Chapter XII

We supped that night beneath the stars with the field dropping downward from our feet into the misty purple of the Sussex Weald. What we had for supper was chicken and rice and onions, and very excellent it was. The wind had gone, and it was cold. It was like a night in North Germany, where the wind sighs all day long and at sunset it suddenly grows coldly and clearly calm.

These are quotations from a conversation I overheard between Frau von Eckthum (oddly loquacious that night) and Jellaby, who both sat near where I was eating my supper, supposed to be eating theirs but really letting it spoil while they looked down at the Sussex Weald (I wish I knew what a Weald is: Kent had one too) and she described the extremely flat and notoriously dull country round Storchwerder.

Indeed I would not have recognized it from her description, and yet I know it every bit as well as she can. Blue air, blue sky, blue water, and the flash of white wings--that was how she described it, and poor Jellaby was completely taken in and murmured “Beautiful, beautiful” in his foolish slow voice, and forgot to eat his chicken and rice while it was hot, and little guessed that she had laughed at him with me a few hours before.

I listened, amused but tolerant. We must not keep a pretty lady too exactly to the truth. The first part of this chapter is a quotation from what I heard her say (excepting one sentence), but my hearers must take my word for it that it did not sound anything like as silly as one might suppose. Everything depends on the utterer. Frau von Eckthum’s quasi-poetical way of describing the conduct of our climate had an odd attractiveness about it that I did not find, for instance, in my dear wife’s utterances when she too, which she at this time began to do with increasing frequency, indulged in the quasi-poetic. Quasi-poetic I and other plain men take to be the violent tearing of such a word as rolling from its natural place and applying it to the plains and fields round Storchwerder. A ship rolls, but fields, I am glad to say, do not. You may also with perfect propriety talk about a rolling-pin in connection with the kitchen, or of a rolling stone in connection with moss. Of course I know that we all on suitable occasions make use of exclamations of an appreciative nature, such as _colossal_ and _grossartig_, but that is brief and business-like, it is what is expected of us, and it is a duty quickly performed and almost perfunctory, with one eye on the waiter and the restaurant behind; but slow raptures, prolonged ones, raptures beaten out thin, are not in my way and had not till then been in Edelgard’s way either. The English are flimsier than we are, thinner blooded, more feminine, more finnicking. There are no restaurants or _Bierhalle_ wherever there is a good view to drown their admiration in wholesome floods of beer, and not being provided with this natural stopper it fizzles on to interminableness. Why, Jellaby I could see not only let his supper get stone cold but forgot to eat it at all in his endeavour to outdo Frau von Eckthum’s style in his replies, and then Edelgard must needs join in too, and say (I heard her) that life in Storchwerder was a dusty, narrow life, where you could not see the _liebe Gott_ because of other people’s chimney-pots.

Greatly shocked (for I am a religious man) I saved her from further excesses by a loud call for more supper, and she got up mechanically to attend to my wants.

Jellaby, however, whose idea seemed to be that a woman is never to do anything (I wonder who is to do anything, then?) forestalled her with the sudden nimbleness he displayed on such occasions, so surprising in combination with his clothes and general slackness, and procured me a fresh helping.

I thanked him politely, but could not repress some irony in my bow as I apologized for disturbing him.

“Shall I hold your plate while you eat?” he said.

“Why, Jellaby?” I asked, mildly astonished.

“Wouldn’t it be even more comfortable if I did?” he asked; and then I perceived that he was irritated, no doubt because I had got most of the cushions, and he, Quixotic as he is, had given up his to my wife, on whom it was entirely thrown away for she has always assured me she actually prefers hard seats.

Well, of course there were few things in the world quite so unimportant as Jellaby’s irritation, so I just looked pleasant and at the food he had brought me; but I did not get another evening with Frau von Eckthum. She sat immovable on the edge of the slope with my wife and Jellaby, talking in tones that became more and more subdued as dusk deepened into night and stars grew hard and shiny.

They all seemed subdued. They even washed up in whispers. And afterward the very nondescripts lay stretched out quite quietly by the glowing embers of Lord Sigismund’s splendid fire listening to Menzies-Legh’s and Lord Sidge’s talk, in which I did not join for it was on the subject they were so fond of, the amelioration of the condition of those dull and undeserving persons, the poor.

