when she saw me thus employed, first started in astonishment and then said she would do it for me.
“No, no, let him do it,” quickly interposed Mrs. Menzies-Legh, almost as though she liked me to wash up in the same saucepan as herself.
But I will not dwell on the forks. We were still engaged in the amazingly difficult and distasteful work of cleaning them when the rain suddenly descended with renewed fury. This was too much. I slipped away from Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s side into the darkness, whispered to Edelgard to follow, and having found my caravan bade her climb in after me and bolt the door. What became of the remaining forks I do not know—there are limits to that which a man will do in order to have a clean one. Stealthily we undressed in the dark so that our lighted windows might not betray us—“Let them each,” I said to myself with grim humour, “suppose that we are engaged helping one of the others”—and then, Edelgard having ascended into the upperberth and I having crawled into the lower, we lay listening to the loud patter of the rain on the roof so near our faces (especially Edelgard’s), and marvelled that it should make a noise that could drown not only every sound outside but also our voices when we, by shouting, endeavoured to speak.
UNDER the impression that I had not closed my eyes all night I was surprised to find when I opened them in the morning that I had. I must have slept, and with some soundness; for there stood Edelgard, holding back the curtain that concealed me when in bed from the gaze of any curious should the caravan door happen to burst open, already fully dressed and urging me to get up. It is true that I had been dreaming I was still between Flushing and Queenboro’, so that in my sleep I was no doubt aware of the heavings of the caravan while she dressed; for a caravan gives, so to speak, to every movement of the body, and I can only hope that if any of you ever go in one the other person in the bed above you may be a motionless sleeper. Indeed, I discovered that after all it was not an advantage to occupy the lower bed. While the rain was striking the roof with the deafening noise of unlimited and large stones I heard nothing of Edelgard, though I felt every time she moved. When, however, it left off, the creakings and crunchings of her bed and bedding (removed onlya few inches from my face) every time she turned round were so alarming that disagreeable visions crossed my mind of the bed, unable longer to sustain a weight greater perhaps than what it was meant to carry, descendingin totoin one of these paroxysms upon the helpless form (my own) stretched beneath. Clearly if it did I should be very much hurt, and would quite likely suffocate before assistance could be procured. These visions, however, in spite of my strong impression of unclosed eyes, must ultimately and mercifully have been drowned in sleep, and my bed being very comfortable and I at the end of my forces after the previous day when I did sleep I did it soundly and I also apparently did it long; for the sun was coming through the open window accompanied by appetizing smells of hot coffee when Edelgard roused me by the information that breakfast was ready, and that as everybody seemed hungry if I did not come soon I might as well not come at all.
She had put my clothes out, but had brought me no hot water because she said the two sisters had told her it was too precious, what there was being wanted for washing up. I inquired with some displeasure whether I, then, were less important than forks, and to my surprise Edelgard replied that it depended on whether they were silver; which was, of course, perilously nearrepartee. She immediately on delivering this left the caravan, and as I could not go to the door to call her back—as she no doubt recollected—I was left to my cold water and to my surprise. For though I had often noticed a certain talent she has in this direction (my hearers will remember instances) it had not yet been brought to bear personally on me. Repartee is not amiss in the right place, but the right place is never one’s husband. Indeed, on the whole I think it is a dangerous addition to a woman, and best left alone. For is not that which we admire in woman womanliness? And womanliness, as the very sound of the word suggests, means nothing that is not round, and soft, and pliable; the word as one turns it on one’s tongue has a smoothly liquid sound as of sweet oil, or precious ointment, or balm, that very well expresses our ideal. Sharp tongues, sharp wits—what are these but drawbacks and blots on the picture?
Such (roughly) were my thoughts while I washed in very little and very cold water, and putting on my clothes was glad to see that Edelgard had at least brushed them. I had to pin the curtains carefully across the windows because breakfast was going on just outside, and hurried heads kept passing to and fro in search, no doubt, of important parts of the meal that had either been forgotten or were nowhere to be found.
