Gentle as my voice was, it yet made her start
Gentle as my voice was, it yet made her start
I say, Lord Sigismund who had given the expedition its decent air of being just an aristocratic whim, stamped it, marked it, raised it altogether above mere appearances. He was a Christian gentleman; more, he was the only one of the party who could cook. Were we, then, to be thrown for future sustenance entirely on Jellaby’s porridge?
That afternoon, dining in the mud of the deserted farmyard, we had sausages; a dinner that had only been served once before, and which was a sign in itself that the kitchen resources were strained. I have already described how Jellaby cooked sausages, goading them round and round the pan, prodding them, pursuing them, giving them no rest in which to turn brown quietly—as foolish a way with a sausage as ever I have seen. For the second time during the tour we ate them pink, filling up as best we might with potatoes, a practice we had got quite used to, though to you, my hearers, who only know potatoes as an adjunct, it will seem a pitiable state of things. So it was; but when one is hungry to the point of starvation a hot potato is an attractive object, and two hot potatoes are exactly doubly so. Anyhow my respect for them has increased tenfold since my holiday, and I insist now on their being eaten in much larger quantities than they used to be in our kitchen, for do I notknow how thoroughly they fill? And servants quarrel if they have too much meat.
“That is poor food for a man like you, Baron,” said Menzies-Legh, suddenly addressing me from the other end of the table.
He had been watching me industriously scraping—picture, my friends, Baron von Ottringel thus reduced—scraping, I say, the last remnants of the potatoes out of the saucepan after the ladies had gone, accompanied by Jellaby, to begin washing up.
It was so long since he had spoken to me of his own accord that I paused in my scraping to stare at him. Then, with my natural readiness at that sort of thing, I drew his attention to his bad manners earlier in the afternoon by baldly answering “Eh?”
“I wonder you stand it,” he said, taking no notice of the little lesson.
“Pray will you tell me how it is to be helped?” I inquired. “Roast goose does not, I have observed, grow on the hedges in your country.” (This, I felt, was an excellent retort.)
“But it flourishes in London and other big towns,” said he—a foolish thing to say to a man sitting in the back yard of Frogs’ Hole Farm. “Have a cigarette,” he added; and he pushed his case toward me.
I lit one, slightly surprised at the change forthe better in his behaviour, and he got up and came and sat on the vacant camp-stool beside me.
“Hunger,” said I, continuing the conversation, “is the best sauce, and as I am constantly hungry it follows that I cannot complain of not having enough sauce. In fact, I am beginning to feel that gipsying is a very health-giving pursuit.”
“Damp—damp,” said Menzies-Legh, shaking his head and screwing up his mouth in a disapproval that astonished me.
“What?” I said. “It may be a little damp if the weather is damp, but one must get used to hardships.”
“Only to find,” said he, “that one’s constitution has been undermined.”
“What?” said I, unable to understand this change of attitude.
“Undermined for life,” said he, impressively.
“My dear sir, I have heard you myself, under the most adverse circumstances, repeatedly remark that it was healthy and jolly.”
“My dear Baron,” said he, “I am not like you. Neither Jellaby, nor I, nor Browne either, for that matter, has your physique. We are physically, compared to you—to be quite frank—mere weeds.”
“Oh, come now, my dear sir, I cannot permit you—you undervalue—of slighter build, perhaps, but hardly——”
“It is true. Weeds. Mere weeds. And my point is that we, accordingly, are not nearly so likely as you are to suffer in the long run from the privations and exposure of a bad-weather holiday like this.”
“Well now, you must pardon me if I entirely fail to see——”
“Why, my dear Baron, it’s as plain as daylight. Our constitutions will not be undermined for the shatteringly good reason that we have none to undermine.”
My hearers will agree that, logically, the position was incontrovertible, and yet I doubted.
Observing my silence, and probably guessing its cause, he took up an empty glass and poured some tea into it from the teapot at which Frau von Eckthum had been slaking her thirst in spite of my warnings (I had, alas, no right to forbid) that so much tea drinking would make her still more liable to start when suddenly addressed.
“Look here,” said he.
I looked.
“You can see this tea.”
“Certainly.”
“Clear, isn’t it? A beautiful clear brown. A tribute to the spring water here. You can see the house and all its windows through it, it is so perfectly transparent.”
And he held it up, and shutting one eye stared through it with the other.
“Well?” I inquired.
“Well, now look at this.”
And he took another glass and set it beside the first one, and poured both tea and milk into it.
“Look there,” he said.
I looked.
“Jellaby,” said he.
I stared.
Then he took another glass, and poured both tea and milk into it, setting it in a line with the first two.
“Browne,” said he.
I stared.
Then he took a fourth glass, and filled it in the same manner as the second and third and placed it at the end of the line.
“Myself,” said he.
I stared.
“Can you see through either of those three?” he asked, tapping them one after the other.
“No,” said I.
“Now if I put a little more milk into them”—he did—“it makes no difference. They were muddy and thick before, and they remain muddy and thick.But”—and he held the milk jug impressively over the first glass—“if I put the least drop into this one”—he did—“see how visible itis. The admirable clearness is instantaneously dimmed. The pollution spreads at once. The entire glass, owing to that single drop, is altered, muddied, ruined.”
“Well?” I inquired, as he paused and stared hard at me.
“Well?” said he. “Do you not see?”
“See what?” said I.
“My point. It’s as clear as the first glass was before I put milk into it. The first glass, my dear Baron, is you, with your sound and perfect constitution.”
I bowed.
“Your splendid health.”
I bowed.
“Your magnificent physique.”
I bowed.
“The other three are myself, and Jellaby, and Browne.”
He paused.
“And the drop of milk,” he said slowly, “is the caravan tour.”
I was confounded; and you, my hearers, will admit that I had every reason to be. Here was an example of what is rightly called irresistible logic, and a reasonable man dare not refuse, once he recognizes it, to bow in silence. Yet I felt very well. I said I did, after a pause during which I was realizing how unassailable Menzies-Legh’s position was, and endeavouring to reconcile its unassailableness with my own healthful sensations.
