Chapter III

She became, however, more normal as the morning wore on, and by about eleven o’clock was taking an intelligent interest in hop-kilns.

These objects, recurring at frequent intervals as one travels through the county of Kent, are striking and picturesque additions to the landscape, and as our guide-book described them very fully I was able to talk a good deal about them. Kent pleased me very well. It looked as if there were money in it. Many thriving villages, many comfortable farmhouses, and many hoary churches peeping slyly at us through surrounding groups of timber so ancient that its not yet having been cut down and sold is in itself a testimony to the prevailing prosperity. It did not need much imagination to picture the comfortable clergyman lurking in the recesses of his snug parsonage and rubbing his well-nourished hands at life. Well, let him rub. Some day perhaps--and who knows how soon?--we shall have a decent Lutheran pastor in his black gown preaching the amended faith in every one of those churches.

Shortly, then, Kent is obviously flowing with milk and honey and well-to-do inhabitants; and when on referring to our guide-book I found it described as the Garden of England I was not in the least surprised, and neither was Edelgard. In this county, as we knew, part at any rate of our gipsying was to take place, for the caravans were stationed at a village about three miles from Wrotham, and we were very well satisfied that we were going to examine it more closely, because though no one could call the scenery majestic it yet looked full of promise of a comfortable nature. I observed for instance that the roads seemed firm and good, which was clearly important; also that the villages were so plentiful that there would be no fear of our ever getting beyond the reach of provisions. Unfortunately, the weather was not true August weather, which I take it is properly described by the word bland. This is not bland. The remains of the violent wind that had blown us across from Flushing still hurried hither and thither, and gleams of sunshine only too frequently gave place to heavy squalls of rain and hail. It was more like a blustering October day than one in what is supposed to be the very height and ripeness of summer, and we could only both hope, as the carriage windows banged and rattled, that our caravan would be heavy enough to withstand the temptation to go on by itself during the night, urged on from behind by the relentless forces of nature. Still, each time the sun got the better of the inky clouds and the Garden of England laughed at us from out of its bravery of graceful hop-fields and ripening corn, we could not resist a feeling of holiday hopefulness. Edelgard’s spirits rose with every mile, and I, having readily forgiven her on her asking me to and acknowledging she had been selfish, was quite like a boy; and when we got out of the train at Wrotham beneath a blue sky and a hot sun with the hail-clouds retreating over the hills and found we would have to pack ourselves and our many packages into a fly so small that, as I jocularly remarked in English, it was not a fly at all but an insect, Edelgard was so much entertained that for several minutes she was perfectly convulsed with laughter.

By means of the address neatly written in Latin characters on an envelope, we had no difficulty in getting the driver to start off as though he knew where he was going, but after we had been on the way for about half an hour he grew restless, and began to twist round on his box and ask me unintelligible questions. I suppose he talked and understood only _patois_, for I could not in the least make out what he meant, and when I requested him to be more clear I could see by his foolish face that he was constitutionally unable to be it. A second exhibition of the addressed envelope, however, soothed him for a time, and we continued to advance up and down chalky roads, over the hedges on each side of which leapt the wind and tried to blow our hats off. The sun was in our eyes, the dust was in our eyes, and the wind was in our faces. Wrotham, when we looked behind, had disappeared. In front was a chalky desolation. We could see nothing approaching a village, yet Panthers, the village we were bound for, was only three miles from the station, and not, observe, three full-blooded German miles, but the dwindled and anæmic English kind that are typical, as so much else is, of the soul and temper of the nation. Therefore we began to be uneasy, and to wonder whether the man were trustworthy. It occurred to me that the chalk pits we constantly met would not be bad places to take us into and rob us, and I certainly could not speak English quickly enough to meet a situation demanding rapid dialogue, nor are there any directions in my German-English Conversational Guide as to what you are to say when you are being murdered.

Still jocose, but as my hearers will notice, jocose with a tinge of grimness, I imparted these two linguistic facts to Edelgard, who shuddered and suggested renewed applications of the addressed envelope to the driver. “Also it is past dinner time,” she added anxiously. “I know because _mein Magen knurrt_.”

By means of repeated calls and my umbrella I drew the driver’s attention to us and informed him that I would stand no further nonsense. I told him this with great distinctness and the deliberation forced upon me by want of practice. He pulled up to hear me out, and then, merely grinning, drove on. “The youngest Storchwerder _droschke_ driver,” I cried indignantly to Edelgard, “would die of shame on his box if he did not know every village, nay, every house within three miles of it with the same exactitude with which he knows the inside of his own pocket.”