I confess I thought they might have waited with breakfast till I came. It is possible that Frau von Eckthum was thinking so too; but as far as the others were concerned I was dealing, I remembered, with members of the most inconsiderate nation in Europe. And besides, I reflected, it was useless to look for the courtesy we in Germany delight to pay to rank and standing among people who had neither of these things themselves. For what was Menzies-Legh? A man with much money (which is vulgar) and no title at all. Neither in the army, nor in the navy, nor in the diplomatic service, not even the younger son of a titled family, which in England, as perhaps my hearers have heard with surprise, is a circumstance sometimes sufficient to tear the title a man would have had in any other country from him and send him forth a naked Mr. into the world—Menzies-Legh, I suppose, after the fashion of our friend the fabled fox in a similar situation, saw no dignity in, nor any reason why he should be polite to, noble foreign grapes. And his wife’s original good German blood had become so thoroughly undermined by the action of British microbes that I could no longer regard her as a daughter of one of our oldest families; while as for the two young men, on asking Menzies-Legh the previous evening over that damp and dreary supper of insufficient eggs who they were,being forced to do so by his not having as a German gentleman would have done given me every information at the earliest opportunity of his own accord, with details as to income, connections, etc., so that I would know the exact shade of cordiality my behaviour toward them was to be tinged with—on asking Menzies-Legh, I repeat, he merely told me that the one with the spectacles and the hollow cheeks and the bull terrier was Browne, who was going into the Church, and the other with the Pomeranian and the round, hairless face was Jellaby.
Concerning Jellaby he said no more. Who and what he was except pure Jellaby I would have been left to find out by degrees as best I could if I had not pressed him further, and inquired whether Jellaby also were going into the Church, and if not what was he going into?
Menzies-Legh replied—not with the lively and detailed interest a German gentleman would have displayed talking about the personal affairs of a friend, but with an appearance of being bored that very extraordinarily came over him whenever I endeavoured to talk to him on topics of real interest, and disappeared whenever he was either doing dull things such as marching, or cleaning his caravan, or discussing tiresome trivialities with the others such as some foolish poem lately appeared, or the best kind of kitchenranges to put into the cottages he was building for old women on his estates—that Jellaby was not going into anything, being in already; and that what he was in was the House of Commons, where he was not only a member of the Labour Party but also a Socialist.
I need not say that I was considerably upset. Here I was going to live, as the English say, cheek by jowl for a substantial period with a Socialist member of Parliament, and it was even then plain to me that the caravan mode of life encourages, if I may so express it, a degree of cheek by jowlishness unsurpassed, nay, unattained, by any other with which I am acquainted. To descend to allegory, and taking a Prussian officer of noble family as the cheek, how terrible to him of all persons on God’s earth must be a radical jowl. Since I am an officer and a gentleman it goes without saying that I am also a Conservative. You cannot be one without the others, at least not comfortably, in Germany. Like the three Graces, these other three go also hand in hand. The King of Prussia is, I am certain, in his heart passionately Conservative. So also I have every reason to believe is God Almighty. And from the Conservative point of view (which is the only right one) all Liberals are bad—bad, unworthy, and unfit; persons with whom one would never dream of either dining or talking; persons dwellingin so low a mental and moral depth that to dwell in one still lower seems almost extravagantly impossible. Yet in that lower depth, moving about like those blind monsters science tells us inhabit the everlasting darkness of the bottom of the seas, beyond the reach of light, of air, and of every Christian decency, dwells the Socialist. And who can be a more impartial critic than myself? Excluded by my profession from any opinion or share in politics I am able to look on with the undisturbed impartiality of the disinterested, and I see these persons as a danger to my country, a danger to my King, and a danger (if I had any) to my posterity. In consequence I was very cold to Jellaby when he asked me to pass him something at supper—I think it was the salt. It is true he is prevented by his nationality from riddling our Reichstag with his poisonous theories (not a day would I have endured his company if he had been a German) but the broad principle remained, and as I dressed I reflected with much ruefulness that even as it was his presence was almost compromising, and I could not but blame Frau von Eckthum for not having informed me of its imminence beforehand.