I put my plate where somebody would see it and wash it, and retired to the shelter of a hedge and the comfort of a cigar. The three figures on the edge of the hill became gradually almost mute. Not a leaf in my hedge stirred. It was so still that people talking at the distant farm where we had procured our chickens could almost be understood, and a dog barking somewhere far away down in the Weald seemed quite threateningly near. It was really extraordinarily still; and the stillest thing of all was that strange example of the Englishwoman grafted on what was originally such excellent German stock, Mrs. Menzies-Legh, sitting a yard or two away from me, her hands clasped round her knees, her face turned up as though she were studying astronomy.

I do not suppose she moved for half an hour. Her profile seemed to shine white in the dusk with lines that reminded me somehow of a cameo there is in a red velvet case lying on the table in our comfortable drawing-room at Storchwerder, and the remembrance brought a slight twinge of home-sickness with it. I shook this off, and fell to watching her, and for the amusement of an idle hour lazily reconstructed from the remnants before me what her appearance must have been ten years before in her prime, when there were at least undulations, at least suggestions that here was a woman and not a kind of elongated boy.

The line of her face is certainly quite passable; and that night in the half darkness it was quite as passable as any I have seen on a statue--objects in which I have never been able to take much interest. It is probable she used to be beautiful. Used to be beautiful? What is the value of that? Just a snap of the fingers, and nothing more. If women would but realize that once past their first youth their only chance of pleasing is to be gentle and rare of speech, tactful, deft--in one word, apologetic, they would be more likely to make a good impression on reasonable men such as myself. I did not wish to quarrel with Mrs. Menzies-Legh and yet her tongue and the way she used it put my back up (as the British say) to a height it never attains in the placid pools of feminine intercourse in Storchwerder.

To see her sit so silent and so motionless was unusual. Was she regretting, perhaps, her lost youth? Was she feeling bitter at her inability to attract me, a man within two yards of her, sufficiently for me to take the trouble to engage her in conversation? No doubt. Well--poor thing! I am sorry for women, but there is nothing to be done since Nature has decreed they shall grow old.

I got up and shook out the folds of my mackintosh--a most useful garment in those damp places--and threw away the end of my cigar. “I am now going to retire for the night,” I explained, as she turned her head at my rustling, “and if you take my advice you will not sit here till you get rheumatism.”

She looked at me as though she did not hear. In that light her appearance was certainly quite passable: quite as passable as that of any of the statues they make so much fuss about; and then of course with proper eyes instead of blank spaces, and eyes garnished with that speciality of hers, the ridiculously long eyelashes. But I knew what she was like in broad day, I knew how thin she was, and I was not to be imposed upon by tricks of light; so I said in a matter of fact manner, seizing the opportunity for gentle malice in order to avenge myself a little for her repeated and unjustified attacks on me, “You will not be wise to sit there longer. It is damp, and you and I are hardly as young as we were, you know.”

Any normal woman, gentle as this was, would have shrivelled. Instead she merely agreed in an absent way that it was dewy, and turned up her face to the stars again.

“Looking for the Great Bear, eh?” I remarked, following her gaze as I buttoned my wrap.

She continued to gaze, motionless. “No, but--don’t you see? At Christ Whose glory fills the skies,” she said--both profanely and senselessly, her face in that light exactly like the sort of thing one sees in the windows of churches, and her voice as though she were half asleep.

So I hied me (poetry being the fashion) to my bed, and lay awake in it for some time being sorry for Menzies-Legh, for really no man can possibly like having a creepy wife.

But (luckily) _autres temps autres mœurs_, as our unbalanced but sometimes felicitous neighbours across the Vosges say, and next morning the poetry of the party was, thank heaven, clogged by porridge.

It always was at breakfast. They were strangely hilarious then, but never poetic. Poetry developed later in the day as the sun and their spirits sank together, and flourished at its full growth when there were stars or a moon. That morning, our first Sunday, a fresh breeze blew up from the Weald below and a cloudless sun dazzled us as it fell on the white cloth of the table set out in the middle of the field by somebody--I expect it was Mrs. Menzies-Legh--who wanted to make the most of the sun, and we had to hold on our hats with one hand and shade our eyes with the other while we ate.

Uncomfortable? Of course it was uncomfortable. Let no one who loves to be comfortable ever caravan. Neither let any one who loves order and decency do so. They may take it from me that there is never any order, and even less frequently is there any decency. I can give you an example from that Sunday morning. I was sitting at the table with the ladies, on a seat (as usual) too low for me, and that (also as usual) slanted on the uneven ground, with my feet slightly too cold in the damp grass and my head slightly too hot in the bright sun, and the general feeling of subtle discomfort and ruffledness that is one of the principal characteristics of this form of pleasure-taking, when I saw (and so did the ladies) Jellaby emerge from his tent--in his shirt sleeves if you please--and fastening up a mirror on the roof of his canvas lair proceed then and there in the middle of the field to lather his face and then to shave it.

