Edelgard posing—and what a pose; good heavens, what a pose!
Edelgard posing—and what a pose; good heavens, what a pose!
shown when I was explaining some of my views to her on the march—I mean, of course, my views on wives, but language is full of pitfalls. The Menzies-Legh niece (they called her Jane) paused in the middle of a banana to stare. Her friend, who answered to the singular name (let us hope it was merely asobriquet) of Jumps, forgot to continue greedily pressing biscuits into her mouth, and, forgetting also that her mouth was open to receive them, left it in that condition. Mrs. Menzies-Legh got up and snap-shotted me. Menzies-Legh leaned forward when I had had my laugh nearly out and said: “Come, Baron, let us share the joke?” But his melancholy voice belied his words, and looking round at him I thought he seemed little in the mood for sharing anything. I never saw such a solemn, dull face; it shrivelled up my merriment just to see it. So I merely shrugged one of my shoulders and said it was a German joke.
“Ah,” said Menzies-Legh; and did not press me further. And Jellaby, wiping his forehead (on which lay perpetually a long, lank strand of hair which he was as perpetually brushing aside with his hand, apparently desirous of not having it there, but only apparently, for five seconds with any competent barber would have rid him of it forever)—Jellaby, I say, asking Menzies-Legh in his womanish tenor voice if the greenshadows in the wood opposite did not remind him of some painter friend’s work, they began talking pictures as though they were as important every bit as the great objects of life—wealth, and war, and a foot on the neck of the nations.
Well, it was impossible to help contrasting their sluggishness with a party of Germans under similar conditions. Edelgard would have been greeted with one immense roar of laughter on her appearing suddenly in her new guise. She would have been assailed with questions, pelted with mocking comments, and I might have expressed my own disapproval frankly and openly and no one would have thought it anything but natural. There, however, in that hypocritical country they one and all pretended not to have seen any change at all; and there was something so depressing about so many stiff and lantern jaws whichever way I turned my head that after my one Homeric burst I found myself unable to go on. A joke soon palls if nobody else can see it. In silence I drank my beer: and realized that my opinion of the nation is low.
It was chiefly Menzies-Legh and Jellaby who sent down the mercury, I reflected, as we resumed the march. One gets impressions, one knows not how or why, nor does one know when. I had not spoken much to either, yet there the impressions were. It was not likely that I could be mistaken,for I suppose that of all people in the world a Prussian officer is the least likely to be that. He is too shrewd, too quick, of too disciplined an intelligence. It is these qualities that keep him at the top of the European tree, combined, indeed, with his power of concentrating his entire being into one noble determination to stay on it. Again descending to allegory, I can see Menzies-Legh and Jellaby and all the other slow-spoken and slow-thoughted Englishmen flapping ineffectually among the lower and more comfortable branches of the tree of nations. Yes, they are more sheltered there; they have roomier nests; less wind and sun; less distance to fly in order to fetch the waiting grub from the moss beneath; but what about the Prussian eagle sitting at the top, his beak flashing in the light, his watchful eye never off them? Some day he will swoop down on them when they are, as usual, asleep, clear out their and similar well-lined nests, and have the place to himself—becoming, as the well-known picture has it (for I too can allude to pictures), in all his gloryEnfin seul.
The road went down straight and long and white into the flat. High dusty hedges shut us in on either side. Across the end, which looked an interminable way off, lay the blue distance the milk drinkers admired. The three caravans creaked over the loose stones. Their brownvarnish glistened blindingly in the sun. The horses plodded onward with hanging heads, subdued, no doubt, by the growing number of the hours. It was half-past three, and there were no signs of camp or dinner; no signs of our doing anything but walk along like that in the dust, our feet aching, our throats parching, our eyes burning, and our stomachs empty, forever.
AMAN who is writing a book should have a free hand. When I began my narrative I hardly realized this, but I do now. No longer is Edelgard allowed to look over my shoulder. No longer are the sheets left lying open on my desk. I put Edelgard off with the promise that she shall hear it when it is done. I lock it up when I go out. And I write straight on without wasting time considering what this or that person may like or not.
At the end, indeed, there is to be a red pencil,—an active censor running through the pages making danger signals, and whenever on our beer evenings I come across its marks I shall pause, and probably cough, till my eye has found the point at which I may safely resume the reading. Our guests will tell me that I have a cold, and I shall not contradict them; for whatever one may say to one friend at a time in confidence about, for instance, one’s wife, one is bound to protect her collectively.
I hope I am clear. Sometimes I fear I am not, but language, as I read in the paper lately,is but a clumsy vehicle for thought, and on this clumsy vehicle therefore, overloaded already with all I have to say, let us lay the whole blame, using it (to descend to quaintness) as a kind of tarpaulin or other waterproof cover, and tucking it in carefully at the corners. I mean the blame. Also, let it not be forgotten that this is the maiden flight of my Muse, and that even if it were not, a gentleman cannot be expected to write with the glibness of your Jew journalist or other professional quill-driver.
We did not get into camp that first day till nearly six (much too late, my friends, if you should ever find yourselves under the grievous necessity of getting into such a thing), and we had great difficulty in finding one at all. That, indeed, is a very black side of caravaning; camps are rarely there when they are wanted, and, conversely, frequently so when they are not. Not once, nor twice, but several times have I, with the midday sun streaming vertically on my head, been obliged to labour along past a most desirable field, with just the right aspect, the sheltering trees to the north, the streamlet for the dish-washing loitering about waiting, the yard full of chickens, and cream and eggs ready to be bought, merely because it came, the others said, too early in the march and we had not yet earned our dinner. Earned our dinner? Why, long before I left the last night’s camp I had earned mine, if exhaustion from overwork is what they meant, and earned it well too. I pity a pedant; I pity a mind that is made up like a bed the first thing in the morning, and goes on grimly like that all day, refusing to be unmade till a certain fixed evening hour has been reached; and I assert that it is a sign of a large way of thinking, of the intellectual pliability characteristic of the real man of the world, to have no such hard and fast determinations and to be always ready to camp. Left to myself, if I were to see the right spot ten minutes, nay, five, after leaving the last one, I would instantly pounce on it. But no man can pounce instantly on anything who shall not first have rid himself of his prejudices.
On that second day of dusty endeavouring to get to Sussex, which was and remained in the much talked of blue distance, we passed no spot at all except one that was possible. That one, however, was very possible indeed in the eyes of persons who had endured sun and starvation since the morning—a shaded farmhouse, of an appearance that pleased the ladies owing to the great profusion of flowers clambering up and down it, an orchard laden with fruit suggestive of dessert, a stream whose clear waters promised an excellent foot bath, and fat chickens in great numbers, merely to look on whom caused little rolls of baconand dabs of bread sauce and even fragments of salad to dance delightfully before one’s eyes.