And the other—the future pastor, Browne. A pastor is necessary and even very well at a christening, a marriage, or an interment; but for mingling purposes on common social ground—no. Sometimes at public dinners in Storchwerder there has been one in the background, but he very properly remained in it; and once or twice dining with our country neighbours their pastor and his wife were present, and the pastor said grace and his wife said nothing, and they felt they were not of our class, and if they had not felt it of themselves they would very quickly have been made to feel it by others. This is all as it should be: perfectly natural and proper; and it was equally natural and proper that on finding I was required to do what the English call hobnob with a future pastor I should object. I did object strongly. And decided, while I dressed, that my attitude toward both Jellaby and Browne should be of the chilliest coolness.
Now in this narrative nothing is to be hidden, for I desire it to be a real and sincere human document, and I am the last man, having made a mistake, to pass it over in silence. My friends shall see me as I am, with all my human weaknesses and, I hope, some at least of my human strengths. Not that there is anything to be ashamed of in the matter of him Menzies-Legh spoke baldly of as Browne—rather should Menzies-Legh have been ashamed of leading me through his uncommunicativeness into a natural error; for how could I be supposed to realize that the singular nation places the Churchas a profession on practically the same level as the only three that to us have a level at all, namely, the Army, the Navy, and the Service diplomatic or ministerial of the State?
To Browne, therefore, when I finally climbed down from my caravan into the soaking grass that awaited me at the bottom and found him breakfasting alone, the others being scattered about in the condition of feverish yet sterile activity that is characteristic of caravan life, I behaved in a manner perfectly suitable applied to an ordinary pastor who should begin to talk to me with an air of equality—I was, that is, exceedingly stiff.
He pushed the coffee-pot toward me: I received it with a cold bow. He talked of the rain in the night and his fears that my wife had been disturbed by it: I replied with an evasive shrug. He spoke cheerily of the brightness of the morning, and the promise it held of a pleasant day: I responded with nothing more convivial than Perhaps or Indeed—at this moment I cannot recall which. He suggested that I should partake of a thick repulsive substance he was eating which he described as porridge and as the work of Jellaby, and which was, he said, extraordinarily good stuff to march on: I sternly repressed a very witty retort that occurred to me and declined by means of a monosyllable. In a word, I was stiff.
Judge then of my vexation and dismay when I discovered not ten minutes later by the merest accident while being taken by Mrs. Menzies-Legh to a farm in order that I might carry back the vegetables she proposed to buy at it, that the young gentleman not only has a title but is the son of one of the greatest of English families. He is a younger son of the Duke of Hereford, that wealthy and well-known nobleman whose sister was not considered (on the whole) unworthy to marry our Prince of Grossburg-Niederhausen, and far from being mere Browne in the way in which Jellaby was and remained mere Jellaby, the young gentleman I had been deliberately discouraging was Browne indeed, but with the transfiguring addition of Sigismund and Lord.
Mrs. Menzies-Legh, with the same careless indifference I had observed in her husband, spoke of him briefly as Sidge. He was, it appeared, a distant cousin of her husband’s. I had to question her closely and perseveringly before I could extract these details from her, she being apparently far more interested in the question as to whether the woman at the farm would not only sell us vegetables but also a large iron vessel in which to stew them. Yet it is clearly of great importance first, that one should be in good company, and secondly, that one should be told one is in it, because if one is not told how in the world isone to know? And my hearers will, I am sure, sympathize with me in the disagreeable situation in which I found myself, for never was there, I trust and believe, a more polite man than myself, a man more aware of what he owes to his own birth and breeding and those of others, a man more careful to discharge punctiliously all the little (but so important) nameless acts of courtesy where and whenever they are due, and it greatly distressed me to think I had unwittingly rejected the advances of the nephew of an aunt whom the entire German nation agrees to address on her envelopes as Serene.