“You can’t get away from facts,” he answered. “There they are.”
And he indicated with his cigarette the four glasses and the milk jug.
“But,” I repeated, “except for a natural foot-soreness I undoubtedly do feel very well.”
“My dear Baron, it is obvious beyond all argument that the more absolutely well a person is the more easily he must be affected by the smallest upset, by the smallest variation in the environment to which he has got accustomed. Paradox, which plays so large a part in all truths, is rampant here. Those in perfect health are nearer than anybody else to being seriously ill. To keep well you must never be quite so.”
He paused.
“When,” he continued, seeing that I said nothing, “we began caravaning we could not know how persistently cold and wet it was going to be, but now that we do I must say I feel the responsibility of having persuaded you—or of my sister-in-law’s having persuaded you—to join us.”
“But I feel very well,” I repeated.
“And so you will, up to the moment when you do not.”
Of course that was true.
“Rheumatism, now,” he said, shaking his head; “I greatly fear rheumatism for you in the coming winter. And rheumatism once it gets hold of a man doesn’t leave him till it has ravaged each separate organ, including, as everybody knows, that principal organ of all, the heart.”
This was gloomy talk, and yet the man was right. The idea that a holiday, a thing planned and looked forward to with so much pleasure, was to end by ravaging my organs did not lighten the leaden atmosphere that surrounded and weighed upon Frogs’ Hole Farm.
“I cannot alter the weather,” I said at last—irritably, for I felt ruffled.
“No. But I wouldn’t risk it for too long if I were you,” said he.
“Why, I have paid for a month,” I exclaimed, surprised that he should overlook this clinching fact.
“That, set against an impaired constitution, is a very inconsiderable trifle,” said he.
“Not inconsiderable at all,” said I sharply.
“Money is money, and I am not one to throw it away. And what about the van? You cannot abandon an entire van at a great distance from the place it belongs to.”
“Oh,” said he quickly, “we would see to that.”
I got up, for the sight of the glasses full of what I was forced to acknowledge was symbolictruth irritated me. The one representing myself, into which he had put but one drop of milk, was miserably discoloured. I did not like to think of such discolouration being my probable portion, and yet having paid for a month’s caravaning what could I do?
The afternoon was chilly and very damp, and I buttoned my wraps carefully about my throat. Menzies-Legh watched me.
“Well,” said he, getting up and looking first at me and then at the glasses and then at me again, “what do you think of doing, Baron?”
“Going for a little stroll,” I said.
And I went.
THIS was a singular conversation.
I passed round the back of the house and along a footpath I found there, turning it over in my mind. Less than ever did I like Menzies-Legh. In spite of the compliments about my physique I liked him less than ever. And how very annoying it is when a person you do not like is right; bad enough if you do like him, but intolerable if you do not. As I proceeded along the footpath with my eyes on the ground I saw at every step those four glasses of tea, particularly my one, the one that sparkled so brilliantly at first and was afterward so easily ruined. Absorbed in this contemplation I did not notice whither my steps were tending till I was pulled up suddenly by a church door. The path had led me to that, and then, as I saw, skirted along a fringe of tombstones to a gate in a wall beyond which appeared the chimneys of what was no doubt the parsonage.
The church door was open, and I went in—for I was tired, and here were pews; ruffled, and here was peace. The droning of a voice led meto conclude (rightly) that a service was in progress, for I had learned by this time that in England the churches constantly burst out into services, regardless of the sort of day it is—whether, I mean, it is a Sunday or not. I entered, and selecting a pew with a red cushion along its seat and a comfortable footstool sat down.
The pastor was reading the Scriptures out of a Bible supported, according to the unaccountable British custom, on the back of a Prussian eagle. This prophetic bird—the first swallow, as it were, of that summer which I trust will not long be delayed, when Luther’s translation will rest on its back and be read aloud by a German pastor to a congregation forced to understand by the simple methods we bring to bear on our Polish (also acquired) subjects—eyed me with a human intelligence. We eyed each other, in fact, as old friends might who meet after troublous experiences in an alien land.
Except for this bird, who seemed to me quite human in his expression of alert sympathy, the pastor and I were alone in the building; and I sat there marvelling at the wasteful folly that pays a man to read and pray daily to a set of empty pews. Ought he not rather to stay at home and keep an eye on his wife? To do, indeed, anything sooner than conduct a service which nobody evidently wants? I call it heathenism; I call it idolatry;and so would any other plain man who heard and saw empty pews, things of wood and cushions, being addressed as brethren, and dearly beloved ones into the bargain.
When he had done at the eagle he crossed over to another place and began reciting something else; but very soon, after only a few words, he stopped dead and looked at me.
I wondered why, for I had not done anything. Even, however, with that innocence of conscience in the background, it does make a man uncomfortable when a pastor will not go on but fixes his eyes on you sitting harmless in your pew, and I found myself unable to return his gaze. The eagle was staring at me with a startling expression of comprehension, almost as if he too were thinking that a pastor officiating has such an undoubted advantage over the persons in the pews that it is cowardice to use it. My discomfort increased considerably when I saw the pastor descend from his place and bear down on me, his eyes still fixing me, his white clothing fluttering out behind him. What, I asked myself greatly perturbed, could the creature possibly want? I soon found out, for thrusting an open Prayer-book toward me he pointed to a verse of what appeared to be a poem, and whispered:
“Will you kindly stand up and take your part in the service?”
Even had I known how, surely I had no part nor lot in such a form of worship.
“Sir,” I said, not heeding the outstretched book, but feeling about in my breast-pocket, “permit me to present you with my card. You will then see——”
He, however, in his turn refused to heed the outstretched card. He did not so much as look at it.