But the woman was cross. Worse, she was inhuman. She was a monster of indifference to the desires of her fellow-creatures, deaf to their offers of payment, stony in regard to their pains. Arguing with her, we gave up one by one our first more succulent visions, and retreating before the curtness of her refusals let first the camp beneath the plum trees go, then the dessert, then the chickens with theiretcaeteras, then, still further backward, and fighting over each one, egg after egg of all those many eggs we were so sure she would sell us and we wanted so badly to buy.
Audaciously she swore she had no eggs, while there beneath our very eyes walked chickens brimful of the eggs of the morrow. Where were the eggs of the morning, and where the eggs of yesterday? To this question, put by me, she replied that it was no business of mine. Accurséd British female,—certainly not lady, doubtfully even woman, but emphaticallyWeib—of twisted appearance, and a gnarled and knotty age! May you in your turn be refused rest and nourishment when hard put to it and willing to pay, and after you have marched five hours in the sun controlling, from your feet, the wayward impulses of a big, rebellious horse.
She shut the door while yet we were protesting.In silence we trooped back down the brick path between rose bushes that were tended with a care she denied humans, to where the three caravans waited hopefully in the road for the call to come in and be at rest.
We continued our way subdued. This is a characteristic of those who caravan, that in the afternoons they are subdued. So many things have happened to them by then; and, apart from that, they have daily got by then into that physical condition doctors describe as run down—or, if I may alter it better to fit this special case, walked down. Subdued, therefore, we journeyed along flat uncountrified roads, reminding one, by the frequent recurrence of villas, of the outskirts of some big town rather than the seclusion it had been and still was our aim to court, and in this way we came at last to a broad and extremely sophisticated bridge crossing a river some one murmured was Medway.
Houses and shops lined its approach on the right. On the left was a wide and barren field with two donkeys finding difficulties in collecting from the scanty herbage a sufficiency of supper. In the gutter, opposite a public house, stood a piano-organ, emitting the sounds of shrill yet unconvincing joyfulness natural to those instruments, and mingled with these was a burr of machinery at work, and a smell of so searching anature that it provoked Frau von Eckthum into a whole sentence—a plaintive and faintly spoken one, but a long one—describing her conviction that there must be a tannery somewhere near, and that it was very disagreeable. Her plaintiveness increased a hundredfold when Menzies-Legh announced that camp we must at all costs or night would be upon us.
We drew up in the middle of the road while Lord Sigismund made active inquiries of the inhabitants as to which of them would be willing to lend us a field.
“But surely not here?” murmured Frau von Eckthum, holding her little handkerchief to her nose.
It was here, however, and in the field, said Lord Sigismund returning, containing the donkeys. For the privilege of sharing with these animals their bare and shelterless field, exposed as it was to all the social amenities of the district, including the piano-organ, the shops opposite, the smell of leather in the making, and the company as long as the light lasted of innumerable troops of children, the owner would make us a charge of half a crown per caravan for the night, but this only on condition that we did not turn out, as he appeared to have had the greatest suspicions we would turn out, to be a circus.
With a flatness of which I would not have
“But surely not here,” murmured Frau von Eckthum
“But surely not here,” murmured Frau von Eckthum
thought her capable Frau von Eckthum refused to spend a night in the donkey field; and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, who was absorbed in snap-shotting the ever-swelling crowd of children and loafers who were surrounding us, suddenly stamped her foot and said she would not either.
“The horses can’t go another yard,” remonstrated Menzies-Legh.
“I won’t sleep with the donkeys,” said his wife, taking another snap.
Her sister said nothing, but held her handkerchief as before.
Then Jellaby, descrying a hedge with willows beyond it at the far-away end of the field, and no doubt conscious of a parliamentary practice in persuasion, said he would get permission to go in there for the night, and disappeared. Lord Sigismund expressed doubts as to his success, for the man, he said, was apparently own brother to the female at the farm, or at any rate of the closest spiritual affinity; but Jellaby did come back after a while, during which the piano-organ’s waltzes had gone on accentuating the blank dreariness of the spot, and said it was all right.
Later on I discovered that what he called all right was paying exactly twice as much per caravan for the superior exclusiveness of the willow field as what was demanded for the donkey field. Well, he did not have to pay, being Menzies-Legh’s guest, so no doubt he did think it all right; but I call it monstrous that I should be asked to pay that which would have secured me a perfectly dry bedroom with no grass in it in a first-rate Berlin hotel for the use for a few hours of a gnat-haunted, nettle-infested, low-lying, swampy meadow.
The monstrosity struck me more afterward when I looked back. That evening I was too tired to be struck, and would, I truly believe, have paid five shillings just for being allowed to sink down into a sitting position, it mattered not where, and remain in it; but there was still much, I feared to do and to suffer before I could so sink down—for instance, there was the gate leading into the donkey field to be got through, the whole population watching, and the pleasant prospect before me of having to reimburse any damage done to a caravan that could only, under the luckiest circumstances, just fit in. Then there was Edelgard to be brought to reason, and suppose she refused to be brought? That is, quickly; for I had no fears as to her ultimate bringing.
Well, the gate came first, and as it would require my concentrated attention I put the other away from me till I should be more at leisure. Old James, assisted by Menzies-Legh, got the Ailsa safely through, and away she heaved, while the onlookers cheered, over the mole heaps toward the willows on the horizon. Then Menzies-Legh,calling Jellaby, came to help me pull the Elsa through, Lord Sigismund waiting with the third horse, who had been his special charge throughout the day. It seemed all very well to help me, but any scratches to the varnish caused by the two gentlemen in their zeal would be put in my bill, not in theirs, and under my breath I called down a well-known Pomeranian curse of immense body and scope on all those fools who had helped in the making of the narrow British gates.
As I feared, there was too much of that zèle that somebody (I think he was French) advised somebody else (I expect he must have been English) not to have, and amid a hubbub of whoas—which is the island equivalent for our so much more lucidbrrr—shouts from the onlookers, and a scream or two from Edelgard who could not listen unmoved to the crashings of our crockery, Menzies-Legh and Jellaby between them drew the brute so much to one side that it was only owing to my violent efforts that a terrible accident was averted. If they had had their way the whole thing would have charged into the right-hand gate post—with what a crashing and a parting from its wheels may be imagined—but thanks to me it was saved, although the left-hand gate post did scrape a considerable portion of varnish off the Elsa’s left (so to speak) flank.
“I say,” said the Socialist when it was all over,brushing his bit of hair aside, “you shouldn’t have pulled that rein like that.”
The barefaced audacity of putting the blame on to me left me speechless.
“No,” said Menzies-Legh, “you shouldn’t have pulled anything.”