Then I called up to the man once more, and recollecting that nothing clears our Hermann’s brain at home quicker than to address him as _Esel_ I said, “Ask, ass.”

He looked down over his shoulder at me with an expression of great surprise.

“What?” said he.

“What?” said I, confounded by this obtuseness. “What? The way, of course.”

He pulled up once more and turned right round on his box.

“Look here----” he said, and paused.

“Look where?” said I, very naturally supposing he had something to show me.

“Who are you talkin’ to?” said he.

The question on the face of it was so foolish that a qualm gripped my heart lest we had to do with a madman. Edelgard felt the same, for she drew closer to me.

Luckily at that moment I saw a passer-by some way down the road, and springing out of the fly hastened to meet him in spite of Edelgard’s demand that I should not leave her alone. On reaching him I took off my hat and courteously asked him to direct us to Panthers, at the same time expressing my belief that the flyman was not normal. He listened with the earnest and strained attention English people gave to my utterances, an attention caused, I believe, by the slightly unpractised pronunciation combined with the number and variety of words at my command, and then going up (quite fearlessly) to the flyman he pointed in the direction entirely opposed to the one we were following and bade him go there.

“I won’t take him nowhere,” said the flyman with strange passion; “he calls me a ass.”

“It is not your fault,” said I (very handsomely, I thought). “You are what you were made. You cannot help yourself.”

“I won’t take him nowhere,” repeated the flyman, with, if anything, increased passion.

The passer-by looked from one to another with a faint smile.

“The expression,” said he to the flyman, “is, you see, merely a term of recognition in the gentleman’s country. You can’t reasonably object to that, you know. Drive on like a sensible man, and get your fare.”

And lifting his hat to Edelgard he continued his passing by.

Well, we did finally arrive at the appointed place--indeed, my hearers next winter will know all the time that we must have, or why should I be reading this aloud?--after being forced by the flyman to walk the last twenty minutes up a hill which, he declared, his horse would not otherwise be able to ascend. The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle--a hard one to encounter when it is long past dinner-time. I am aware that by English clocks it was not past it, but what was that to me? My watch showed that in Storchwerder, the place our inner natures were used to, it was half-past two, a good hour beyond the time at which they are accustomed daily to be replenished, and no arbitrary theory, anyhow no perilously near approach to one, will convince a man against the evidence of his senses that he is not hungry because a foreign clock says it is not dinner-time when it is.

Panthers, we found on reaching the top of the hill and pausing to regain our composure, is but a house here and a house there scattered over a

bleak, ungenial landscape. It seemed an odd, high up district to use as a terminus for caravans, and I looked down the steep, narrow lane we had just ascended and wondered how a caravan would get up it. Afterward I found that they never do get up it, but arrive home from the exactly opposite direction along a fair road which was the one any but an imbecile driver would have brought us. We reached our destination by, so to speak, its back door; and we were still standing on the top of the hill doing what is known as getting one’s wind, for I am not what would be called an ill-covered man but rather, as I jestingly tell Edelgard, a walking compliment to her good cooking, and she herself was always of a substantial build, not exaggeratedly but agreeably so--we were standing, I say, struggling for breath when some one came out quickly from a neighbouring gate and stopped with a smile of greeting upon seeing us.

It was the gaunt sister.

We were greatly pleased. Here we were, then, safely arrived, and joined to at least a portion of our party. Enthusiastically we grasped both her hands and shook them. She laughed as she returned our greetings, and I was so much pleased to find some one I knew that though Edelgard commented afterward somewhat severely on her dress because it was so short that it nowhere touched the ground, I noticed nothing except that it seemed to be extremely neat, and as for not touching the ground Edelgard’s skirt was followed wherever she went by a cloud of chalky dust which was most unpleasant.