“I cannotobligeyou to,” he whispered, as though our conversation were unfit for the eagle’s ears; and leaving the open book on the little shelf in the front of the pew he strode back again to his place and resumed his reading, doing what he called my part as well as his own with a severity of voice and manner ill-suited to one presumably addressing theliebe Gott.
Well, being there and very comfortable I did not see why I should go. I was behaving quite inoffensively, sitting still and holding my tongue, and the comfort of being in a building with no fresh air in it was greater than you, my friends, who only know fresh air at intervals and in properly limited quantities, will be able to understand. So I stayed till the end, till he, after a profusion of prayers, got up from his knees and walked away into some obscure portion of the church where I could no longer observe his movements, and then, not desiring to meet him, Isought the path that had led me thither and hurriedly descended the hill to our melancholy camp. Once I thought I heard footsteps behind me and I hastened mine, getting as quickly round a bend that would conceal me from any one following me as a tired man could manage, and it was not till I had reached and climbed into the Elsa that I felt really safe.
The three caravans were as usual drawn up in a parallel line with mine in the middle, and their door ends facing the farm. To be in the middle is a most awkward situation, for you cannot speak the least word of caution (or forgiveness, as the case may be) to your wife without running grave risk of being overheard. Often I used carefully to shut all the windows and draw the door curtain, hoping thus to obtain a greater freedom of speech, though this was of little use with the Ilsa and the Ailsa on either side, their windows open, and perhaps a group of caravaners sitting on the ground immediately beneath.
My wife was mending, and did not look up when I came in. How differently she behaved at home. She not only used to look up when I came in, she got up, and got up quickly too, hastening at the first sound of my return to meet me in the passage, and greeting me with the smiles of a dutiful and accordingly contented wife.
Shutting the Elsa’s windows I drew her attention to this.
“But there isn’t a passage,” said she, still with her head bent over a sock.
Really Edelgard should take care to be specially feminine, for she certainly will never shine on the strength of her brains.
“Dear wife,” I began—and then the complete futility of trying to thresh any single subject out in that airy, sound-carrying dwelling stopped me. I sat down on the yellow box instead, and remarked that I was extremely fatigued.
“So am I,” said she.
“My feet ache so,” I said, “that I fear there may be something serious the matter with them.”
“So do mine,” said she.
This, I may observe, was a new and irritating habit she had got into: whatever I complained of in the way of unaccountable symptoms in divers portions of my frame, instead of sympathizing and suggesting remedies she said hers (whatever it was) did it too.
“Your feet cannot possibly,” said I, “be in the terrible condition mine are in. In the first place mine are bigger, and accordingly afford more scope for disorders. I have shooting pains in them resembling neuralgia, and no doubt traceable to some nervous source.”
“So have I,” said she.
“I think bathing might do them good,” I said, determined not to become angry. “Will you get me some hot water, please?”
“Why?” said she.
She had never said such a thing to me before. I could only gaze at her in a profound surprise.
“Why?” I repeated at length, keeping studiously calm. “What an extraordinary question. I could give you a thousand reasons if I chose, such as that I desire to bathe them; that hot water—rather luckily for itself—has no feet, and therefore has to be fetched; and that a wife has to do as she is told. But I will, my dear Edelgard, confine myself to the counter inquiry, and ask why not?”
“I, too, my dear Otto,” said she—and she spoke with great composure, her head bent over her mending, “could give you a thousand answers to that if I chose, such as that I desire to get this sock finished—yours, by the way; that I have walked exactly as far as you have; that I see no reason why you should not, as there are no servants here, fetch your own hot water; and that your wishing or not wishing to bathe your feet has really, if you come to think of it, nothing to do with me. But I will confine myself just to saying that I prefer not to go.”
It can be imagined with what feelings—notmixed but unmitigated—I listened to this. And after five years! Five years of patience and guidance.
“Is this my Edelgard?” I managed to say, recovering speech enough for those four words but otherwise struck dumb.
“Your Edelgard?” she repeated musingly as she continued to mend, and not even looking at me. “Your boots, your handkerchief, your gloves, your socks—yes——”
I confess I could not follow, and could only listen amazed.
“But not your Edelgard. At least, not more than you are my Otto.”
“But—my boots?” I repeated, really dazed.
“Yes,” she said, folding up the finished sock, “they really are yours. Your property. But you should not suppose that I am a kind of living boot, made to be trodden on. I, my dear Otto, am a human being, and no human being is another human being’s property.”
A flash of light illuminated my brain. “Jellaby!” I cried.
“Hullo?” was the immediate answer from outside. “Want me, Baron?”
“No, no! No,no! No, NO!” I cried leaping up and dragging the door curtain to, as though that could possibly deaden our conversation. “He has been infecting you,” I continued, in a whisperso much charged with indignation that it hissed, “with his poisonous——”
Then I recollected that he could probably hear every word, and muttering an imprecation on caravans I relapsed on to the yellow box and said with forced calm as I scrutinized her face:
“Dear wife, you have no idea how exactly you resemble your Aunt Bockhügel when you put on that expression.”
For the first time this failed to have an effect. Up to then to be told she looked like her Aunt Bockhügel had always brought her back with a jerk to smiles; even if she had to wrench a smile into position she did so, for the Aunt Bockhügel is the sore point in Edelgard’s family, the spot, the smudge across its brightness, the excrescence on its tree, the canker in its bud, the worm destroying its fruit, the night frost paralyzing its blossoms. She cannot be suppressed. She cannot be explained. Everybody knows she is there. She was one of the reasons that made me walk about my room the whole of the night before I proposed marriage to Edelgard, a prey to doubts as to how far a man may go in recklessness in the matter of the aunts he fastens upon his possible children. The Ottringels can show no such relatives; at least there is one, but she looms almost equal to the rest owing to the mirage created by fogs of antiquity and distance. But Edelgard’s aunt iscontemporary and conspicuous. Of a vulgar soul at her very birth, as soon as she came of age she deliberately left the ranks of the nobility and united herself to a dentist. We go there to be treated for toothache, because they take us (owing to the relationship) on unusually favourable terms; otherwise we do not know them. There is however an undoubted resemblance to Edelgard in her less pleasant moods, a thickened, heavier, and older Edelgard, and my wife, well aware of it (for I help her to check it as much as possible by pointing it out whenever it occurs) has been on each occasion eager to readjust her features without loss of time. On this one she was not. Nay, she relaxed still more, and into a profounder likeness.