He too! Again I was left speechless—left, indeed, altogether, for they immediately dropped behind to help (save the mark) Lord Sigismund bring the Ilsa through.
So the Elsa in her turn heaved away, guided anxiously by me over the mole heaps, every mole heap being greeted by our pantry as we passed over it with a thunderous clapping together of its contents, as though the very cups, being English, were clapping their hands, or rather handles, in an ecstasy of spiteful pleasure at getting broken and on to my bill.
Little do you who only know cups in their public capacity, filled with liquids and standing quietly in rows, realize what they can do once they are let loose in a caravan. Sometimes I have thought—but no doubt fancifully—that so-called inanimate objects are not as inanimate as one might think, but are possessed of a character like other people, only one of an unadulterated pettiness and perversity rarely found in the human. I believe most people who had been in my place that evening last August guiding the Elsa acrossall the irregularities that lay between us and the willow-field in the distance, and had listened to what the cups were doing, would have been sure of it. As for me, I can only say that every time I touch a cup or other piece of crockery it seems to upset it, and frequently has such an effect on it that it breaks; and it is useless for Edelgard to tell me to be careful, and to hint (as she does when she is out of spirits) that I am clumsy, because I am careful; and as for being clumsy, everybody knows that I have the straightest eye and am the best shot in our regiment. But it is not only cups. If, while I am dressing (or undressing) I throw any portion of my clothes or other article I may be using on to a table or a chair, however carefully I aim it invariably either falls at once, or after a brief hesitation slips off on to the floor from which place, in its very helplessness, it seems to jeer at me. And the more important it is I should not be delayed the more certainly is this conduct indulged in. Fanciful? Perhaps. But let me remind you of what the English poet Shakespeare says through the mouth of Hamlet into the ears of Horatio, and express the wish that you too could have listened to the really exultant clapping of the cups in our pantry as I crossed the mole heaps.
Edelgard, feeling guilty, remained behind, so was not there as she otherwise certainly wouldhave been making anxious sums, according to her custom, in what these noises were going to cost us. A man who has been persuaded to take a holiday because it is cheap may be pardoned for being preoccupied when he finds it is likely to be dear. Among other things I thought some very sharp ones about the owner of the field, who permitted his ground, in defiance I am sure (though not being an agriculturist I cannot give chapter and verse for my belief) of all laws of health and wholesomeness, to be so much ravaged by moles. If he had done his duty my cups would not have been smashed. The heaps of soil thrown up by these animals were so frequent that during the entire crossing at least one of the Elsa’s wheels was constantly on the top of a heap, and sometimes two of her wheels simultaneously on the top of two.
It is a pity people do not know what other people think of them. Unfortunately it is rude to tell them, but if only means could be devised—perhaps by some Marconi of the mind—for letting them know without telling them, how nice and modest they would all become. That farmer was probably eating his supper in his snug parlour in bestial complacency and ignorance at the very moment that I was labouring across his field pouring on him, if he had only known it, a series of as scalding criticisms as ever made a man, ifhe were aware of them, shrivel and turn over a new leaf.
I found Mrs. Menzies-Legh at the farther gate, holding it open. Old James had already got his horse out, and when he saw me approaching came and laid hold of the bridle of mine and led him through. He then drew him up parallel with the Ailsa, the doors of both caravans being toward the river, and proceeded with the skill and expedition natural in an old person who had done nothing else all his life to unharness my horse and turn him loose.
Mrs. Menzies-Legh lit a cigarette and handed me her case. She then dropped down on to the long and very damp-looking grass and motioned to me to sit beside her; so we sat together, I much too weary either to refuse or to converse, while the muddy river slid sullenly along within a yard of us between fringes of willows, and myriads of gnats gyrated in the slanting sunbeams.
“Tired?” said she, after a silence that no doubt surprised her by its length.
“Too tired,” said I, very shortly.
“Not really?” said she, turning her head to look at me, and affecting much surprise about the eyebrows.
This goaded me. The woman was inhuman. For beneath the affected surprise of the eyebrows I saw well enough the laughter in the eyes, andit has always been held since the introduction of Christianity that to laugh at physical incapacitation is a thing beyond all others barbarous.
I told her so. I tossed away the barely begun cigarette she had given me, not choosing to go on smoking a cigarette of hers, and told her so with as much Prussian thoroughness as is consistent with being at the same time a perfect gentleman. No woman (except of course my wife) shall ever be able to say I have not behaved to her as a gentleman should; and my hearers will be more than ever convinced of the inexplicable toughness of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s nature, of the surprising impossibility of producing the least effect upon her, when I tell them that at the end of quite a long speech on my part, not, I believe ineloquent, and yet as plainspoken as the speech of a man can be within the framework which should always surround him, the carved and gilt and—it must be added—expensive framework of gentlemanliness, she merely looked at me again and said:
“Dear Baron, why is it that men, when they have walked a little farther than they want to, or have gone hungry a little longer than they like to, are always so dreadfully cross?”
The lumbering into the field of the Ilsa with the rest of the party made an immediate reply impossible.
“Hullo,” said Jellaby, on seeing us apparently at rest in the grass. “Enjoying yourselves?”
I fancy this must be a socialistic formula, for short as the period of my acquaintance with him had been he had already used it to me three times. Perhaps it is the way in which his sect reminds those outside it of the existence of its barren and joyless notions of other people’s obligations. A Socialist, as far as I can make out, is a person who may never sit down. If he does, the bleak object he calls the Community immediately becomes vocal, because it considers that by sitting down he is cheating it of what he would be producing by his labour if he did not. Once I (quite good naturedly) observed to Jellaby that in a socialistic world the chair-making industry would be the first to go to the wall (or the dogs—I cannot quite recollect which I said it would go to) for want of suitable sitters, and he angrily retorted—but this occurred later in the tour, and no doubt I shall refer to it in its proper place.
Mrs. Menzies-Legh got up at once on his asking if we were enjoying ourselves, as though her conscience reproached her, and went over to the larder of her caravan and busily began pulling out pots; and I too seeing that it was expected of me prepared to rise (for English society is conducted on such artificial lines that immediately a woman begins to do anything a man must at least pretend to dosomething too) but found that my short stay on the grass had stiffened my over-tired limbs to such an extent that I could not.
The two nondescripts, who were passing, lingered to look.
“Can I help you?” said the one they called Jumps, as I made a second ineffectual effort, advancing and holding out a knuckly hand. “Will you take my arm?” said the other one, Jane, crooking a bony elbow.
“Thank you, thank you, dear children,” I said, with bland heartiness one assumes—for no known reason—toward the offspring of strangers; and obliged to avail myself of their assistance (for want of practice makes it at all times difficult for me to get up from a flat surface, and my stiffness on this occasion turned the difficult into the impossible), I somehow was pulled on to my feet.