While I bore back the iron vessel called a stew-pot which Mrs. Menzies-Legh had unfortunately persuaded the farmer’s wife to sell her, and also a basket (in my other hand) full of big, unruly vegetables such as cabbages, and smooth, green objects, unknown to me but resembling shortened and widened cucumbers, that would not keep still and continually rolled into the road, I wished that at least I had eaten the porridge. It could not have killed me, and it was churlish to refuse. The manner of my refusal had made the original churlishness still more churlish. I made up my mind to seek out Lord Sigismund without delay and endeavour by a tactful word to set matters right between us, for one of my principles is never to be ashamed of acknowledging when I have beenin the wrong; and so much preoccupied was I deciding on the exact form the tactful word was to take that I had hardly time to object to the nature and size of my burdens. Besides, I was beginning to realize that burdens were going to be my fate. There was little hope of escaping them, since the other members of the party bore similar ones and seemed to think it natural. Mrs. Menzies-Legh at that moment was herself carrying a bundle of little sticks for lighting fires, tied up in a big red handkerchief the farmer’s wife had sold her, and also a parcel of butter, and she walked along perfectly indifferent to the odd figure she would cut and the wrong impression she would give should we by any chance meet any of the gentlefolk of the district. And one should always remember, I consider, when one wishes to let one’s self go, that the world is very small, and that it is at least possible that the last person one would choose as a witness may be watching one through an apparently deserted hedge with his eyeglasses up. Besides, there is no pleasure in behaving as though you were a servant, and old James certainly ought to have accompanied us and carried our purchases back. Of what use is a man servant, however untidy, who is nowhere to be seen when washing up begins or shopping takes place? Being forced to pause a moment and put the stew-pot down inorder to rest my hand (which ached) I inquired somewhat pointedly of my companion what she supposed the inhabitants of Storchwerder would say if they could see us at that moment.
“They wouldn’t say anything,” she replied—but her smile is not equal to her sister’s because she has only one dimple—“they’d faint.”
“Exactly,” said I meaningly; adding, after a pause sufficient to point my words, “and very properly.”
“Dear Baron,” said she, pretending to look all innocent surprise and curling up her eyelashes, “do you think it is wrong to carry stew-pots? You mustn’t carry them, then. Nobody must ever do what they think wrong. That’s what is called perjuring one’s soul—a dreadfully wicked thing to do. Do you suppose I would have you perjure yours for the sake of a miserable stew-pot? Put it down. Don’t touch the accursed thing. Leave it in the ditch. Hang it on the hedge. I’ll send Sidge for it.”
Send Sidge? At once I snatched it up again, remarking that what Lord Sigismund could fetch I hoped Baron von Ottringel could carry; to which she made no answer, but a faint little sound as we resumed our journey came from behind her motor veil, whether of approval and acquiescence or disapproval and contradiction I cannot say, for there was nothing, on looking at her as she
“Dear Baron,” said she, “do you think it is wrong to carry stew-pots?”
“Dear Baron,” said she, “do you think it is wrong to carry stew-pots?”
walked beside me, to go on except the tip of a slightly inquiring nose and the tip of a slightly defiant chin and the downward curve of the row of ridiculously long eyelashes that were on the side next to me.
When we got back to the camp we found it in precisely the same condition in which we had left it—that is, in confusion. Every one seemed to be working very hard, and nothing seemed to be different from what it was a full hour before. Indeed, hours seem to have strangely little effect in caravaning: even hours and hours have little; and it is only when you get to hours and hours and hours that you see a change. In our preparations each morning for departure it always appeared to me that they would never have ended but for a sudden desperate unanimous determination to break them off and go.
The two young girls who had not appeared the previous night when I retired to rest had at last, as Menzies-Legh would say, turned up. They had done this, I gathered, early in the morning, having slept with their governess at an inn in Wrotham, she being a discreet person who preferred not to search in rain and darkness for that which when found might not be nice. She had arrived after breakfast, handed over her charges, and taken her departure; and the young girls as I at once saw were not young girls atall, but that nondescript creature with a thick plait down its back and a disconcerting way of staring at one that we in Germany describe asBackfischand the English, I am told, allude to as flapper.
Lord Sigismund was cleaning boots, seated on the edge of a table in his shirt sleeves with these two nondescripts standing in a row watching him, and I was greatly touched by observing that the boot he was actually engaged upon at the moment of our approach was one of Edelgard’s.
This was magnanimity. More than ever was I sorry about the porridge. I hastily put down the stew-pot and the basket and hurried across to him.
“Pray allow me,” I said, snatching up another boot that stood on the table at his side and plunging a spare brush into the blacking.
“That one’s done,” said he, pipe in mouth.
“Ah, yes—I beg your pardon. Are these——?”
I took up another pair, with some diffidence, for the done ones and the undone ones had a singular resemblance to each other.