“It’s true,” she said, not even looking at me but staring out of the window; “it’s true about the boots.”
“Aunt Bockhügel! Aunt Bockhügel!” I cried softly, clapping my hands.
She actually took no notice, but continued to stare abstractedly out of the window; and feeling how impossible it was to talk really naturally to her with Jellaby just outside, I chose the better part and with a movement I could not wholly suppress of impatience got up and left her.
Jellaby, as I suspected, was sitting on theground leaning against one of our wheels as though it were a wheel belonging to his precious community and not ours, hired and paid for. Was it possible that he selected this wheel out of the twelve he could have chosen from because it was my wife’s wheel?
“Do you want anything?” he asked, looking up and taking his pipe out of his mouth; and I just had enough self-control to shake my head and hurry on, for I felt if I had stopped I would have fallen upon him and rattled him about as a terrier rattles a rat.
But what terrible things caravans are when you have to share one with a person with whom you have reason to be angry! Of all their sides this is beyond doubt the worst; worse than when the rain comes in on to your bed, worse than when the wind threatens to blow them over during the night, or half of them sinks into the mud and has to be dug out laboriously in the morning. It may be imagined with what feelings I wandered forth into the chill evening, homeless, bearing as I felt a strong resemblance to that Biblical dove which was driven forth from the shelter of the ark and had no idea what to do next. Of course I was not going to fetch the hot water and return with it, as it were (to pursue my simile), in my beak. Every husband throughout Germany will understand the impossibility of doing that—pictureEdelgard’s triumph if I had! Yet I could not at the end of a laborious day wander indefinitely out-of-doors; besides, I might meet the pastor.
The rest of the party were apparently in their caravans, judging from the streams of conversation issuing forth, and there was no one but old James reclining on a sack in the corner of a distant shed to offer me the solace of companionship. With a sudden mounting to my head of a mighty wave of indignation and determination not to be shut out of my own caravan, I turned and quickly retraced my steps.
“Hullo, Baron,” said Jellaby, still propped against my wheel. “Had enough of it already?”
“More than enough of some things,” I said, eyeing him meaningly as I made my way, much impeded by my mackintosh, up the ladder at an oblique angle (it never could or would stand straight) against our door.
“For instance?” he inquired.
“I am unwell,” I answered shortly, evading a quarrel—for why should I allow myself to be angered by a wisp like that?—and entering the Elsa drew the curtain sharply to on his expressions of conventional regret.
Edelgard had not changed her position. She did not look up.
I pulled off my outer garments and flung them on the floor, and sitting down with emphasis onthe yellow box unlaced and kicked off my boots and pulled off my stockings.
Edelgard raised her head and fixed her eyes on me with a careful imitation of surprise.
“What is it, Otto?” she said. “Have you been invited out to dine?”
I suppose she considered this amusing, but of course it was not, and I jerked myself free of my braces without answering.
“Won’t you tell me what it is?” she asked again.
For all answer I crawled into my berth and pulled the coverings up to my ears and turned my face to the wall; for indeed I was at the end both of my patience and my strength. I had had two days’ running full of disagreeable incidents, and Menzies-Legh’s fatal drop of milk seemed at last to have fallen into the brightness of my original strong tea. I ached enough to make his prophesied rheumatism a very near peril, and was not at all sure as I lay there that it had not already begun its work upon me, beginning it with an alarming promise of system and thoroughness at the very beginning,i. e., my feet.
“Poor Otto,” said Edelgard, getting up and laying her hand on my forehead; adding, after a moment, “It is nice and cool.”
“Cool? I should think so,” said I shivering. “I am frozen.”
She got a rug out of the yellow box and laid it over me, tucking in the side.
“So tired?” she said presently, as she tidied up my clothes.
“Ill,” I murmured.
“What is it?”
“Oh, leave me, leave me. You do not really care. Leave me.”
At this she paused in her occupation to gaze, I fancy, at my back as I lay resolutely turned away.
“It is very early to go to bed,” she said after a while.
“Not when a man is ill.”
“It isn’t seven yet.”
“Oh, do not, I beg you, argue with me. If you cannot have sympathy you can at least leave me. It is all I ask.”
This silenced her, and she moved about the van more careful not to sway it, so that presently I was able to fall into an exhausted sleep.
How long this lasted I could not on suddenly waking tell, but everything had grown dark and Edelgard, as I could hear, was asleep above me. Something had wrenched me out of the depths of slumber in which I was sunk and had brought me up again with a jerk to that surface known to us as sentient life. You are aware, my friends, being also living beings with all the experiences connected with such a condition behind you, you are awarewhat such a jerking is. It seems to be a series of flashes. The first flash reminds you (with an immense shock) that you are not as you for one comfortable instant supposed in your own safe familiar bed at home; the second brings back the impression of the loneliness and weirdness of Frogs’ Hole Farm (or its, in your case, local equivalent) that you received while yet it was day; the third makes you realize with a clutching at your heart thatsomethinghappened before you woke up, and thatsomethingis presently going to happen again. You lie awake waiting for it, and the entire surface of your body becomes as you wait uniformly damp. The sound of a person breathing regularly in the apartment does but emphasize your loneliness. I confess I was unable to reach out for matches and strike a light, unable to do anything under that strong impression that something had happened except remain motionless beneath the bed-coverings. This was no shame to me, my friends. Face me with cannon, and I have the courage of any man living, but place me on the edge of the supernatural and I can only stay beneath the bedclothes and grow most lamentably damp. Such a thin skin of wood divided me from the night outside. Any one could push back the window standing out there; any one ordinarily tall would then have his head and shoulders practically inside the caravan. And there was no dog towarn us or to frighten such a wretch away. And all my money was beneath my mattress, the worst place possible to put it in if what you want is not to be personally disturbed. What was it I had heard? What was it that called me up from the depths of unconsciousness? As the moments passed—and except for Edelgard’s regular breathing there was only an awful emptiness and absence of sound—I tried to persuade myself it was just the sausages having been so pink at dinner; and the tenseness of my terror had begun slowly to relax when I was smitten stark again—and by what, my friends?By the tuning of a violin.