“Thank you, thank you,” I said again, adding jestingly, “I expect I am too old to sit on the ground.” ^
“Yes,” said Jane.
This was so unexpected that I could not repress a slight sensation of annoyance, which found its expression in sarcasm.
“I am extremely obliged to you young ladies,” I said, sweeping off my Panama, “for extending your charitable support and assistance to such a poor old gentleman.”
The two nondescripts, who were passing, lingered to look
The two nondescripts, who were passing, lingered to look
“Oh,” said Jumps earnestly, too thick-skinned to feel sarcasm, “I’m used to it. I have to help Papa about. He’s very old too.”
“Yet surely,” said I, tingeing my sarcasm with playfulness (but they were too thick-skinned even for playfulness), “surely not so old as I?”
“About the same,” said Jumps, considering me gravely.
“And how old,” said I, inquiring of Jane, for Jumps annoyed me too much, “may your friend’s excellent parent be?”
“Oh, about sixty, or seventy, or eighty,” said she, indifferently.
“THE children of England——” I remarked, when they had gone their way, their arms linked together, to Lord Sigismund who was hurrying past to the river with a bucket—but he interrupted me by shouting over his shoulder:
“Will you stay and light the fire, or come with us and forage for food?”
Light the fire? Why, what are women for? Even Hermann, my servant, would rebel if he instead of Clothilde had to light fires. But, on the other hand, forage? Go back across that immense field and walk from shop to shop on feet that had for some time past been unable to walk at all? And then return weighed down with the results?
“Do you understand fires, Baron?” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, appearing suddenly behind me.
“As much, I suppose, as intelligence unaided by experience does,” said I unwillingly.
“Oh, but of course you do,” said she, putting a box of matches—one of those enormous English boxes that never failed to arouse my amused contempt, for they did not light a single fire orcandle more than their handy little continental brethren—into my right hand, and the red handkerchiefful of sticks bought that morning into my left, “of course you do. You must have got quite used to them in the wars.”
“What wars?” I asked sharply. “You surely do not imagine that I——”
“Oh, were you too young for Sedan and all that?” she asked, as she crossed over the very long and very green grass toward a distant ditch and I found that I was expected to cross with her.
“I was so young,” I said, more nettled than my hearers will perhaps understand, but then I was tired out and no longer able to bear much, “so young that I had not even reached the stage of being born.”
“Not really?” said she.
“Yes,” said I. “I was still spending my birthdays among the angels.”
This, of course, was not strictly true, but one likes to take off a few years in the presence of a woman who has left herGotha Almanachat home, and it was, I felt, a picturesque notion—I mean about the birthdays and the angels.
“Not really?” said she again.
And what, I thought, as we walked on together, is all this talk about young and not young? If a man is not young in the forties when will he be? I have never concealed my age, which is about fiveor six and forty, with perhaps a year or two added on, but as I take little notice of birthdays it is just as likely the year or two ought to be added off, and the forties are universally acknowledged by all persons who are in them to be the very flower and prime of life, or rather the beginning of the very flower and prime, the beginning of the final unfolding of the last crumple in the last petal.
I should have thought this state of things was visible enough in me, plain enough to any ordinary onlooker. I have neither a gray hair nor a wrinkle. My moustache is as uninterruptedly blond as ever. My face is perfectly smooth. And when my hat is on there is no difference whatever between me and a person of thirty. Of course I am not a narrow man, weedy in the way in which Jellaby is weedy, and unable as he is unable to fill out my clothes; but it is laughable that just breadth should have made those two fledglings place me in the same category as an exceedingly venerable and obviously crippled old gentleman.
I expect the truth is that in England children are ill-trained and educated, and their perceptions are allowed to remain rudimentary. It must be so, for so few of them wear spectacles. Clearly education is not carried on with anything like our systematic rigor, for except on Lord Sigismund I had up to then nowhere seen these artificial aids to eyesight, and in Germany at least two-thirds ofour young people, as a result of their application, wear either spectacles orpince-nez. They may well be proud of them. They are the visible proof of a youth spent entirely at its books, the hoisted standard of an ordered and studious life.
“The children of England——” I began vigorously to Mrs. Menzies-Legh, desirous of expressing a few of my objections to them to a lady who could not be supposed to mind, she being one of my own countrywomen—but she too interrupted me.
“This is the most sheltered place,” she said, pointing to the dry ditch. “You’ll find more sticks in that little wood. You will want heaps more.”
And she left me.
Well, I had never made a fire in my life. I stood there for a moment in great hesitation as to how to begin. They should not say I was unwilling, those ant-like groups over by the caravans so feverishly hurrying hither and thither, but to do a thing one must begin it, and as there are no doubt several ways of lighting a fire, even as there are several ways of doing anything else in life, I stood uncertain while I asked myself which of these several ways (all of them, I must concede, unknown to me) I ought to choose.
The ditch had a hedge on its farther side, and through a gap in it I saw the wood, cleared in places and overgrown between the remainingstumps by bracken and brambles, wherein I was, as Mrs. Menzies-Legh said, to find more sticks. The first thing to be done, then, was to find the sticks, for the handkerchief contained the merest handful; and this was a hard task among brambles at the end of a dinnerless day, and likely, besides, to prove ruinous to my stockings.
The groups at the caravans were peeling the potatoes and other vegetables we had bought at the farm near Grip’s Common that morning, and were doing it with an expedition that showed how hunger was triumphing over fatigue. Jellaby hurried to and fro to a small spring among the bracken fetching water. Menzies-Legh and Lord Sigismund had disappeared in the distance that led to the shops. Old James was feeding the horses. I could see the two fledglings sitting on the grass with bowed heads and flushed cheeks absorbed in the shredding of cabbages. Mrs. Menzies-Legh had begun, with immense energy, to peel potatoes. Her gentle sister—I deplored it—was engaged on an onion. Nowhere, look as I might (for I needed her assistance) could I see my wife.
Then Mrs. Menzies-Legh, raising her eyes from her potatoes, saw me standing motionless and called out that the vegetables would soon be ready for the fire, but she feared if I were not quick the fire would not soon be ready for the vegetables; and thus urged, and contrary to myfirst intention, I hastily emptied the sticks out of the handkerchief into the ditch and began to endeavour to light them.
But they would not light. Match after match flared an instant, then went out. It was a windy evening, and I saw no reason for supposing that any match would stay alight long enough to get even one stick to catch fire. I went down on my knees and interposed my person between the sticks and the wind, but though the matches then burned to the end (where were my fingers) the sticks took no more notice than if they had been of iron. Losing patience I said something aloud and not, I am afraid, quite complimentary, about wives who neglect their duties and kick in shortened skirts over the traces of matrimony; and Edelgard’s voice immediately responded from the other side of the hedge. “ButlieberOtto,” it said, “is it then my fault that you have forgotten the paper?”
