On the right, the direction in which we were going to travel, the road dipped down into a valley with distant hills beyond, and the company, between their sips of milk, talked much about the blueness of this distance. Also they talked much about the greenness of the Mereworth woods rustling opposite, and the way the sun shone; as though woods in summer were ever anything but green, and as though the sun, when it was there at all, could do anything but go on shining!
I was on the point of becoming impatient at such talk and suggesting that if they would only leave off drinking milk they would probably see things differently, when Frau von Eckthum came and sat down beside me on the bench, her gingerbeer in one hand and a biscuit, also made of ginger, in the other (the thought of what they must taste like together made me shiver) and said in her attractive voice:
“I hope you are going to enjoy your holiday. I feel responsible, you know.” And she looked at me with her pretty smile.
I liked to think of the gentle lady as a kind of godmother, and made the proper reply, chivalrous and sugared, and was asking myself what it is that gives other people’s wives a charm one’s own never did, never could, and never will possess, when the door-curtain of the Elsa was pulled aside, and Edelgard, whose absence at our siesta I had not noticed, stepped out on to the platform.
Lord Sigismund and Jellaby immediately got up and unhooked the steps and held them for her to come down by. Menzies-Legh also went across and offered her a hand. I alone sat still, as well I might; for not only am I her husband, but it is absurd to put false notions of her importance into a woman’s head who has not had such attentions paid her since she was eighteen and what we call appetitlich.
Besides, I was rooted to the bench by amazement at her extraordinary appearance. No wonder she was not to be seen when duty ought to have kept her at my side helping me with the horse. She had not walked one of those five hot miles. She had been sitting in the caravan, busily cutting her skirt short, altering her hair, and transforming herself into as close a copy as she could manage of Mrs. Menzies-Legh and her sister.
Small indeed was the resemblance now to the Christian gentlewoman one wishes one’s wife to seem to be. Few were the traces of Prussia. I declare I would not have recognized her had I met her casually in the road; and to think she had dared do it without a word, without asking my permission, without even asking my opinion! Her nice new felt hat with its pheasant’s wing had almost disappeared beneath a gauze veil arranged after the fashion adopted by the sisters. Heaven knows where she got it, or out of what other garment, now of course ruined, she had cut and contrived it; and what is the use of having a pheasant’s wing if you hide it? Her hair, up to then so tight and inconspicuous, was loosened, her skirt showed almost all of both her boots. The whole figure was strangely like that of the two sisters, a little thickened, a little emphasized. What galled me was the implied entire indifference to my authority. My mind’s indignant eye saw the snap her fingers were executing in its face. Also, one’s own wife is undoubtedly a thing apart. It is proper and delightful that the wives of others should be attractive, but one’s own ought to be adorned solely with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit combined with that other ornament, an enduring desire to keep the husband Grod has given her comfortable and therefore happy. Without these two a wife cannot be regarded as a fit object for her husband’s esteem. I plainly saw that I would find it impossible to esteem mine in that skirt. I do not know what she had done to her feet, but they looked much smaller than I had been accustomed to suppose them as she came down the steps assisted by the three gentlemen. My full beer-glass, held neglected in my hand, dripped unheeded on to the road as I stared stupidly at this apparition. Rapidly I selected the first few of the phrases I would address to her the moment we found ourselves alone. There should be an immediate stop put to this loosening of the earth round the roots of the great and sheltering tree of a husband’s authority.
“Poor silly sheep,” I could not help murmuring, those animals flashing into my mind as a legitimate development of the sheltering-tree image.
Then I felt there was a quotation atmosphere about them, and was sure Horace or Virgil — elusive bugbears of my boyhood — must have said something that began like that and went on appropriately if only I could remember it. I regretted that having forgotten it I was unable to quote it, to myself as it were, but yet just loud enough for the lady beside me to hear. She, however, heard what I did say, and looked at me inquiringly.
“If I were to explain, dear lady,” said I, instantly responding to the look, “you would not understand.”
“Oh,” said she.
“I was thinking in symbols.”
“Oh,” said she.
“It is one of my mental tricks,” I said, my gaze however contracting sternly as it fell on Edelgard’s approaching form.
“Oh,” said she.
Certainly she is a quiet lady. But how stimulating. Her solitary oh’s are more packed with expressiveness than other women’s hour-long tirades.
She too was watching Edelgard coming toward us across the sun-beaten bit of road, her head slightly turned away from me but not so much that I could not see she was smiling at my wife. Of course she must have been amused at such a slavish imitation; but with her usual kindness she made room on the bench for her and, without alluding to the transformation, suggested refreshment.
Edelgard as she sat down shot a very curious glance at me round the corner of her headwrappings. I was surprised to see little that could be called apology in her way of sitting down, and looked in vain for the red spot that used to appear on each cheek at home when she was aware that she had done wrong and that it was not going to be passed over. She was sheltered from immediate steps on my part by Frau von Eckthum who sat between us, and when Jellaby approached her with a glass of milk she actually took it without so much as breathing the honest word beer.
This was too much. I threw back my head and laughed as heartily as I have ever seen a man laugh. Edelgard and milk! Why, I do not believe she had drunk it pure like that since the day she parted from the last of her infancy’s bottles. Edelgard becoming squeamish; Edelgard posing — and what a pose; good heavens, what a pose! Edelgard, one of Prussia’s daughters, one of Prussia’s noblemen’s daughters, accepting milk instead of beer, and accepting it at the hands of a Socialist in shirt sleeves. A vision of Storchwerder’s face if it could see these things rose before me. Of course I laughed. Not, mind you, without some slight tinge of bitterness, for laughter may be bitter and hearty at the same time, but on the whole I think I did credit to my unfailing sense of humour in spite of very great provocation, and I laughed till even the horses pricked up their ears and turned their heads and stared.
Nobody else smiled. On the contrary — it cannot be true that laughter is infectious — they watched me with a serious, amusingly serious, surprise. Edelgard did not watch. She knew better than that. Carefully she concealed her face in the milk, feeling no doubt it was the best place for it, and unable to leave off drinking the stuff because of the problem of how to meet my eyes once she did. Frau von Eckthum regarded me with much the same attentive interest she had 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 a sobriquet) 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 green shadows in the wood opposite did not remind him of some painter friepd’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-Legb 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 glory Enfin 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 brown varnish 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.
CHAPTER VII
A MAN 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 bacon and 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 their etceteras, 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. Accursed British female, — certainly not lady, doubtfully even woman, but emphatically Weib — 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 den
ied 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 a nature 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.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 117