Now consider, you who frequent concerts and see nothing disturbing in this sound, consider our situation. Consider the remoteness from the highway of Frogs’ Hole Farm; how you had, in order to reach it, to follow the prolonged convolutions of a lane; how you must then come by a cart track along the edge of a hop-field; how the house lay alone and empty in a hollow, deserted, forlorn, untidy, out of repair. Consider further that none of our party had brought a violin and none, to judge from the absence in their conversation of any allusions to such an instrument, played on it. No one knows who has not heard one tuned under the above conditions the blankness of the horror it can strike into one’s heart. Ilistened, stiff with fear. It was tuned with a care and at a length that convinced me that the spirit turning its knobs must be of a quite unusual musical talent, possessed of an acutely sensitive ear. How came it that no one else heard it? Was it possible—I curdled at the thought—that only myself of the party had been chosen by the powers at work for this ghastly privilege? When the thing broke into a wild dance, and a great and rhythmical stamping of feet began apparently quite near and yet equally apparently on boards, I was seized with a panic that relaxed my stiffness into action and enabled me to thump the underneath of Edelgard’s mattress with both my fists, and thump and thump with a desperate vigour that did at last rouse her.
Being half asleep she was more true to my careful training than when perfectly awake, and on hearing my shouts she unhesitatingly tumbled out of her berth and leaning into mine asked me with some anxiety what the matter was.
“The matter? Do you not hear?” I said, clutching her arm with one hand and holding up the other to enjoin silence.
She woke up entirely.
“Why, what in the world——” she said. Then pulling a window curtain aside she peeped out. “There’s only the Ailsa there,” she said, “darkand quiet. And only the Ilsa here,” she added, peeping through the opposite curtain, “dark and quiet.”
I looked at her, marvelling at the want of imagination in women that renders it possible for them to go on being stolid in the presence of what seemed undoubtedly the supernatural. Unconsciously this stolidity, however, made me feel more like myself; but when on her going to the door and unbolting it and looking out she made an exclamation and hastily shut it again, I sank back on my pillow once morehors de combat, so great was the shock. Face me, I say, with cannon, and I can do anything but expect nothing of me if it is ghosts.
“Otto,” she whispered, holding the door, “come and look.”
I could not speak.
“Get up and come and look,” she whispered again.
Well my friends I had to, or lose forever my moral hold of and headship over her. Besides, I was drawn somehow to the fatal door. How I got out of my berth and along the cold floor of the caravan to the end I cannot conceive. I was obliged to help myself along, I remember, by sliding my hand over the surface of the yellow box. I muttered, I remember, “I am ill—I am ill,” and truly never did a manfeel more so. And when I got to the door and looked through the crack she opened, what did I see?
I saw the whole of the lower windows of the farmhouse ablaze with candles.
MY hearers will I hope appreciate the frankness with which I show them all my sides, good and bad. I do so with my eyes open, aware that some of you may very possibly think less well of me for having been, for instance, such a prey to supernatural dread. Allow me, however, to point out that if you do you are wrong. You suffer from a confusion of thought. And I will show you why. My wife, you will have noticed, had on the occasion described few or no fears. Did this prove courage? Certainly not. It merely proved the thicker spiritual skin of woman. Quite without that finer sensibility that has made men able to produce works of genius while women have been able only to produce (a merely mechanical process) young, she felt nothing apparently but a bovine surprise. Clearly, if you have no imagination neither can you have any fears. A dead man is not frightened. An almost dead man does not care much either. The less dead a man is the more do possible combinations suggest themselves to him. It is imagination and sensibility, or the want of them, that removes you further orbrings you nearer to the animals. Consequently (I trust I am being followed?) when imagination and sensibility are busiest, as they were during those moments I lay waiting and listening in my berth, you reach the highest point of aloofness from the superiority to the brute creation; your vitality is at its greatest; you are, in a word, if I may be permitted to coin an epigram,least dead. Therefore, my friends, it is plain that at that very moment when you (possibly) may have thought I was showing my weakest side I was doing the exact opposite, and you will not, having intelligently followed the argument, say at the end of it as my poor little wife did, “But how?”
I do not wish, however, to leave you longer under the impression that the deserted farmhouse was haunted. It may have been of course, but it was not on that night of last August. What was happening was that a party from the parsonage—a holiday party of young and rather inclined to be noisy people, which had overflowed the bounds of the accommodation there—was utilizing the long, empty front room as an impromptu (I believe that is the expression) ball-room. The farm belonged to the pastor—observe the fatness of these British ecclesiastics—and it was the practice of his family during the holidays to come down sometimes in the evening and dance in it. All this I found out after Edelgard had dressed andgone across to see for herself what the lights and stamping meant. She insisted on doing so in spite of my warnings, and came back after a long interval to tell me the above, her face flushed and her eyes bright, for she had seized the opportunity, regardless of what I might be feeling waiting alone, to dance too.
“You danced too?” I exclaimed.
“Do come, Otto. It is such fun,” said she.
“With whom did you dance, may I inquire?” I asked, for the thought of the Baroness von Ottringel dancing with the first comer in a foreign farm was of course most disagreeable to me.
“Mr. Jellaby,” said she. “Do come.”
“Jellaby? What is he doing there?”
“Dancing. And so is everybody. They are all there. That’s why their caravans were so quiet. Do come.”