Now why were we so glad to see this lady again? Why, indeed, are people ever glad to see each other again? I mean people who when they last saw each other did not like each other. Given a sufficient lapse of time, and I have observed that even those who parted in an atmosphere thick with sulphur of implied cursings will smile and genially inquire how the other does. I have observed this, I say, but I cannot explain it. There had, it is true, never been any sulphur about our limited intercourse with the lady on the few occasions on which proper feeling prevailed enough to induce her to visit her flesh and blood in Prussia--our attitude toward her had simply been one of well-bred chill, of chill because no thinking German can, to start with, be anything but prejudiced against a person who commits the unpatriotism--not to call it by a harsher name--of selling her inestimable German birthright for the mess of an English marriage. Also she was personally not what Storchwerder could like, for she was entirely wanting in the graces and undulations of form which are the least one has a right to expect of a being professing to be a woman. Also she had a way of talking which disconcerted Storchwerder, and nobody likes being disconcerted. Our reasons for joining issue with her in the matter of caravans were first, that we could not help it, only having discovered she was coming when it was too late; and secondly, that it was a cheap and convenient way of seeing a new country. She with her intimate knowledge of English was to be, we privately told each other, our unpaid courier--I remember Edelgard’s amusement when the consolatory cleverness of this way of looking at it first struck her.

But I am still at a loss to explain how it was that when she unexpectedly appeared at the top of the hill at Panthers we both rushed at her with an effusiveness that could hardly have been exceeded if it had been Edelgard’s grandmother Podhaben who had suddenly stood before us, an old lady of ninety-two of whom we are both extremely fond, and who, as is well known, is going to leave my wife her money when she (which I trust sincerely she will not do for a long time yet) dies. I cannot explain it, I say, but there it is. Rush we did, and effusive we were, and it was reserved for a quieter moment to remember with some natural discomposure that we had showed far more enthusiasm than she had. Not that she was not pleasant, but there is a gap between pleasantness and enthusiasm, and to be the one of two persons who is most pleased is to put yourself in the position of the inferior, of the suppliant, of him who hopes, or is eager to ingratiate himself. Will it be believed that when later on I said something to this effect about some other matter in general conversation, the gaunt sister immediately cried, “Oh, but that’s not generous.”

“What is not generous?” I asked surprised, for it was the first day of the tour and I was not then as much used as I subsequently became to her instant criticism of all I said.

“That way of thinking,” said she.

Edelgard immediately bristled--(alas, what would make her bristle now?)

“Otto is the most generous of men,” she said. “Every year on Sylvester evening he allows me to invite six orphans to look at the remains of our Christmas tree and be given, before they go away, doughnuts and grog.”

“What! Grog for orphans?” cried the gaunt sister, neither silenced nor impressed; and there ensued a warm discussion on, as she put it, (_a_) the effect of grog on orphans, (_b_) the effect of grog on doughnuts, (_c_) the effect of grog on combined orphans and doughnuts.

But I not only anticipate, I digress.

Inside the gate through which this lady had emerged stood the caravans and her gentle sister. I was so much pleased at seeing Frau von Eckthum again that at first I did not notice our future homes. She was looking remarkably well and was in good spirits, and, though dressed in the same way as her sister, by adding to the attire all those graces so peculiarly her own the effect she produced was totally different. At least, I thought so. Edelgard said she saw nothing to choose between them.

After the first greetings she half turned to the row of caravans, and with a little motion of the hand and a pretty smile of proprietary pride said, “There they are.”

There, indeed, they were.

There were three; all alike, sober brown vehicles, easily distinguishable, as I was pleased to notice, from common gipsy carts. Clean curtains fluttered at the windows, the metal portions were bright, and the names painted prettily on them were the Elsa, the Ilsa, and the Ailsa. It was an impressive moment, the moment of our first setting eyes upon them. Under those frail roofs were we for the next four weeks to be happy, as Edelgard said, and healthy and wise--“Or,” I amended shrewdly on hearing her say this, “_vice versa_.”

Frau von Eckthum, however, preferred Edelgard’s prophecy, and gave her an appreciative look--my hearers will remember, I am sure, how agreeably her dark eyelashes contrast with the fairness of her hair. The gaunt sister laughed, and suggested that we should paint out the names already on the caravans and substitute in large letters Happy, Healthy, and Wise, but not considering this particularly amusing I did not take any trouble to smile.

Three large horses that were to draw them and us stood peacefully side by side in a shed being fed with oats by a weather-beaten person the gaunt sister introduced as old James. This old person, a most untidy, dusty-looking creature, touched his cap, which is the inadequate English way of showing respect to superiors--as inadequate at its end of the scale as the British army is at the other--and shuffled off to fetch in our luggage, and the gaunt sister suggesting that we should climb up and see the interior of our new home with some difficulty we did so, there being a small ladder to help us which, as a fact, did not help us either then or later, no means being discovered from beginning to end of the tour by which it could be fixed firmly at a convenient angle.

