The ladies were busied devising methods for the more rapid relief of the unhappy and still obstinately swollen fledgling.
There was no supper except ginger-biscuits.
“You can’t expect it,”’ said Edelgard, when I asked her (very distantly) about it, “with sickness in the house.”
“What house? ‘‘ I retorted, pardonably snappy.
I hope never to revisit Dundale.
CHAPTER X
LET me earnestly urge any of my hearers who may be fired by my example to follow it, never to go to Dundale. It is a desolate place, and a hungry place; and a place, moreover, greatly subject to becoming enveloped in a sort of universal gray cloud, emitting a steady though fine drizzle and accounted for — which made it none the less wet — by persons who knew everything, like Jellaby, as being a sea-mist.
I am no doubt very stupid, and therefore was unable to understand why there should be a sea-mist when there was no sea.
“Well, we’re in Sussex now you know,”’ said Jellaby, on my saying something of the sort to him.
“Indeed,”“ said I politely, as though that explained it; but of course it did not.
Up to this point we had at least, since the first night, been dry. Now the rain began, and caravaning in rain is an experience that must be met with one’s entire stock of fortitude and philosophy. This stock, however large originally, has a tendency to give out after drops have trickled down inside one’s collar for some hours. At the other end, too, the wet ascends higher and higher, for is not one wading about in long and soaking grass, trying to perform one’s (so to speak) household duties? And if, when the ascending wet and the descending wet meet, and the whole man is a mere and very unhappy sponge, he can still use such words as healthy and jolly, then I say that that man is either a philosopher indeed, worthy of and ripe for an immediate tub, or he is a liar and a hypocrite. I heard both those adjectives often that day, and silently divided their users into the proper categories. For myself I preferred to say nothing, thus producing private flowers of stoicism in response to the action of the rain.
For the first time I was glad to walk, glad to move on, glad of anything that was not helping dripping ladies to pack up dripping breakfast things beneath the dripping umbrella that with studious gallantry I endeavoured to hold the while over my and their dripping heads. However healthy and jolly the wet might be it undoubtedly made the company more silent than the dry, and our resumed march was almost entirely without conversation. We moved on in a southwesterly direction, the diseased fledgling still in bed and still, I was credibly informed, scratching, through pine woods full of wet bracken and deep gloom and drizzle, till at a place called Frant we turned off due south in response to some unaccountable impulse of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s, whose unaccountable impulses were the capricious rudder which swayed us hither and thither during the entire tour.
She used to study maps, and walk with one under her arm out of which she read aloud the names of the places we were supposed to be at; and just as we had settled down to believe it we would come to some flatly contradictory signpost which talked of quite different places, places we had been told were remote and in an altogether different direction.
“It doesn’t matter,”’ she would say, with a smile in which I, at least, never joined, for I have my own opinions of petticoat government— “the great thing is to go on.’’
So we went on; and it was she who made us suddenly turn off southward after Frant, leaving a fairly comfortable highroad for the vicissitudes of narrow and hilly lanes.
“Lanes,” said she, “are infinitely prettier.”
I dare say. They are also generally hillier, and so narrow that once a caravan is in one on it has to go whatever happens, trusting to luck not to meet anything else on wheels till it reaches, after many anxieties, the haven of another highroad. This lane ran deep between towering hedges and did not leave off again for five miles. and none of you would believe how long it took us to do those five miles because none of you know — how should you? — what the getting of caravans up hills by means of tracing is. We had, thanks to Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s desire for the pretty (unsatisfied I am glad to say on that occasion, because the so-called sea-mist clung close round us like a wet gray cloak) — we had got into an almost mountainous lane. We were tracing the whole time, dragging each caravan up each hill in turn, leaving it solitary at the top and returning with all three horses for the next one left meanwhile at the bottom. I never saw such an endless succession of hills. If tracing does not teach a man patience what, I would like to know, will?
At first, on finding my horse removed and harnessed on to the Ailsa, I thought I would get inside the Elsa and stretch myself on the yellow box and wait there quietly smoking till the horse came back again; but I found Edelgard inside, blocking it up and preparing to mend her stockings.
This was unpleasant, for I had hardly spoken to her, and then only with the chilliest politeness, since her behaviour on the evening by the Medway; yet, determined to be master in my own (so to speak) house, I would have carried out my intention if Menzies-Legh’s voice, which I thought had gone up the hill, had not been heard quite close outside asking where I was.
I warned my wife by means of a hasty enjoining finger to keep silence.
Will it be believed that she looked at me, said “Why should you not help?” opened the window, and called out that I was there?
“Come and give us a hand. Baron,” said Menzies-Legh from outside. “It’s a very stiff pull — we’ll have to push behind as well, and want what help we’ve got.”
“Certainly,” said I, all apparent ready bustle; but I shot a very expressive brief glance at Edelgard as I went out.
She, however, pretended to be absorbed in her sewing.
“You Socialists,” said I to Jellaby, next to whom I found I was expected to push, “do not believe in marriage, do you?”
“We — don’t — believe — in — tyrants,” he panted, so short of breath that I stared at him, I myself having quite a quantity of it; besides, what an answer!