And she ran out again, a childishly eager expression on her face, into the night.
“Edelgard!” I called.
But though she must have heard me she did not come back.
Relieved, puzzled, vexed, and curious together, I did get up and dress, and on lighting a candle and looking at my watch I was astonished to find that it was only a quarter to ten. For a moment I could not credit my eyes, and I shook the watch and held it to my ears, but it was going,as steadily as usual, and all I could do was to reflect as I dressed on what may happen to you if you go to bed and to sleep at seven o’clock.
And how soundly I must have done it. But of course I was unusually weary, and not feeling at all well. Two hours’ excellent sleep, however, had done wonders for me so great are my recuperative powers, and I must say I could not help smiling as I crossed the yard and went up to the house at the remembrance of Menzies-Legh’s glass of tea. He would not see much milk about me now, thought I, as I strode, giving my moustache ends a final upward push and guided by the music, into the room in which they were dancing.
The dance came to an end as I entered, and a sudden hush seemed to fall upon the company. It was composed of boys and young girls attired in evening garments next to which the clothes of the caravaners, weather-beaten children of the road, looked odd and grimy indeed. The tender lady, it is true, had put on a white and cobwebby kind of blouse, which together with her short walking skirt and the innocent droop of her fair hair about her little ears made her look at the most eighteen, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh had tricked herself out in white too, producing indeed for our admiration a white skirt as well as a white blouse, andachieving at the most by these efforts an air of (no doubt spurious) cleanliness; but the others were still all spattered and disfigured by the muddy accumulations of the past day.
Though they stopped dancing as I came in I had time to receive a photograph on my mind’s eye of the various members of our party: of Jellaby, loose-collared and wispy-haired, gyrating with poor Frau von Eckthum, of Edelgard, flushed with childish enjoyment, in the grip of a boy who might very well have been her own if I had married her a few years sooner and if it were conceivable that I could ever have produced anything so undeveloped and half-grown, and of, if you please, Menzies-Legh in all his elderliness, dancing with an object the short voluminousness of whose clothing proclaimed a condition of unripeness even greater than that of the two fledglings—dancing, in a word, with a child.
That he should dance at all was, you will agree, sufficiently unworthy but at least if he must make himself publicly foolish he might have done it with some one more suited to his years, some one of the age of the lady, for instance—singularly unlike one’s idea of a ghost—standing at the upper end of the room playing the violin that had half an hour previously been so incomprehensible to me.
On seeing me enter he stopped dead, andhis face resumed the familiar look of lowering gloom. The other couples followed his example, and the violin, after a brief hesitation, whined away into passivity.
“Capital,” said I heartily to Menzies-Legh, who happened to have been in the act of dancing past the door I came in by. “Capital. Enjoy yourself, my friend. You are doing admirably well for what you told me is a weed. In a German ball-room you would, I assure you, create an immense sensation, for it is not the custom there for gentlemen over thirty—which,” I amended, bowing, “I may be entirely wrong in presuming that you are—for gentlemen over thirty——”
But he interrupted me to remark with the intelligence that characterized him (after all, what ailed the man was, I believe, principally stupidity) that this was not a German ball-room.
“Ah,” said I, “you are right there, my friend. That indeed is what you English call a different pair of shoes. If it were, do you know where the gentlemen over thirty would be?”
He spoiled the neat answer I had all ready of “Not there” by, instead of seeking information, observing with his customary boorishness, “Confound the gentlemen over thirty,” and walking his long-stockinged partner away.
“Otto,” whispered my wife, hurrying up, “youmust come and be introduced to the people who are kindly letting us dance here.”
“Not unless they are of decent birth,” I said firmly.
“Whether they are or not you must come,” said she. “The lady who is playing is——”
“I know, I know, she is a ghost,” said I, unable to forbear smiling at my own jest; and I think my hearers will agree that a man who can make fun of himself may certainly be said to be at least fairly equipped with a sense of humour.
Edelgard stared. “She is the pastor’s wife,” she said. “It is her party. It is so kind of her to let us in. You must come and be introduced.”
“She is a ghost,” I persisted, greatly diverted by the notion, for I felt a reaction of cheerfulness, and never was a lady more substantial than the one with the violin; “she is a ghost, and a highly unattractive specimen of the sect. Dear wife, only ghosts should be introduced to other ghosts. I am flesh and blood, and will therefore go instead and release the little Eckthum from the flesh and blood persistencies of Jellaby.”
“But Otto, you must come,” said Edelgard, laying her hand on my arm as I prepared to move in the direction of the charming victim; “you can’t be rude. She is your hostess——”
“She is my ghostess,” said I, very divertingly Ithought; so divertingly that I was seized by a barely controllable desire to indulge in open mirth.
Edelgard, however, with the blank incomprehension of the droll so often to be observed in women, did not so much as smile.
“Otto,” said she, “you absolutelymust——”
“Must, dear wife,” said I with returning gravity, “is a word no woman of tact ever lets her husband hear. I see no must why I, being who I am, should request an introduction to a Frau Pastor. I would not in Storchwerder. Still less will I at Frog’s Hole Farm.”
“But you are her guest——”
“I am not. I came.”
“But it is so nice of her to allow you to come.”
“It is not niceness. She is delighted at the honour.”
“But Otto, you simplycan’t——”
I was about to move off definitely to the corner where Frau von Eckthum sat helpless in the talons of Jellaby when who should enter the door just in front of which Edelgard was wrangling but the creature I had last parted from on unfriendly terms in the church a few hours before.
Attired this time from chin to boots in a long and narrow buttoned-down black garment suggestive of that of the Pope’s priests, with a gold cross dangling on his chest, his eye immediately caught mine and the genial smile of the party-giver withwhich he had come in died away. Evidently he had been there earlier, for Edelgard as though she were well acquainted with him darted forward (where, alas, remained the dignity of the well-born?) and very officiously introduced me to him. Me to him, observe.