I straightened myself and looked at her. She had already been on the search for sticks, for as she advanced to the gap and stood in it I saw she had an apronful of them. I must say I was surprised at her courage in confronting me thus alone, when she was aware I must be gravely displeased with her and could only be waiting for an opportunity to tell her so. She, however, with the cunning common to wives, called melieberOttoas though nothing had happened, did not allude to my overheard exclamation and sought to soften me with sticks.
I looked at her therefore very coldly. “No,” I said, “I had not forgotten the paper.”
And this was true, because to forget paper (or indeed anything else) you must first of all have thought of it, and I had not.
“Perhaps,” I went on, my coldness descending as I spoke below zero, which is the point in our well-arranged thermometers (either Celsius or Réaumur, but none of their foolish Fahrenheits) where freezing begins, “perhaps, since you are so clever, you will have the goodness to light the fire yourself. Any one,” I continued with emphasis, “can criticize. We will now, if you please, change places, and you shall bring your unquestioned gifts to bear on this matter, while I assume therolesuited to lesser capacity, and merely criticize.”
This of course, was bitter; but was it not a justified bitterness? Unfortunately I shall have to suppress the passage I suppose at the reading aloud, so shall never hear the verdict of my friends; but even without that verdict (and I well know what it would be, for they all have wives) even without it I can honestly call my bitterness justified. Besides, it was very well put.
She listened in silence, and then just said, “Oh, Otto,” and came down at once into the ditch, and
“But, lieber Otto, is it then my fault that you have forgotten the paper?”
“But, lieber Otto, is it then my fault that you have forgotten the paper?”
bending over the sticks began to arrange them quickly on some stones she picked up.
I did not like to sit down and smoke, which is what I would have done at home (supposing such a situation as the Ottringels lighting a fire out-of-doors in Storchwerder were conceivable), because Mrs. Menzies-Legh would probably have immediately left off peeling her potatoes to exclaim, and Jellaby would, I dare say, have put down his buckets and come over to inquire if I were enjoying myself. Not that I care tenpfenningsfor their opinions, and I also passionately disapprove of the whole English attitude toward women; but I am a fair-minded man, and believe in going as far as is reasonable with the well-known maxim of behaving in Rome as the Romans behave.
I therefore just stood with my back to the caravans and watched Edelgard. In less time than I take to write it she had piled up the sticks, stuffed a bit of newspaper she drew from her apron underneath them, lit them by means (as I noted) of a single match, and behold the fire, crackling and blazing and leaping upward or outward as the wind drove it.
No proof, if anything further in that way were needed, could be more convincing as to the position women are intended by nature to fill. Their instincts are all of the fire-lighting order, the order that serves and tends; while to man, the nobledreamer, is reserved the place in life where there is room, dignity, and uninterruption. Else how can he dream? And without his dreams there would be no subsequent crystallization of dreams; and all that we see of good and great and wealth-bringing was once some undisturbed man’s dream.
But this is philosophy; and you, my friends, who breathe the very air handed down to you by our Hegels and our Kants, who are born into it and absorb it whether you want to or not through each one of your infancy’s pores, you do not need to hear the Ottringel echo of your own familiar thoughts. We in Storchwerder speak seldom on these subjects for we take them for granted; and I will not in this place describe too minutely all that passed through my mind as I watched, in that grassy solitude, at the hour when the sun in setting lights up everything with extra splendour, my wife piling sticks on the fire.
Indeed, what did pass through it was of a mixed nature. It seemed so strange to be there; so strange that that meadow, in all its dampness, its high hedge round three sides of it, its row of willows brooding over the sulky river, its wood on the one hand, its barren expanse of mole-ridden field on the other, and for all view another meadow of exact similarity behind another row of exactly similar willows across the Medway, it seemed so strange that all this had been lying there silent andempty for heaven knows how many years, the exact spot on which Edelgard and I were standing waiting, as it were, for its prey throughout the entire period of our married life in Storchwerder and of my other married life previous to that, while we, all unconscious, went through the series of actions and thoughts that had at length landed us on it. Strange fruition of years. Stranger the elaborate leading up to it. Strangest the inability of man to escape such a destiny. Regarded as the fruition of years it was certainly paltry, it was certainly a disproportionate destiny. I had been led from Pomerania, a most remote place if measured by its distance from the Medway, in order to stand at evening with damp feet on this exact spot. A believer, you will cry, in predestination? Perhaps. Anyhow, filled with these reflections (and others of the same character) and watching my wife doing in silence that for which she is fitted and intended, my feeling toward her became softer; I began to excuse; to relent; to forgive. Indeed I have tried to do my duty. I am not hard, unless she forces me to be. I feel that no one can guide and help a wife except a husband. And I am older than she is; and am I not experienced in wives, who have had two, and one of them for the enormous (sometimes it used to seem endless) period of twenty years?
I said nothing to her at the moment of a softernature, being well aware of the advantage of allowing time, before proceeding to forgiveness, for the firmer attitude to sink in; and Jellaby bringing the iron stew-pot Mrs. Menzies-Legh had bought that morning—or rather dragging it, for he is, as I have said, a weedy creature—across to us, spilling much of the water it contained on the way, I was obliged to help him get it on to the fire, fetching at his direction stones to support it and then considerably scorching my hands in the efforts to settle the thing safely on the stones.
“Please don’t bother, Baroness,” said Jellaby to Edelgard when she began to replenish the fire with more sticks. “We’ll do that. You’ll get the smoke in your eyes.”
But would we not get the smoke in our eyes too? And would not eyes unused to kitchen work smart far more than eyes that did the kind of thing at home every day? For I suppose the fires in the kitchen of Storchwerder smoke sometimes, and Edelgard must have been perfectly inured to it.
“Oh,” said Edelgard, in the pleasant little voice she manages to have when speaking to persons who are not her husband, “it is no bother. I do not mind the smoke.”
“Why, what are we here for?” said Jellaby. And he took the sticks she was still holding from her hands.
Again the thought crossed my mind that Jellabymust be attracted by Edelgard; indeed, all three gentlemen. This is an example of the sort of attention that had been lavished on her ever since we started. Inconceivable as it seemed, there it was; and the most inconceivable part of it was that it was boldly done in the very presence of her husband. I, however, knowing that one should never trust a foreigner, determined to bring round the talk, as I had decided the day before, to the number of Edelgard’s birthdays that very evening at supper.