I shrugged the shoulder nearest him and continued up in silence. At the top of the hill he was so warm and breathless that he could not speak, and so were the others, while I was perfectly cool and chatty.
“Why, gentlemen,” I remarked banteringly, as I stood in the midst of these panters watching them wipe their heated brows, “you are scarcely what is known as in training,”
“But you, Baron — undoubtedly are “ gasped Menzies-Legh. “ You are — absolutely unruffled.”
“Oh, yes,” I agreed modestly, “I am in good condition. We always are in our army. Ready at any moment to”
I stopped, for I had been on the verge of saying “eat the English,” when I recollected that we may not inform the future mouthfuls of their fate.
“Ready to go in and win,” finished Lord Sigismund.
“To blow up Europe,” said Jellaby.
“To mobilize,” said Menzies-Legh. “And very right and proper.”
“Very wrong and improper,” said Jellaby. “You know,” he said, turning on his host with all the combativeness of these men of peace (the only really calm person is your thoroughly trained and equipped warrior)— “you know very well you agree with me that war is the most unnecessary”
“Come, come, my young gentlemen,” I interposed, broadening my chest, “do not forget that you are in the presence of one of its representatives”
“Let us fetch up the next caravan,” interrupted Menzies-Legh, thrusting my horse’s bridle into my hand; and as I led it down the hill again my anxiety to prevent its stumbling and costing me heaven knows how much in the matter of mending its knees rendered me unable for the moment to continue the crushing of Jellaby.
About four o’clock in the afternoon we found ourselves, drenched and hungry, on the outskirts of a place called Wadhurst. It seemed wise to go no nearer unless we were prepared to continue on through it, for already the laurels of its villa residenc
es dropped their rain on us over neat railings as we passed. We therefore, too worn out to attempt to get right through the place to the country beyond, selected the first possible field on the left of the brown and puddle-strewn road, a field of yellow stubble which, soaking as it was, was yet a degree less soaking than long grass, and though it had nothing but a treeless hedge to divide us from the eyes of wanderers along the road it had an unusually conveniently placed gate. The importance now of fields and gates! The importance, indeed, of everything usually unimportant — which is, in brief, the tragedy of caravaning.
This time the Menzies-Leigh couple went to find the owner and crave permission. So reduced were we — and could reduction go further? — that to crave, hat in hand, for permission to occupy some wretched field for a few hours, and to crave it often of illiterate, selfish, and grossly greedy persons like my friend at Dundale, was not beneath any of our prides, while to obtain it seemed the one boon worth having.
While they were gone we waited, a melancholy string of vehicles and people in a world made up of mist and mud. Frau von Eckthum, who might have cheered me, had been invisible nearly the whole day, ministering (no doubt angelically) to the afflicted fledgling. Edelgard and the child Jane got into the Elsa during the pause and began to teach each other languages. I leaned against the gate, staring before me. Old James, a figure of dripping patience, remained at his horse’s head. And Lord Sigismund and Jellaby, as though they had not had enough exercise, walked up and down the road talking.
Except the sound of their receding and advancing footsteps the stillness was broken by nothing at all. It was a noiseless rain. It did not patter. And yet, fine though it was, it streamed down the flanks of the horses, the sides of the caravans, and actually penetrated, as I later on discovered, through the green arras lining of the Elsa, making a long black streak from roof to floor.
I wonder what my friends at home would have said could they have seen me then. No shelter; no refuge; no rest. These three negatives, I take it, sum up fairly accurately a holiday in a caravan. You cannot get in, for if you do either you find it full already of your wife, or, if it is moving, Jellaby immediately springs up from nowhere and inquires at the window whether you have noticed how your horse is sweating. At every camp there is nothing but work — and oh, my friends, such work! Work undreamed of in your ordered lives, and nothing, nothing but it, for must you not eat? And without it there is no eating. And then when you have eaten, without the least pause, the least interval for the meditation so good after meals, there begins that frightful and accursed form of activity, most frightful and accursed of all known forms, the washing up. How it came about that it was not from the first left to the women I cannot understand; they are fitted by nature for such labour, and do not feel it; but I, being in a minority, was powerless to interfere. Nor did I always succeed in evading it. If we camped early, the daylight exposed my movements; and by the time it was done bed seemed the only place to go to. Now an intelligent man does not desire to go to bed at eight; yet in that cold weather — we were> they said, unusually unfortunate in the weather — even if it was dry, what pleasure was there in sitting out-of-doors? I had had enough during the day of out-of-doors; by the time evening came, out-of-doors and fresh air were things abhorrent to me. And there were only three comfortable chairs, low and easy, in which a man might stretch himself and smoke, and these, without so much as a preliminary offering of them to anybody else, were sat in by the ladies. It did seem a turning of good old customs upside down when I saw Edelgard get into one as a matter of course, so indifferent to what I might be thinking that she did not even look my way. How vividly on such occasions did I remember my easy chair at Storchwerder and how sacred it was, and how she never dared, if I were in the house, approach it, nor I firmly believe ever dared, so good was her training and so great her respect, approach it when I was out.