“Let me,” said my wife, “introduce my husband, Baron Ottringel.”
And she did.
It was of course the pastor who ought to have been introduced to me on such neutral ground as an impromptu ball-room, but Edelgard had, as the caravan tour lengthened, acquired the habit of using the presence of a third person in order to do as she chose, with no reference whatever to my known wishes. This is a habit specially annoying to a man of my disposition, peppery perhaps, but essentiallybon enfant, who likes to get his cautions and reprimands over and done with and forgotten, rather than be forced to allow them to accumulate and brood over them indefinitely.
Rendered helpless by my own good breeding—a quality which leads to many a discomfort in life—I was accordingly introduced for all the world as though I were the inferior, and could only show my sensibility of the fact by a conspicuous stiffening.
“Otto thinks it is so very kind of you to let us come in,” said Edelgard, all smiles and with anaugmentation of officiousness and defiance of me that was incredible.
“I am glad you were able to,” replied the pastor looking at me, politeness in his voice and chill in his eye. It was plain the creature was still angry because, in church, I would not pray.
“You are very good,” said I, bowing with at least an equal chill.
“Otto wishes,” continued the shameless Edelgard, reckless of the private hours with me ahead, “to be introduced to your—to Mrs.—Mrs.——”
“Raggett,” supplied the pastor.
And I would certainly have been dragged up then and there to the round red ghost at the top of the room while Edelgard, no doubt, triumphed in the background, if it had not itself come to the rescue by striking up another tune on its fiddle.
“Presently,” said the pastor, now become crystallized for me into Raggett. “Presently. Then with pleasure.”
And his glassy eye, fixed on mine, had little of pleasure in it.
At this point Edelgard danced away with Jellaby from under my very nose. I made an instinctive movement toward the slender figure alone in the corner, but even as I moved a half-grown boy secured her and hurried her off among the dancers. Looking round, I saw no one else I could go and talk to; even Mrs. Menzies-Legh was not available. There was nothing for it, therefore, but unadulterated Raggett.
“It is nice,” observed this person, watching the dancers—he had a hooky profile as well as a glassy eye—“to see young people enjoying themselves.”
I bowed, determined to keep within the limits of strict iciness; but as Jellaby and my wife whirled past I could not forbear adding:
“Especially when the young people are so mature that they are fully aware of the extent of their own enjoyment.”
“Yes,” said he; without, however, any real responsiveness.
“It is only,” said I, “when a woman is mature, and more than mature, that she begins to enjoy being young.”
“Yes,” said he; still with no real responsiveness.
“You may possibly,” said I, nettled by this indifference, “regard that as a paradox.”
“No,” said he.
“It is, however,” said I more loudly, “not one.”
“No,” said he.
“It is on the contrary,” said I still louder, “a rather subtle but undeniable truth.”
“Yes,” said he; and I then perceived that he was not listening.
I do not know what my hearers feel, but I fancy they feel with me that when a gentleman ofbirth and position is amiable enough to talk to a person of neither it is particularly galling to discover that that person is so unable to grasp the true aspect of the situation as to neglect even to follow the conversation. Good breeding (as I have before remarked, a great hinderer) prevents one’s explaining who one is and emphasizing who the other person is and doing then and there a sum of subtraction between one’s own value and his and offering him the result for his closer inspection, so what is one to do? Stiffen and go dumb, I suppose. Good breeding allows no more. Alas, there are many and heavy drawbacks to being a gentleman.
Raggett had evidently not been listening to a word I said, for after his last abstracted “Yes,” he suddenly turned the glassiness of his eye full upon me.
“I did not know,” he said, “when I saw you in church——”
Really the breeding that could go back to the church and what happened there was too bad for words. My impulse was to stop him by saying “Shall we dance?” but I was too uncertain of the extent, nay of the existence, of his powers of seeing fun to venture.
“—that you were not English, or I should not have asked——”
“Sir,” I interrupted, endeavouring to get himat all cost out of the church, “who, after all,isEnglish?”
He looked surprised. “Well,” said he, “I am.”
“Why, you do not know. You cannot possibly be certain. Go back a thousand years and, as I lately read in an ingenious but none the less probably right book, the whole of Europe was filled with your fathers and mothers. Starting with your two parents and four grandparents and going backward multiplying as you go, the sixteen great-grandparents are already almost unmanageable, and a century or two further back you find them irrepressibly overflowing your little island and spreading themselves across Europe as thickly and as adhesively as so much jam, until in days a trifle more remote not a person living of white skin but was your father, unless he was your mother. Take,” I continued, as he showed signs of wanting to interrupt—“take any example you choose, you will find the same inextricable confusion everywhere. And not only physically—spiritually. Take any example. Anything at random. Take our late lamented Kaiser Friedrich, who married a daughter of your royal house. It is our custom to regard and even to call our Kaiser and Kaiserin the Father and Mother of the nation. The entire nation therefore is, in a spiritual sense, half English. So, accordingly, am I. So, accordingly, to push the point astep further, you become their nephew, and therefore a quarter German—a spiritual German quarter, even as I am a spiritual English half. There is no end to the confusion. Have you observed, sir, that the moment one begins to think everything does become confused?”
“Are you not dancing?” said he, fidgetting and looking about him.
I think one is often angry with people because, having assumed on first acquaintance that they are on one’s own level of intelligence, their speech and actions presently prove that they are not. This is unjust; but, like most unjust things, natural. I, however, as a reasonable man do my best to fight against it, and on Raggett’s asking this question for all response to the opportunity I gave him of embarking on an interesting discussion, I checked my natural annoyance by realizing that he was what Menzies-Legh probably was, merely stupid. Stupidity, my hearers will agree, is of various kinds, and one kind is want of interest in what is interesting. Of course this particular stupid was hopelessly ill-bred besides, for what can be more so than meeting a series of, to put them at their lowest, suggestive remarks by inquiring if one is not dancing?