Edelgard, of course, true to her early training, at once cast down her eyes and was careful to keep them averted during the remainder of the meal, but nobody else seemed to mind; indeed, Mrs. Menzies-Legh got out her camera and focussing him with deliberate care snap-shotted him.

Were these people getting blunted as the days passed to the refinements and necessary precautions of social intercourse? I had been stirred to much silent indignation by the habit of the gentlemen of walking in their shirt sleeves, and had not yet got used to that, but to see Jellaby dressing in an open field was a little more than I could endure in silence. For if, I asked myself rapidly, Jellaby dresses (shaving being a part of dressing) out-of-doors in the morning, what is to prevent his doing the opposite in the evening? Where is the line? Where is the logical limit? We had now been three days out, and we had already got to this. Where, I thought, should we have got to in another six? Where should we be by, say, the following Sunday?

I cannot think a promiscuous domesticity desirable, and am one of those who strongly disapprove of that worst example of it, the mixed bathing or _Familienbad_ which blots with practically unclothed Jews of either sex our otherwise decent coasts. Never have I allowed Edelgard to indulge in it, nor have I done so myself. It is a deplorable spectacle. We used to sit and watch it for hours, in a condition of ever-increasing horror and disgust--it was quite difficult to find seats sometimes, so many of our friends were there being disgusted too.

But these denizens of the deep at the points where the deep was a _Familienbad_ were, as I have said, chiefly Jews and their Jewesses, and what can you expect? Jellaby, however, in spite of his other infirmities, was not yet a Jew; he was everything else I think, but that crowning infamy had up to then been denied him.

But not to be one and yet to behave with the laxness of one within view of the rest of the party was very inexcusable. “Are there no hedges to this field?” I cried in indignant sarcasm, looking pointedly at each of its four hedges in turn and raising my voice so that he could hear.

“Oh, Baron dear, it’s Sunday,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, no longer a rather nice-looking if irreverent cameo in a velvet case, but full of morning militancy. “Don’t be cross till to-morrow. Save it up, or what will you do on Monday?”

“Be, I trust, just as capable of distinguishing between the permitted and the non-permitted as I am to-day,” was my ready retort.

“Oh, oh,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, shaking her head and smiling as though she were talking to a child or a feeble-minded; and turning her camera on to me she took my photograph.

“Pray why,” I inquired with justifiable heat, “should I be photographed without my consent?”

“Because,” she said, “you look so deliciously cross. I want to have you in my scrap-book like that. You looked then exactly like a baby I know.”

“Which baby?” I asked, frowning and at a loss how to meet this kind of thing conversationally. And there was Edelgard, all ears; and if a wife sees her husband being treated disrespectfully by other women is it not very likely that she soon will begin to treat him so herself? “Which baby?” I asked; but knew myself inadequate.

“Oh, a perfectly respectable baby,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh carelessly, putting her camera down and going on with her breakfast, “but irritable and exacting about things like bottles.”

“But I do not see what I have to do with bottles,” I said nettled.

“Oh, no--you haven’t. Only it looks at its nurse just like you did then if they’re late, or not full enough.”

“But I did not look at its nurse,” I said angrily, becoming still more so as they all (including my wife) laughed.

I rose abruptly. “I will go and smoke,” I said.

Of course I saw what she meant about the nurse the moment I had spoken, but it is inexcusable to laugh at a man because he does not immediately follow the sense (or rather the senselessness) of a childishly skipping conversation. I am as ready as any one to laugh at really amusing phrases or incidents, but being neither a phrase nor an incident myself I do not see why I should be laughed at. Surely it is unworthy of grown men and women to laugh at each other in the way silly children do? It is ruin to the graces of social intercourse, to the courtliness that should uninterruptedly distinguish the well-born. But there was a childish spirit pervading the whole party (with the exception of myself) that seemed to increase as the days went by, a spirit of unreasoning glee and mischievousness which I believe is characteristic of very young and very healthy children. Even Edelgard was daily becoming more calf-like, as we say, daily descending nearer to the level occupied at first only by the two nondescripts, that level at which you begin to play idiotic and heating games like the one the English call Blind Man’s Buff (an obviously foolish name, for what is buff?) and which we so much more sensibly call Blind Cow. Therefore I, having no intention at my age and in my position of joining in puerilities or even of seeming to countenance them by my presence, said abruptly, “I will smoke”--and strode away to do it.