Well, our proverb — descriptive of a German gentleman about to start on his (no doubt) well-deserved holiday travels—” He who loves his wife leaves her at home,” is as wise now as the day it was written, and about this time I began to see that by having made my bed in a manner that disregarded it I was going to have to lie on it.
The Menzies-Leghs returned wreathed in smiles — I beg you to note the reason, and all of wretchedness that it implies — because the owner of the field’s wife had not been rude, and had together with the desired permission sold them two pounds of sausages, the cold potatoes left from her dinner, a jug of milk, a piece of butter, and some firewood. Also they had met a baker’s cart and had bought loaves.
This, of course, as far as it went, was satisfactory, especially the potatoes that neither wanted peeling nor patience while they grew soft, but I submit that it was only a further proof of our extreme lowness in the scale of well-cared-for humanity. Here in my own home, with these events in what Menzies-Legh and Jellaby would have called the blue distance, how strange it seems that just sausages and cold potatoes should ever have been able to move me to exultation.
We at once got into the field, hugging the hedge, and in the shelter of the Ilsa (which entered last) made our fire. I was deputed (owing to the unfortunate circumstance of my being the only person who had brought one) to hold my umbrella over the frying pan while Jellaby fried the sausages on one of the stoves. It was not what I would have chosen, for while protecting the sausages I was also, in spite of every effort to the contrary, protecting Jellaby; and what an anomalous position for a gentleman of birth and breeding and filled with the aristocratic opinions, and perhaps (for I am a fair man) prejudices, incident to being born and bred — well born of course I mean, not recognizing any other form of birth — what a position, to stand there keeping the back of a British Socialist dry!
But there is no escaping these anomalies if you caravan; they crop up continually; and however much you try to dam them out, the waters of awkwardly familiar situations constantly break through and set all your finer feelings on edge. Fain would I have let the rain work its will on Jellaby’s back, but what about the sausages? As they turned and twisted in the pan, obedient to his guiding fork, I could not find it in me to let a drop of rain mar that melodious fizzling. So I stood there doing my best, glad at least I was spared being compromised owing to the absence of my friends, while the two other gentlemen warmed up the potatoes over the fire preparatory to converting them into pureey and the ladies in the caravans were employed, judging by the fragrance, in making coffee.
In spite of the rain a small crowd had collected and was leaning on the gate. Their faces were divided between wonder and pity; but this was an expression we had now got used to, for except on fine days every face we met at once assumed it, unless the face belonged to a little boy, when it was covered instead with what seemed to be glee and was certainly animation, the animation being apparently not infrequently inspired by a train of thought which led up to, after we had passed, a calling out and a throwing of stones.
“You’ll see these turn brown soon,” said Jellaby, crouching over his sausages and pursuing them untiringly round and round the pan with a fork.
“Yes,” said I; “and a pleasant sight too when one is hungry.”
“By Jove, yes,” said he; “caravaning makes one appreciate things, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,’’ said I, “ whenever there are any.”
In silence he continued to pursue with his fork.
“They are very pink,” said I, after some minutes.
“Yes,” said he.
“Do you think so much — such unceasing — exercise is good for them?”
“Well, but I must get them brown all round.” “They are, however, still altogether pink.” “Patience, my dear Baron. You’ll soon see.” I watched him in a further silence of some minutes.
“Do you, Jellaby,” I then inquired, “really understand how best to treat a sausage?”
“Oh, yes; they’re bound to turn brown soon.”
“But see how obstinately they continue pink. Would it
not be wise, considering the lateness, to call my wife and desire her to cook them?”
“What! The Baroness in this wet stubble?” said he, with such energy that I deemed the moment come for the striking of the blow that had been so long impending.
“When a lady,” I said with great distinctness, “has cooked for fourteen years without interruption — ever since, that is, she was sixteen — one may safely at thirty leave it always in her hands,”
“Monstrous,” said he.
At first I thought he was in some way alluding to her age, and to the fact that he had been deceived into supposing her young.
“What is monstrous?” I inquired, as he did not add anything.
“Why should she cook for us? Why should she come out in the wet to cook for us? Why should any woman cook for fourteen years without interruption?”
“She did it joyfully, Jellaby, for the comfort and sustenance of her husband, as every virtuous woman ought.”
“I think,” said he, “it would choke me.”
“What would choke you?”
“Food produced by the unceasing labour of my wife. Why should she be treated as a servant when she gets neither wages nor the privilege of giving notice and going away?”
“No wages? Her wages, young gentleman, are the knowledge that she has done her duty to her husband.”
“Thin, thin,” he murmured, digging his fork into the nearest sausage.
“And as for going away, I must say I am surprised you should connect such a thought with any respectable lady,”
Indeed, what he said was so ridiculous, and so young, and so on the face of it unmarried that in my displeasure I moved the umbrella for a moment far enough to one side to allow the larger drops collected on its metal tips to fall on to his bent and practically collarless (he wore a flannel shirt with some loose apology for a collar of the same material) neck.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 121