“No. But you’d better take off your coat, Baron—it’s hot work.”
So I did. And much relieved to hear by his tone that he bore me no ill will I joined him on the edge of the table; and if any one had told me a week before that a day was at hand when I should clean boots I would, without hesitation,
Thus, as it were, with blacking, did I cement my friendship with Lord Sigismund
Thus, as it were, with blacking, did I cement my friendship with Lord Sigismund
have challenged him to fight, the extremity of the statement’s incredibleness leaving me no choice but to believe it a deliberate insult.
Thus, as it were with blacking, did I cement my friendship with Lord Sigismund. I think he thought me a thoroughly good fellow who was only, like so many people, a little stiff at breakfast, as I sat there helping him, my hat pushed back off my forehead, one leg swinging, and while I brushed and blackened chatting cheerfully about the inferior position the clergy occupy to the German eye. I am sure he was interested, for he paused several times in his work and looked at me over his spectacles with much attention. As for the two nondescripts, they never took their exceedingly round and unblinking eyes off me for an instant.
IT was twelve o’clock before we left Grib’s (or Grip’s) Common, lurching off it by another grassy lane down into the road in the direction of Mereworth, and leaving, as we afterward discovered, several portions of our equipment behind us.
“What a lovely, sparkling world!” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, coming and walking beside me.
I was struggling with the tempers of my very obstinate horse, so could only gasp a brief assent.
The road was narrow, and wound along hard and smooth between hedges she seemed to find attractive, for every few yards she stopped to pull something green out of them and take it along with her. The heavy rain in the night had naturally left things wet, and there being a bright sun the drops on the blades of grass and on the tips of the leaves could not help sparkling, but there was nothing remarkable in that, and I would not have noticed it if she had not looked round with such apparent extreme delight and sniffed in the air as if she were in a first-class perfumery shopUnter den Lindenwhere there reallyare things worth sniffing. Also she appeared to think there was something very wonderful about the sky, which was just the ordinary blue one has a right to expect in summer sprinkled over with the usual number of white fine-weather clouds, for she gazed up at that too, and evidently with the greatest pleasure.
“Schwärmerisch,” said I to myself; and was internally slightly amused.
My hearers will agree with me that such raptures are well enough in a young girl in a white gown, with blue eyes and the washed-out virginal appearance one does not dislike at eighteen before Love the Artist has pounced on it and painted it pink, and they will also, I think, agree that the older and married women must take care to be at all times quiet. Ejaculations of a poetic or ecstatic nature should not, as a rule, pass their lips. They may ejaculate perhaps over a young baby (if it is their own) but that is the one exception; and there is a good reason for this one, the possession of a young baby implying as a general rule a corresponding youth in its mother. I do not think, however, that it is nice when a woman ejaculates over, say, her tenth young baby. The baby, of course, will still be sufficiently young for it is a fresh one, but it is not a fresh mother, and by that time she should have stiffened into stolidity, and apart from the hoursdevoted to instructing her servant, silence. Indeed, the perfect woman does not talk at all. Who wants to hear her? All that we ask of her is that she shall listen intelligently when we wish, for a change, to tell her about our own thoughts, and that she should be at hand when we want anything. Surely this is not much to ask. Matches, ash-trays, and one’s wife should be, so to speak, on every table; and I maintain that the perfect wife copies the conduct of the matches and the ash-trays, and combines being useful with being dumb.
These are my views, and as I drove my caravan along the gravelly road I ruminated on them. The great brute of a horse, overfed and under-worked, was constantly endeavouring to pass the Ailsa which was in front of us, and as that meant in that narrow lane taking the Elsa up the bank as a preliminary, I was as constantly endeavouring to thwart him. And the sun being hot and I (if I may so put it) a very meltable man, I soon grew tired of this constant tugging and looked round for Edelgard to come and take her turn.
She was nowhere to be seen.
“Have you dropped anything?” asked Frau von Eckthum, who was walking a little way behind.
“No,” said I; adding, with much readiness, “but my wife has dropped me.”
“Oh!” said she.