One of the ladies called after me to inquire if I were not going to church with them, but I pretended not to hear and strode on toward the shelter of the hedge, giving Jellaby as I passed him such a look as would have caused any one not overgrown with the leather substitute for skin peculiar to persons who set order, morals, and religion at defiance, to creep confounded into his tent and stay there till his face was ready and his collar on. He, however, called out with the geniality born of brazenness, that it was a jolly morning; of which, of course, I took no notice.

In the dry ditch beneath the hedge on the east side of the field sat Lord Sigismund beside his _batterie de cuisine_, watching over, with unaccountable and certainly misplaced kindness, the porridge and the coffee that were presently to be Jellaby’s. While he watched he smoked his pipe, stroked his dog, and hummed snatches of what I supposed were psalms with the pleasant humming of the good, the happy, and the well-born.

Near him lay Menzies-Legh, his dark and sinister face bent over a book. He nodded briefly in response to my lifted hat and morning salutation, while Lord Sigismund, full as ever of the graciousness of noble birth, asked me if I had had a good night.

“A good night, and an excellent breakfast, thanks to you, Lord Sidge,” I replied; the touch of playfulness contained in the shortened name lightening the courteous correctness of my bow as I arranged myself next to him in the ditch.

Menzies-Legh got up and went away. It was characteristic of him that he seemed always to be doing that. I hardly ever joined him but he was reminded by my approach of something he ought to be doing and went away to do it. I mentioned this to Edelgard during the calm that divided one difference of opinion from another, and she said he never did that when she joined him.

“Dear wife,” I explained, “you have less power to remind him of unperformed duties than I possess.”

“I suppose I have,” said Edelgard.

“And it is very natural that it should be so. Power, of whatever sort it may be, is a masculine attribute. I do not wish to see my little wife with any.”

“Neither do I,” said she.

“Ah--there speaks my own good little wife.”

“I mean, not if it is that sort.”

“What sort, dear wife?”

“The sort that reminds people whenever I come that it is time they went.”

She looked at me with the odd look that I observed for the first time during our English holiday. Often have I seen it since, but I cannot recollect having seen it before. I, noticing that somehow we did not understand each other, patted her kindly on the shoulder, for, of course, she cannot always quite follow me, though I must say she manages very creditably as a rule.

“Well, well,” I said, patting her, “we will not quibble. It is a good little wife, is it not?” And I raised her chin by means of my forefinger, and kissed her.

This, however, is a digression. I suppose it is because I am unfolding my literary wings for the first time that I digress so frequently. At least I am aware of it, which is in itself, I should say, a sign of literary instinct. My Muse has been, so to speak, kept in bed without stopping till middle age, and is now suddenly called upon to get up and go for a walk. Such a muse must inevitably stagger a little at first. I will, however, endeavour to curb these staggerings, for I perceive that I have already written more than can be conveniently read aloud in one evening, and though I am willing the same friends should come on two, I do not know that I care to see them on as many as three. Besides, think of all the sandwiches.

(This last portion of the narrative, from “one evening” to “sandwiches” will, of course, be omitted in public.)

I will, therefore, not describe my conversation with Lord Sigismund in the ditch beyond saying that it was extremely interesting, and conducted on his side (and I hope on mine) with the social skill of a perfect gentleman.

It was brought to an end by the arrival of Jellaby and his dog, which was immediately pounced on by Lord Sigismund’s dog, who very properly resented his uninvited approach, and they remained inextricably mixed together for what seemed an eternity of yells, the yells rending the Sabbath calm and mingling with the distant church bells, and all proceeding from Jellaby’s dog, while Lord Sigismund’s, a true copy of his master, did that which he had to do with the silent self-possession of, if I may so express it, a dog of the world.

The entire company of caravaners, including old James, ran up with cries and whistling to try to separate them, and at last Jellaby, urged on I suppose to deeds of valour by knowing the eyes of the ladies upon him, made a mighty effort and tore them asunder, himself getting torn along his hand as the result.

Menzies-Legh helped Lord Sigismund to drag away the naturally infuriated bull-terrier, and Jellaby, looking round, asked me to hold his dog while he went and washed his hand. I thought this a fair instance of the brutal indifference to other people’s tastes that characterizes the British nation. Why did he not ask old James, who was standing there doing nothing? Yet what was I to do? There were the ladies looking on, among them Edelgard, motionless, leaving me to my fate, though if either of us knows anything about dogs it is she who does. Jellaby had got the beast by the collar, so I thought perhaps holding him by the tail would do. It was true it was the merest stump, but at least it was at the other end. I therefore grasped it, though with no little trouble, for, for some unknown reason, just as my hand approached it, it began to wag.