I think I could have climbed up better if Frau von Eckthum had not been looking on; besides, at that moment I was less desirous of inspecting the caravans than I was of learning when, where, and how we were going to have our delayed dinner. Edelgard, however, behaved like a girl of sixteen once she had succeeded in reaching the inside of the Elsa, and most inconsiderately kept me lingering there too while she examined every corner and cried with tiresome iteration that it was _wundervoll_, _herrlich_, and _putzig_.

“I knew you’d like it,” said Frau von Eckthum from below, amused apparently by this kittenish conduct.

“Like it?” called back Edelgard. “But it is delicious--so clean, so neat, so miniature.”

“May I ask where we dine?” I inquired, endeavouring to free the skirts of my new mackintosh from the door, which had swung to (the caravan not standing perfectly level) and jammed them tightly. I did not need to raise my voice, for in a caravan even with its door and windows shut people outside can hear what you say just as distinctly as people inside, unless you take the extreme measure of putting something thick over your head and whispering. (Be it understood I am alluding to a caravan at rest: when in motion you may shout your secrets, for the noise of crockery leaping and breaking in what we learned--with difficulty--to allude to as the pantry will effectually drown them.)

The two ladies took no heed of my question, but coming up after us--they never could have got in had they been less spare--filled the van to overflowing while they explained the various arrangements by which our miseries on the road were to be mitigated. It was chiefly the gaunt sister who talked, she being very nimble of tongue, but I must say that on this occasion Frau von Eckthum did not confine herself to the attitude I so much admired in her, the ideal feminine one of smiling and keeping quiet. I, meanwhile, tried to make myself as small as possible, which is what persons in caravans try to do all the time. I sat on a shiny yellow wooden box that ran down one side of our “room” with holes in its lid and a flap at the end by means of which it could, if needed, be lengthened and turned into a bed for a third sufferer. (On reading this aloud I shall probably substitute traveller for sufferer, and some milder word such as discomfort for the word miseries in the first sentence of the paragraph.) Inside the box was a mattress, also extra sheets, towels, etc., so that, the gaunt sister said there was nothing to prevent our having house-parties for week-ends. As I do not like such remarks even in jest I took care to show by my expression that I did not, but Edelgard, to my surprise, who used always to be the first to scent the vicinity of thin ice, laughed heartily as she continued her frantically pleased examination of the van’s contents.

It is not to be expected of any man that he shall sit in a cramped position on a yellow box at an hour long past his dinner time and take an interest in puerilities. To Edelgard it seemed to be a kind of a doll’s house, and she, entirely forgetting the fact of which I so often reminded her that she will be thirty next birthday, behaved in much the same way as a child who has just been presented with this expensive form of toy by some foolish and spendthrift relation. Frau von Eckthum, too, appeared to me to be less intelligent than I was accustomed to suppose her. She smiled at Edelgard’s delight as though it pleased her, chatting in a way I hardly recognized as she drew my wife’s attention to the objects she had not had time to notice. Edelgard’s animation amazed me. She questioned and investigated and admired without once noticing that as I sat on the lid of the wooden box I was obviously filled with sober thoughts. Why, she was so much infatuated that she actually demanded at intervals that I too should join in this exhibition of childishness; and it was not until I said very pointedly that I, at least, was not a little girl, that she was recalled to a proper sense of her behaviour.

“Poor Otto is hungry,” she said, pausing suddenly in her wild career round the caravan and glancing at my face.

“Is he? Then he must be fed,” said the gaunt sister, as carelessly and with as little real interest as if there were no particular hurry. “Look--aren’t these too sweet?--each on its own little hook--six of them, and their saucers in a row underneath.”

And so it would have gone on indefinitely if an extremely pretty, nice, kind little lady had not put her head in at the door and asked with a smile that fell like oil on the troubled water of my brain whether we were not dying for something to eat.