“My dear sir,” I said, preserving my own manners at least, “in my country it is not the custom for married gentlemen over thirty to dance.Perhaps you were paying me the compliment (often, I must say, paid me before) of supposing I am not yet that age, but I assure you that I am. Nor do ladies continue to dance in our country once their early youth is past and their outlines become—shall we say, bolder? Seats are then provided for them round the walls, and on them they remain in suitable passivity until the oasis afforded by the Lancers is reached, when the elder gentlemen pour gallantly out of the room in which they play cards all the evening and lead them through its intricacies with the ceremony that satisfies Society’s sense of the becoming. In this country, on the contrary——”
“Really,” he interrupted, his habit of fidgetting more pronounced than ever, “you talk English with such a flow and volume that after all you very well might have joined——”
I now saw that the man was a fanatic, a type of unbalanced person I have always particularly disliked. Good breeding is little if at all appreciated by fanatics, and I might have been excused if, at this point, I had flung mine to the winds. I did not do so, however, but merely interrupted him in my turn by informing him with cold courteousness that I was a Lutheran.
“And Lutherans,” I added, “do not pray. At least, not audibly, and certainly never in duets. More,” I continued, putting up my hand as heopened his mouth to speak, “more. I am a philosopher, and the prayers of a philosopher cannot be confined within the limits of any formula. Formulas are for the undeveloped. You tie a child into its chair lest, untied, it should fall disastrously to the floor. You tie the undeveloped adult to a creed lest, untied, he should fall goodness really knows where. The grown man, of full stature in mind as well as body, requires no tying. His whole life is his creed. Nothing cut and dried, nothing blatant, nothing gaudily apparent to the outside world, but a subtle saturation, a continual soaking——”
“Excuse me,” said he, “one of those candles is guttering.”
And he hurried across the room with an expedition I would not have thought possible in a man so gray and glassy to where, in the windows, the illuminating rows of candles had been placed.
Nor did he come back, I am glad to say, for I found him terribly fatiguing; and I remained alone, leaning against the wall by the door.
Down at the further end of the room danced my gentle friend, and also her sister; also all the other members of our party except Menzies-Legh who, recalled to decency by my good-natured shafts, spent the rest of his time soberly either helping the pastor pinch off candle-wicks or turning over the ghost’s music for it.
Desiring to watch Frau von Eckthum more conveniently (for I assure you it was a pretty sight to see her grace, and how the same tune that made my wife whirl moved her to nothing more ruffling than an appearance of being wafted) and also in order to be at hand should Jellaby become too tactless, I went down to where our party seemed to be gathered in a knot and took up my position near them against another portion of the wall.
I had hardly done so before they seemed to have melted away to the upper end.
As they did not come back I presently strolled after them. They then appeared to melt back again to the bottom.
It was very odd. It was almost like an optical illusion. When I went up, they went down; when I went down, they went up. I felt at last as one may feel who plays at see-saw, and began to doubt whether I were really on firm ground—onterra cotta, as I (amusingly, I thought) called it to Edelgard when we alighted from the steamer at Queenboro’, endeavouring to restore her spirits and make her laugh. (Quite in vain I may add, which inclined me to wonder, I remember, whether the illiteracy which is one of the leading characteristics of people’s wives had made it impossible for her to understand even so simple a classical play on words as that. In thetrain I realized that it was not illiteracy but the crossing; and I will say for Edelgard that up to the time the English spirit of criticism got, like a devastating microbe, hold of her German womanliness, she had invariably laughed when I chose to jest.)
But gradually the profitless see-sawing began to tire me. The dance ended, another began, and still my little white-bloused friend had not once been within reach. I made a determined effort to get to her in the pauses between the dances in order to offer to break the German rule on her behalf and give her one dance (for I fancy she was vexed that I did not) and also to help her out of the clutches of Jellaby, but I might as well have tried to dance with and help a moonbeam. She was here, she was there, she was everywhere, except where I happened to be. Once I had almost achieved success when, just as I was sure of her, she ran up to the ghost resting at that moment from its labours and embarked in an apparently endless and absorbing discussion with it, deaf and blind to all beside; and as I had made up my mind that nothing would induce me to extend my Raggett acquaintance by causing myself to be introduced to the psychical phenomenon bearing that name, I was forced to retreat.
Moodily, though. My first hilarity was extinguished.Bon enfantthough I am I cannot goon beingbon enfantforever—I must have, so to speak, the encouragement of a bottle at intervals; and I was thinking of taking Edelgard away and giving her, before the others returned to their caravans, a brief description of what maturity combined with calf-like enjoyment looks like to bystanders, when Mrs. Menzies-Legh passing on the arm of a partner caught sight of my face, let her partner go, and came up to me.
“I suppose,” she said (and she had at least the grace to hesitate), “it would be no good asking—asking you to—dance?”
I stared at her in undisguised astonishment.
“Are you not dreadfully bored, standing there alone?” she said, as I did not answer. “Won’t you—” (again she had the grace to hesitate)—“won’t you—dance?”
Pointedly, and still staring amazed, I inquired of her with whom, for really I could hardly believe——
“With me, if—if you will,” said she, a rather lame attempt at a smile and a distinctly anxious look in her eyes showing that at least it was only a momentary aberration.
Momentary or not, however, I am not the man to smile with feigned gratification when what is needed is rebuke, especially in the case of this lady who of all others needed one so often and so badly.
“Why,” I exclaimed, not caring to conceal my opinion, “why—this is matriarchy!”
And turning on my heel I made my way at once to my wife, stopped her whirlings, drew her away from her partner’s arm (Jellaby’s, by the way), made her take her husband’s and without a word led her out of the room.
But, as I passed the door I saw the look of (I should think pretended) astonishment of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s face give way to the appearance of the dimple, to a sudden screwing together of the upper and lower eyelashes, and my friends will be able to form a notion of how complete was the havoc England had wrought in all she had been taught to understand and reverence in her youth when I tell them that what she was manifestly trying not to do was to laugh.