“No, no--catch hold of the collar. He’s all right, he won’t do anything to you,” said Jellaby, grinning and keeping his wounded hand well away from him while the nondescripts ran to fetch water.

The brute was quiet for a moment, and under the circumstances I do think Edelgard might have helped. She knows I cannot bear dogs. If she had held his head I would not have minded going on holding his tail, and at home she would have made herself useful as a matter of course. Here, however, she did nothing of the sort, but stood tearing up a perfectly good, clean handkerchief into strips in order, forsooth, to render that assistance to Jellaby which she denied her own husband. I did take the dog by the collar, there being no other course open to me, and was thankful to find that he was too tired and too much hurt to do anything to me. But I have never been a dog lover, carefully excluding them from my flat in Storchwerder, and selling the one Edelgard had had as a girl and wanted to saddle me with on her marriage. I remember how long it took, she being then still composed of very raw material, to make her understand I had married her and not her _Dachshund_. Will it be believed that her only answer to my arguments was a repeated parrot-like cry of “But he is so sweet!” A feeble plea, indeed, to set against the logic of my reasons. She shed tears, I remember, in quantities more suited to fourteen than twenty-four (as I pointed out to her), but later on did acknowledge, in answer to my repeated inquiries, that the furniture and carpets were, no doubt, the better for it, though for a long time she had a tendency which I found some difficulty in repressing, to make tiresomely plaintive allusions to the fact that the buyer (I sold the dog by auction) had chanced to be a maker of sausages and she had not happened to meet the dog since in the streets. Also, until I spoke very seriously to her about it, for months she would not touch anything potted, after always having been particularly fond of this type of food.

I soon found myself alone and unheeded with Jellaby’s dog, while Jellaby himself, the flattered centre of the entire body of ladies, was having his wound dressed. My wife washed it, Jumps held the bucket, Mrs. Menzies-Legh bound it up, Frau von Eckthum provided one of her own safety pins (I saw her take it out of her blouse), and Jane lent her sash for a sling. As for Lord Sigismund, after having seen to his own dog’s wounds (all made by Jellaby’s dog) he came back and, with truly Christian goodness, offered to wash and doctor Jellaby’s dog. His attitude, indeed, during these dog-fights was only one possible to a person of the very highest breeding. Never a word of reproach, yet it was clear that if Jellaby’s dog had not been there there would have been no fighting. And he exhibited a real distress over Jellaby’s wound, while Jellaby, thoroughly thick-skinned, laughed and declared he did not feel it; which, no doubt, was true, for that sort of person does not, I am convinced, feel anything like the same amount we others do.

The end of this pleasant Sabbath morning episode was that Jellaby took his dog to the nearest village containing a veterinary surgeon, and Menzies-Legh was found in the ditch almost as green as the surrounding leaves because--will it be believed?--he could never stand the sight of blood!

My hearers will, I am sure, be amused at this. Of course, many Britons must be the same, for it is unlikely that I should have chanced in those few days to meet the solitary instance, and I could hardly repress a hearty laugh at the spectacle of this specimen of England’s manhood in a half fainting condition because he had seen a scratch that produced blood. What will he and his kind do on that battle-field of, no doubt, the near future, when the finest army in the world will face them? It will not be scratches that poor Menzies-Legh will have to look at then, and I greatly fear for his complexion.

Everybody ran in different directions in search of brandy. Never have I seen a man so green. He was, at least, ashamed of himself, and finding I was a moment alone with him and he not in a condition to get up and go away, I spoke an earnest word or two about the inevitably effeminating effect on a man of so much poetry-reading and art-admiring and dabbling in the concerns of the poor. Not thus, I explained, did the Spartans spend their time. Not thus did the ancient Romans, during their greatest period, behave. “You feel the situation of the poor, for instance, far more than the poor feel it themselves,” I said, “and allow yourself to be worried into alleviating a wretchedness that they are used to, and do not notice. And what, after all, is art? And what, after all, is poetry? And what, if you come to that, is wretchedness? Do not weaken the muscles of your mind by feeding it so constantly on the pap of either your own sentimentality or the sentimentality of others. Pull down these artificial screens. Be robust. Accustom yourself to look at facts without flinching. Imitate the conduct of the modern Japanese, who take their children, as part of their training, to gaze on executions, and on their return cause the rice for their dinner to be served mixed with the crimson juices of the cherry, so that they shall imagine----”

But Menzies-Legh turned yet greener, and fainted away.