But when supper, after an hour and a half’s waiting, came, I was too much exhausted to care. We all were very silent. Our remaining strength had gone out of us like a flickering candle in a wind when we became aware of the really endless time the potatoes take to boil. Everything had gone into the pot together. Mrs. Menzies-Legh had declared that was the shortest, and indeed the only way, for the oil-stoves in the caravans and their small saucepans had sufficiently proved their inadequacy the previous night. Henceforth, said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, our hope was to be in the stew-pot; and as she said it she threw in the potatoes, the cabbages, the onion sliced by her tender sister, a piece of butter, a handful of salt, and the bacon her husband and Lord Sigismund had brought back with them from the village. It all went in together; but it did not all come outtogether, for we discovered after savoury fragrances had teased our nostrils for some time that the cabbage and the bacon were cooked, while the potatoes, in response to the proddings of divers anxious forks, remained obstinately hard.
We held a short council, gathered round the stew-pot, as to the best course to pursue. If we left the bacon and the cabbage in the pot they would be boiled certainly to a pulp, and perhaps—awful thought—altogether away, before the potatoes were ready. On the other hand, to relinquish the potatoes, the chief feature of our supper, would be impossible. We therefore, after much anxious argument, decided to take out that which was already cooked, put it carefully on plates, and at the last moment return it to the pot to be warmed up again.
This was done, and we sat round on the grass to wait. Now was the moment, now that we were all assembled silent in a circle, to direct the conversation into the birthday channel, but I found myself so much enfeebled and the rest so unresponsive that after a faltering beginning, which had no effect except to draw a few languid gazes upon me, I was obliged perforce to put it off. Indeed, our thoughts were wholly concentrated on food; and looking back it is almost incredible to me that that meagre supper should have roused so eager an interest.
We all sat without speaking, listening to the bubbling of the pot. Now and then one of the young men thrust more sticks beneath it. The sun had set long since, and the wind had dropped. The meadow seemed to grow much damper, and while our faces were being scorched by the fire our backs were becoming steadily more chilly. The ladies drew their wraps about them. The gentlemen did that for their comfort which they would not do for politeness, and put on their coats. I whose coat had never left me, fetched my mackintosh and hung it over my shoulders, careful to keep it as much as possible out of reach of the fire-glow in case it should begin to melt.
Long before, the ladies had spread the tables and cut piles of bread and butter, and one of them—I expect it was Frau von Eckthum—had concocted an uncooked pudding out of some cakes they alluded to as sponge, with some cream and raspberry jam and brandy, which, together with the bacon and excepting the brandy, were the result of the foraging expedition.
Toward these tables our glances often wandered. We were but human, and presently, overcome, our bodies wandered thither too.
We ate the bread and butter.
Then we ate the bacon and cabbage, agreeing that it was a pity to let it get any cooler.
Then we ate the pudding they spoke of—forafter this they began to be able to speak—as a trifle.
And then—and it is as strange to relate as it is difficult to believe—we returned to the stew-pot and ate every one of the now ready and steaming hot potatoes; and never, I can safely say, was there anything so excellent.
Later on, entering our caravan much softened by these various experiences and by a cup of extremely good coffee made by Edelgard, but feeling justified in withdrawing, now that darkness had set in, from the confusions of the washing up, I found my wife searching in the depths of the yellow box for dishcloths.
I stood in the narrow gangway lighting a cigar, and when I had done lighting it I realized that I was close to her and alone. One is never at any time far from anything in these vehicles, but on this occasion the nearness combined with the privacy suggested that the moment had arrived for the words I had decided she must hear—kind words, not hard as I had at first intended, but needful.
I put out my arm, therefore, and proposed to draw her toward me as a preliminary to peace.
She would not, however, come.
Greatly surprised—for resentment had not till then been one of her failings—I opened my mouth to speak, but she, before I coulddo so, said, “Do you mind not smoking inside the caravan?”
Still more surprised, and indeed amazed (for this was petty) but determined not to be shaken out of my kindness, I gently began, “Dear wife——” and was going on when she interrupted me.
“Dear husband,” she said, actually imitating me, “I know what you are going to say. I always know what you are going to say. I know all the things you ever can or ever do say.”
She paused a moment, and then added in a firm voice, looking me straight in the eyes, “By heart.”
And before I could in any way recover my presence of mind she was through the curtain and down the ladder and had vanished with the dishcloths in the darkness.
THIS was rebellion.
But unconsciousness supervened before I had had time to consider how best to meet it, the unconsciousness of the profound and prolonged sleep which is the portion of caravaners. I fell into it almost immediately after her departure, dropping into my berth, a mere worn-out collection of aching and presently oblivious bones, and remaining in that condition till she had left the Elsa next morning.
Therefore I had little time for reflection on the new side of her nature the English atmosphere was bringing out, nor did I all that day find either the leisure or the privacy necessary for it. I felt, indeed, as I walked by my horse along roads broad and roads narrow, roads straight and roads winding, roads flat and convenient and roads hilly and tiresome, my eyes fixed principally on the ground, for if I looked up there were only hedges and in front of me only the broad back of the Ailsa blocking up any view there might be, I felt a numb sensation stealing over me, a kind of dull patience, such as I have observed (for I see mostthings) to be the leading characteristic of a team of oxen, a tendency becoming more marked with every mile toward the merely bovine.
The weather that day was disagreeable. There was a high wind and a leaden sky and the dust blew hard and gritty. When, on rising, I peeped out between the window curtains, it all looked very cold and wretched, the Medway—a most surly river—muddier than ever, the leaves of the willow trees wildly fluttering and showing their gray undersides. It seemed difficult to believe that one was really there, really about to go out into that gloom to breakfast instead of into a normal dining-room with a stove and a newspaper. But, on emerging, I found that though it looked so cold it was not intolerably so, and no rain in the night had, by drenching the long grass, added to our agonies.
They were all at breakfast beneath the willows, holding on their hats with one hand and endeavouring to eat with the other, and they all seemed very cheerful. Edelgard, who had taken the coffee under her management, was going round replenishing the cups, and was actually laughing when I came out at something some one had just said. Remembering how we parted this struck me as at least strange.
I made a point of at once asking for porridge, but luckily old James had not brought the milkin time, so there was none. Spared, I ate corned beef and jam, but my feet were still sore from the previous day’s march, and I was unable to enjoy it very much. The tablecloth flapped in my face, and my mackintosh blew almost into the river when I let it go for an instant in order to grasp the milk jug, and I must say I could not quite understand why they should all be so happy. I trust I am as willing to be amused as any man, but what is there amusing in breakfasting in a draughty meadow with everything flapping and fluttering, and the coffee cold before it reaches one’s mouth? Yet they were happy. Even Menzies-Legh, a gray-haired, badly-preserved man, older a good deal, I should say, than I am, was joking and then laughing at his jokes with the fledglings, and Lord Sigismund and Jellaby were describing almost with exultation how brisk they had felt after a bath they had taken at five in the morning in the Medway.