I kept the horse back till she caught me up, while her leaner sister, who did not slacken her pace, went on ahead. Then I explained my theory about wives and matches. She listened attentively, in just the way the really clever woman knows best how to impress us favourably does, busying herself as she listened in tying some flowers she had gathered into a bunch, and not doing anything so foolish as to interrupt.
Every now and then as I warmed and drove my different points home, she just looked at me with thoughtful interest. It was delightful. I forgot the annoying horse, the heat of the sun, the chill of the wind, the bad breakfast, and all the other inconveniences, and saw how charming a caravan tour can be. “Given,” I thought, “the right people and fine weather, such a holiday is bound to be agreeable.”
The day was undoubtedly fine, and as for the right people they were amply represented by the lady at my side. Never had I found so good a listener. She listened to everything. She took no mean advantage of one’s breath-pauses to hurry in observations of her own as so many women do. And the way she looked at me when anything struck her particularly was sufficient to show how keenly appreciative she was. After all there is nothing so enjoyable as a conversation with a thoroughly competent listener. The first fivemiles flew. It seemed to me that we had hardly left Grip’s Common before we were pulling up at a wayside inn and sinking on to the bench in front of it and calling for drink.
What the others all drank was milk, or a gray, frothy liquid they said was ginger-beer—childish, sweet stuff, with little enough beer about it, heaven knows, and quite unfit one would think for the stomach of a real man. Jellaby brought Frau von Eckthum a glass of it, and even provided the two nondescripts with refreshments, and they took his attentions quite as a matter of course, instead of adopting the graceful German method of ministering to the wants of the sterner and therefore more thirsty sex.
The road stretched straight and white as far as one could see on either hand. On it stood the string of caravans, with old James watering the horses in the sun. Under the shadow of the inn we sat and rested, the three Englishmen, to my surprise, in their shirt-sleeves, a condition in which no German gentleman would ever show himself to a lady.
“Why? Are there so many holes in them?” asked the younger and more pink and white of the nondescripts, on hearing me remark on this difference of custom to Mrs. Menzies-Legh; and she looked at me with an air of grave interest.
Of course I did not answer, but inwardlycriticized the upbringing of the English child. It is characteristic of the nation that Mrs. Menzies-Legh did not so much as say Hush to her.
On the right, the direction in which we were going to travel, the road dipped down into a valley with distant hills beyond, and the company, between their sips of milk, talked much about the blueness of this distance. Also they talked much about the greenness of the Mereworth woods rustling opposite, and the way the sun shone; as though woods in summer were ever anything but green, and as though the sun, when it was there at all, could do anything but go on shining!
I was on the point of becoming impatient at such talk and suggesting that if they would only leave off drinking milk they would probably see things differently, when Frau von Eckthum came and sat down beside me on the bench, her ginger-beer in one hand and a biscuit, also made of ginger, in the other (the thought of what they must taste like together made me shiver) and said in her attractive voice:
“I hope you are going to enjoy your holiday. I feel responsible, you know.” And she looked at me with her pretty smile.
I liked to think of the gentle lady as a kind of godmother, and made the proper reply, chivalrous and sugared, and was asking myself what it isthat gives other people’s wives a charm one’s own never did, never could, and never will possess, when the door-curtain of the Elsa was pulled aside, and Edelgard, whose absence at oursiestaI had not noticed, stepped out on to the platform.
Lord Sigismund and Jellaby immediately got up and unhooked the steps and held them for her to come down by. Menzies-Legh also went across and offered her a hand. I alone sat still, as well I might; for not only am I her husband, but it is absurd to put false notions of her importance into a woman’s head who has not had such attentions paid her since she was eighteen and what we callappetitlich.
Besides, I was rooted to the bench by amazement at her extraordinary appearance. No wonder she was not to be seen when duty ought to have kept her at my side helping me with the horse. She had not walked one of those five hot miles. She had been sitting in the caravan, busily cutting her skirt short, altering her hair, and transforming herself into as close a copy as she could manage of Mrs. Menzies-Legh and her sister.