Never did the British absence of ceremony and introductions and preliminary phrases seem to me excellent before. I sprang up, and immediately knocked my elbow so hard against a brass bracket holding a candle and hanging on a hook in the wall that I was unable altogether to suppress an exclamation of pain. Remembering, however, what is due to society I very skilfully converted it into a rather precipitate and agonized answer to the little lady’s question, and she, with a charming hospitality, pressing me to come into her adjoining garden and have some food, I accepted with alacrity, only regretting that I was unable, from the circumstance of her going first, to help her down the ladder. (As a matter of fact she had in the end to help me, because the door slammed behind me and again imprisoned the skirts of my mackintosh.)

Edelgard, absorbed in delighted contemplation of a corner beneath the so-called pantry full of brooms and dusters also hanging in rows on hooks, only shook her head when I inquired if she would not come too; so leaving her to her ecstasies I went off with my new protector, who asked me why I wore a mackintosh when there was not a cloud in the sky. I avoided giving a direct answer by retorting playfully (though wholly politely), “Why not?”--and indeed my reasons, connected with creases and other ruin attendant on confinement in a hold-all, were of too domestic and private a nature to be explained to a stranger so charming. But my counter-question luckily amused her, and she laughed as she opened a small gate in the wall and led me into her garden.

Here I was entertained with the greatest hospitality by herself and her husband. The fleet of caravans which yearly pervades that part of England is stationed when not in action on their premises. Hence departs the joyful caravaner, accompanied by kind wishes; hither he returns sobered, and is received with balm and bandages--at least, I am sure he would find them and every other kind form of solace in the little garden on the hill. I spent a very pleasant and reviving half-hour in a sheltered corner of it, enjoying my _al fresco_ meal and acquiring much information. To my question as to whether my entertainers were to be of our party they replied, to my disappointment, that they were not. Their functions were restricted to this seeing that we started happy, and being prompt and helpful when we came back. From them I learned that our party was to consist, besides ourselves and Frau von Eckthum and that sister whom I have hitherto distinguished by the adjective gaunt, putting off the necessity as long as possible of alluding to her by name, she having, as my hearers perhaps remember, married a person with the unpronounceable one if you see it written and the unspellable one if you hear it said of Menzies-Legh--the party was to consist, I say, besides these four, of Menzies-Legh’s niece and one of her friends; of Menzies-Legh himself; and of two young men about whom no precise information was obtainable.

“But how? But where?” said I, remembering the limited accommodations of the three caravans.

My host reassured me by explaining that the two young men would inhabit a tent by night which, by day, would be carried in one of the caravans.

“In which one?” I asked anxiously.

“You must settle that among yourselves,” said he smiling.

“That’s what one does all day long caravaning,” said my hostess, handing me a cup of coffee.

“What does one do?” I asked, eager for information.

“Settle things among oneselves,” said she. “Only generally one doesn’t.”

I put it down to my want of practice in the more idiomatic involutions of the language that I did not quite follow her meaning; but as one of my principles is never to let people know that I have not understood them I merely bowed slightly and, taking out my note-book, remarked that if that were so I would permit myself to make a list of our party in order to keep its various members more distinct in my mind.

The following is the way in which we were to be divided:

1. A caravan (the Elsa), containing the Baron and Baroness von Ottringel, of Storchwerder in Prussia.

2. Another caravan (the Ailsa), containing Mr. and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, of various addresses, they being ridiculously and superfluously rich.

3. Another caravan (the Ilsa), containing Frau von Eckthum, the Menzies-Legh niece, and her (as I gathered, school) friend. In this caravan the yellow box was to be used.

4. One tent, containing two young men, name and status unknown.

The ill-dressed person, old James, was coming too, but would sleep each night with the horses, they being under his special care; and all of the party (except ourselves and Frau von Eckthum and her sister who had already, as I need not say, done so) were yet to assemble. They were expected every moment, and had been expected all day. If they did not come soon our first day’s march, opined my host, would not see us camping further away than the end of the road, for it was already past four o’clock. This reminded me that my luggage ought to be unpacked and stowed away, and I accordingly begged to be excused that I might go and superintend the operation, for I have long ago observed that when the controlling eye of the chief is somewhere else things are very apt to go irremediably wrong.

“Against stupidity,” says some great German--it must have been Goethe, and if it was not, then no doubt it was Schiller, they having, I imagine, between them said everything there is to be said--“against stupidity the very gods struggle in vain.” And I beg that this may not be taken as a reflection on my dear wife, but rather as an inference of general applicability. In any case the recollection of it sent me off with a swinging stride to the caravans.