What a place to be in at five in the morning. I shivered only to hear of it. Well, that which makes one man brisk is the undoing of another, and a bath in that cold, unfriendly stream would undoubtedly have undone me. I could only conclude that, pasty and loosely put together as they outwardly were, they must be of a very great secret leatheriness.
This surprised me. Not that Jellaby shouldbe leathery, for if he were not neither would he be a Socialist; but that the son of so noble a house as the house of Hereford should have anything but the thinnest, most sensitive of skins, really was astonishing. No doubt, however, Lord Sigismund combined, like the racehorse of purest breed, a skin thin as a woman’s with a mettle and spirit nothing could daunt. Nothing was daunting him that morning, that was very clear, for he sat at the end of the table shedding such contented beams through his spectacles on the company and on the food that it was as if, unconsciously true to his future calling, he was saying a continual grace.
I think they must all have been up very early, for except the cups and plates actually in use everything was already stowed away. Even the tent and its furniture was neatly rolled up preparatory to being distributed among the three caravans. Such activity, after the previous day, was surprising; and still more so was the circumstance that I had heard nothing of the attendant inevitable bustle.
“How do you feel this morning?” I asked solicitously of Frau von Eckthum on meeting her a moment alone behind her larder; I hoped she, at least, had not been working too hard.
“Oh, very well,” said she.
“Not too weary?”
“Not weary at all.”
“Ah—youth, youth,” said I, shaking my head playfully, for indeed she looked singularly attractive that morning.
She smiled, and mounting the steps into her caravan began to do things with a duster and to sing.
For a moment I wondered whether she too had been made brisk by early contact with the Medway (of course in some remoter pool or bay), so unusual in her was this flow of language; but the idea of such delicacy being enveloped and perhaps buffeted by that rude volume of muddy water was, I felt, an impossible one. Still, why should she feel brisk? Had she not walked the day before the entire distance in the dust? Was it possible that she too, in spite of her poetic exterior, was really inwardly leathery? I have my ideals about women, and believe there is much of the poet concealed somewhere about me; and there is a moonlight intangibleness about this lady, an etherealism amounting at times almost to indistinctness, that made the application to her of such an adjective as leathery one from which I shrank. Yet if she were not, how could she—but I put these thoughts resolutely aside, and began to prepare for our departure, moving about mechanically as one in a bleak and chilly dream.
That is a hideous bridge, that one the Englishhave built themselves across the Medway. A great gray-painted iron structure, with the dusty highroad running over it and the dirty river running under it. I hope never to see it again, unless officially at the head of my battalion. On the other side was a place called Paddock Wood, also, it seemed to me, a dreary thing as I walked through it that morning at my horse’s side. The sun came out just there, and the wind with its consequent dust increased. What an August, thought I; what a climate; what a place. An August and a climate and a place only to be found in the British Isles. In Storchwerder at that moment a proper harvest mellowness prevailed. No doubt also in Switzerland, whither we so nearly went, and certainly in Italy. Was this a reasonable way of celebrating one’s silver wedding, plodding through Paddock Wood with no one taking any notice of me, not even she who was the lawful partner of the celebration? The only answer I got as I put the question to myself was a mouthful of dust.
Nobody came to walk with me, and unless some one did my position was a very isolated one, wedged in between the Ailsa and the Ilsa, unable to leave the Elsa, who, like a wife, immediately strayed from the proper road if I did. The back of the Ailsa prevented my seeing who was with whom in front, but once at a sharp turning I didsee, and what I saw was Frau von Eckthum walking with Jellaby, and Edelgard—if you please—on his other side. The young Socialist was slouching along with his hands in his pockets and his bony shoulders up to his ears listening, apparently, to Frau von Eckthum who actually seemed to be talking, for he kept on looking at her, and laughing as though at the things she said. Edelgard, I noticed, joined in the laughter as unconcernedly as if she had nothing in the world to reproach herself with. Then the Elsa followed round the corner and the scene in front was blotted out; but glancing back over my shoulder I saw how respectably Lord Sigismund, true to his lineage, remained by the Ilsa’s horse’s head, reflectively smoking his pipe and accompanied only by his dog.
Beyond Paddock Wood and its flat and dreary purlieus the road began to ascend and to wind, growing narrower and less draughty, with glimpses of a greener country and a hillier distance, in fact improving visibly as we neared Sussex. All this time I had walked by myself, and I was still too tired after the long march the day before to have any but dull objections. It would have been natural to be acutely indignant at Edelgard’s persistent defiance, natural to be infuriated at the cleverness with which she shifted the entire charge of our caravan on to me while she, on the horizon,gesticulated with Jellaby. I realized, it is true, that the others would not have let her lead the horse even had she offered to, but she ought at least to have walked beside me and hear me, if that were my mood, grumble. However, a reasonable man knows how to wait. He does not, not being a woman, hasten and perhaps spoil a crisis by rushing at it. And if no opportunity should present itself for weeks, would there not be years in our flat in Storchwerder consisting solely of opportunities?
Besides, my feet ached. I think there must have been some clumsy darning of Edelgard’s in my socks that pressed on my toes and made them feel as if the shoes were too short for them. And small stones kept on getting inside them, finding out the one place they could get in at and leaping through it with the greatest dexterity, dropping gradually by unpleasant stages down to underneath my socks, where they remained causing me discomfort till the next camp. These physical conditions, to which the endless mechanical trudging behind the Ailsa’s varnished back must be added, reduced me as I said before to a condition of dull and bovine acquiescence. I ceased to make objections. I hardly thought. I just trudged.
At the top of the ascent, at a junction of four roads called Four Winds (why, when they were four roads, the English themselves I suppose best know), we met a motor.
It came scorching round a corner with an insolent shriek of its tooting apparatus, but the shriek died away as it were on its lips when it saw what was filling up the way. It hesitated, stopped, and then began respectfully to back. Pass us it could not at that point, and charge into such vast objects as the caravans was a task before which even bloodthirstiness quailed. I record this as the one pleasing incident that morning, and when it was my turn to walk by the thing I did so with squared shoulders and held-up head and a muttered (yet perfectly distinct) “Road hogs”—which is the term Menzies-Legh had applied to them the day before when relating how one had run over a woman near where he lives, and had continued its career, leaving her to suffer in the road, which she did for the space of two hours before the next passer-by passed in time to see her die. And she was a quite young woman, and a pretty one into the bargain.
(“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” said the foolish Jellaby when, in answer to my questions, I extracted this information from Menzies-Legh.)