Small indeed was the resemblance now to the Christian gentlewoman one wishes one’s wife to seem to be. Few were the traces of Prussia. I declare I would not have recognized her had I met her casually in the road; and to thinkshe had dared do it without a word, without asking my permission, without even asking my opinion! Her nice new felt hat with its pheasant’s wing had almost disappeared beneath a gauze veil arranged after the fashion adopted by the sisters. Heaven knows where she got it, or out of what other garment, now of course ruined, she had cut and contrived it; and what is the use of having a pheasant’s wing if you hide it? Her hair, up to then so tight and inconspicuous, was loosened, her skirt showed almost all of both her boots. The whole figure was strangely like that of the two sisters, a little thickened, a little emphasized.
What galled me was the implied entire indifference to my authority. My mind’s indignant eye saw the snap her fingers were executing in its face. Also, one’s own wife is undoubtedly a thing apart. It is proper and delightful that the wives of others should be attractive, but one’s own ought to be adorned solely with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit combined with that other ornament, an enduring desire to keep the husband God has given her comfortable and therefore happy. Without these two a wife cannot be regarded as a fit object for her husband’s esteem. I plainly saw that I would find it impossible to esteem mine in that skirt. I do not know what she had done to her feet, but they looked much smaller than I had been accustomed to suppose them as shecame down the steps assisted by the three gentlemen. My full beer-glass, held neglected in my hand, dripped unheeded on to the road as I stared stupidly at this apparition. Rapidly I selected the first few of the phrases I would address to her the moment we found ourselves alone. There should be an immediate stop put to this loosening of the earth round the roots of the great and sheltering tree of a husband’s authority.
“Poor silly sheep,” I could not help murmuring, those animals flashing into my mind as a legitimate development of the sheltering-tree image.
Then I felt there was a quotation atmosphere about them, and was sure Horace or Virgil—elusive bugbears of my boyhood—must have said something that began like that and went on appropriately if only I could remember it. I regretted that having forgotten it I was unable to quote it, to myself as it were, but yet just loud enough for the lady beside me to hear. She, however, heard what I did say, and looked at me inquiringly.
“If I were to explain, dear lady,” said I, instantly responding to the look, “you would not understand.”
“Oh,” said she.
“I was thinking in symbols.”
“Oh,” said she.
“It is one of my mental tricks,” I said, mygaze however contracting sternly as it fell on Edelgard’s approaching form.
“Oh,” said she.
Certainly she is a quiet lady. But how stimulating. Her solitary oh’s are more packed with expressiveness than other women’s hour-long tirades.
She too was watching Edelgard coming toward us across the sun-beaten bit of road, her head slightly turned away from me but not so much that I could not see she was smiling at my wife. Of course she must have been amused at such a slavish imitation; but with her usual kindness she made room on the bench for her and, without alluding to the transformation, suggested refreshment.
Edelgard as she sat down shot a very curious glance at me round the corner of her head-wrappings. I was surprised to see little that could be called apology in her way of sitting down, and looked in vain for the red spot that used to appear on each cheek at home when she was aware that she had done wrong and that it was not going to be passed over. She was sheltered from immediate steps on my part by Frau von Eckthum who sat between us, and when Jellaby approached her with a glass of milk she actually took it without so much as breathing the honest word beer.
This was too much. I threw back my head and laughed as heartily as I have ever seen a man laugh. Edelgard and milk! Why, I do not believe she had drunk it pure like that since the day she parted from the last of her infancy’s bottles. Edelgard becoming squeamish; Edelgard posing—and what a pose; good heavens, what a pose! Edelgard, one of Prussia’s daughters, one of Prussia’s noblemen’s daughters, accepting milk instead of beer, and accepting it at the hands of a Socialist in shirt sleeves. A vision of Storchwerder’s face if it could see these things rose before me. Of course I laughed. Not, mind you, without some slight tinge of bitterness, for laughter may be bitter and hearty at the same time, but on the whole I think I did credit to my unfailing sense of humour in spite of very great provocation, and I laughed till even the horses pricked up their ears and turned their heads and stared.
Nobody else smiled. On the contrary—it cannot be true that laughter is infectious—they watched me with a serious, amusingly serious, surprise. Edelgard did not watch. She knew better than that. Carefully she concealed her face in the milk, feeling no doubt it was the best place for it, and unable to leave off drinking the stuff because of the problem of how to meet my eyes once she did. Frau von Eckthum regarded me with much the same attentive interest she had