Therefore, remembering this shocking affair, and being as well a great personal detester of these conveyances, the property invariably of the insolent rich, who with us are chiefly Jews, I took care tobe distinct as I muttered “Road hogs.” The two occupants in goggles undoubtedly heard me, for they started and even their goggles seemed to shrink back and be ashamed of themselves, and I continued my way with a slight reviving of my spirits, the slight reviving of which he is generally conscious who has had the courage to say what he thinks of a bad thing.
The post whose finger we were following had Dundale inscribed on it, and as we wound downward the scenery considerably improved. Woods on our left sheltered us from the wind, and on our right were a number of pretty hills. At the bottom—a bottom only reached after care and exertion, for loose stones imperilled the safety of my horse’s knees, and I had besides to spring about applying and regulating the brake—we found a farm with a hop-kiln in the hollow on the left, and opposite it a convenient, indeed attractive, field.
No other house was near. No populace. No iron bridge. No donkeys. No barrel-organ. Stretches of corn, so ripe that though the sky had clouded over they looked as if the sun were shining on them, alternated very pleasantly with the green of the hop-fields, and portions of woods climbed up between the folds of the hills. It was a sheltered spot, with a farm capable no doubt of supplying food, but I feared that because it was only one o’clock my pedantic companions, in defiance ofthe previous day’s experience, would decline to camp. Taking therefore the law into my own hands I pulled up my caravan in front of the farm gate. The Ilsa behind me was forced to pull up too; and the Ailsa, in the very act of lumbering round the next corner, was arrested by my loud and masterfulBrrr.
“Anything wrong?” asked Lord Sigismund, running up from the back.
“What is it?” asked Menzies-Legh, coming toward me from the front.
Strange to say they listened to reason; and yet not strange, for I have observed that whenever one makes up one’s mind beforehand and unshakably other people give in. One must know what one wants—that is the whole secret; and in a world of flux and shilly-shally the infrequent rock is the only person who really gets it.
Jellaby (who seemed to think he was irresistible) volunteered to go to the farmer and get permission to camp in the field, and I was pleased to see that he made so doubtful an impression that the man came back with him before granting anything, to find out whether the party belonging to this odd emissary were respectable. I dare say he would have decided that we were not had he only seen the others, for the gentlemen were in their shirt sleeves again; but when he saw me, well and completely dressed, he had no further hesitations. Readily he let us use the field, recommending a certain lower portion of it on account of the nearness of the water, and then he prepared to go back and, as he said, finish his dinner.
But we, who wanted dinner too, could not be content with nothing more filling than a field, and began almost with one voice to talk to him of poultry.
He said he had none.
Of eggs.
He said he had none.
Of (anxiously) butter.
He said he had none. And he scratched his head and looked unintelligent for a space, and then repeating that about finishing his dinner turned away.
I went with him.
“Take the caravans into the field and I will forage,” I called back, waving my hand; for the idea of accompanying a man who was going to finish his dinner exhilarated me into further masterfulness.
My rapid calculation was, as I kept step with him, he looking at me sideways, that though it was very likely true he had not enough for ten it was equally probable that he had plenty for one. Besides, he might be glad to let an interesting stranger share the finishing of his no doubt lonely meal.
In the short transit from the lane to his back door (the front door was choked with grass and weeds) I chatted agreeably and fluently about the butter and eggs we desired to buy, adopting the “Come, come, my dear fellow” tone, perhaps better described as the man to man form of appeal.
“Foreign?” said he, after I had thus flowed on, pausing on his doorstep as though intending to part from me at that point.
“Yes, and proud of it,” said I, lifting my hat to my distant Fatherland.
“Ah,” said he. “No accountin’ for tastes.”
This was disappointing after I had thought we were getting on. Also it was characteristically British. I would at once have resented it if with the opening of the door the unfinished dinner had not, in the form of a most appetizing odour, issued forth to within reach of my nostrils. To sit in a room with shut windows at a table and dine, without preliminary labours, on food that did not get cold between the plate and one’s mouth, seemed to me at that moment a lot so blessed that tears almost came into my eyes.
“Do you never have—guests?” I asked, faltering but hurried, for he was about to shut the door with me still on the wrong side of it.
He stared. Red-faced and over stout his very personal safety demanded that he should not by himself finish that dinner.
“Guests?” he repeated stupidly. “No, I don’t have no guests.”
“Poor fellow,” said I.
“I don’t know about poor fellow,” said he, getting redder.
“Yes. Poor fellow. And poor fellow inasmuch as I suppose in this secluded spot there are none to be had, and so you are prevented from exercising the most privileged and noble of rites.”
“Oh, you’re one of them Social Democrats?”
“Social Democrats?” I echoed.
“Them chaps that go about talkin’ to us of rights, and wrongs too, till we all get mad and discontented—which is pretty well all we ever do get,” he added with a chuckle that was at the same time scornful. And he shut the door.
Filled with the certitude that I had been misunderstood, and that if only he could be made aware that he had one of the aristocracy of the first nation in the world on his step willing to be his guest and that such a chance would never in all human probability occur again he would be too delighted to welcome me, I knocked vigorously.
“Let me in. I am hungry. You do not know who I am,” I called out.
“Well,” said he, opening the door a few inches after a period during which I had continued knocking and he, as I could hear, had moved about the room inside, “here’s a quarter of a pound ofbutter for you. I ain’t got no more. It’s salt. I ain’t got no fresh. I send it away to the market as soon as it’s made. It’ll be fourpence. Tell your party they can pay when they settle for the field.”
And he thrust a bit of soft and oily butter lying on a piece of paper into my hand and shut the door.
“Man,” I cried in desperation, rattling the handle, “you do not know who I am. I am a gentleman—an officer—a nobleman——”
He bolted the door.
When I got back I found them encamped in a corner at the far end of the field, as close into the shelter of a hedge as they could get, and my butter was greeted with a shout (led by Jellaby) of laughter. He and the fledglings at once started off on a fresh foraging expedition, on my advice in another direction, but all they bore back with them was the promise, from another farmer, of chickens next morning at six, and what is the good of chickens next morning at six? It was my turn to shout, and so I did, but I seemed to have little luck with my merriment, for the others were never merry at the moment that I was, and I shouted alone.
Jellaby, pretending he did not know why I should, looked surprised and said as usual, “Hullo, Baron, enjoying yourself?”
“Of course,” said I, smartly—“is not that what I have come to England for?”
We dined that day on what was left of our bacon and some potatoes we had over. An attempt which failed was made to fry the potatoes—“as a pleasant change,” said Lord Sigismund good humouredly—but the wind was so high that the fire could not be brought to frying pitch, so about three o’clock we gave it up, and boiled them and ate them with butter and the bacon, which was for some reason nobody understood half raw.