Chapter V

Under the impression that I had not closed my eyes all night I was surprised to find when I opened them in the morning that I had. I must have slept, and with some soundness; for there stood Edelgard, holding back the curtain that concealed me when in bed from the gaze of any curious should the caravan door happen to burst open, already fully dressed and urging me to get up. It is true that I had been dreaming I was still between Flushing and Queenboro’, so that in my sleep I was no doubt aware of the heavings of the caravan while she dressed; for a caravan gives, so to speak, to every movement of the body, and I can only hope that if any of you ever go in one the other person in the bed above you may be a motionless sleeper. Indeed, I discovered that after all it was not an advantage to occupy the lower bed. While the rain was striking the roof with the deafening noise of unlimited and large stones I heard nothing of Edelgard, though I felt every time she moved. When, however, it left off, the creakings and crunchings of her bed and bedding (removed only a few inches from my face) every time she turned round were so alarming that disagreeable visions crossed my mind of the bed, unable longer to sustain a weight greater perhaps than what it was meant to carry, descending _in toto_ in one of these paroxysms upon the helpless form (my own) stretched beneath. Clearly if it did I should be very much hurt, and would quite likely suffocate before assistance could be procured. These visions, however, in spite of my strong impression of unclosed eyes, must ultimately and mercifully have been drowned in sleep, and my bed being very comfortable and I at the end of my forces after the previous day when I did sleep I did it soundly and I also apparently did it long; for the sun was coming through the open window accompanied by appetizing smells of hot coffee when Edelgard roused me by the information that breakfast was ready, and that as everybody seemed hungry if I did not come soon I might as well not come at all.

She had put my clothes out, but had brought me no hot water because she said the two sisters had told her it was too precious, what there was being wanted for washing up. I inquired with some displeasure whether I, then, were less important than forks, and to my surprise Edelgard replied that it depended on whether they were silver; which was, of course, perilously near repartee. She immediately on delivering this left the caravan, and as I could not go to the door to call her back--as she no doubt recollected--I was left to my cold water and to my surprise. For though I had often noticed a certain talent she has in this direction (my hearers will remember instances) it had not yet been brought to bear personally on me. Repartee is not amiss in the right place, but the right place is never one’s husband. Indeed, on the whole I think it is a dangerous addition to a woman, and best left alone. For is not that which we admire in woman womanliness? And womanliness, as the very sound of the word suggests, means nothing that is not round, and soft, and pliable; the word as one turns it on one’s tongue has a smoothly liquid sound as of sweet oil, or precious ointment, or balm, that very well expresses our ideal. Sharp tongues, sharp wits--what are these but drawbacks and blots on the picture?

Such (roughly) were my thoughts while I washed in very little and very cold water, and putting on my clothes was glad to see that Edelgard had at least brushed them. I had to pin the curtains carefully across the windows because breakfast was going on just outside, and hurried heads kept passing to and fro in search, no doubt, of important parts of the meal that had either been forgotten or were nowhere to be found.

I confess I thought they might have waited with breakfast till I came. It is possible that Frau von Eckthum was thinking so too; but as far as the others were concerned I was dealing, I remembered, with members of the most inconsiderate nation in Europe. And besides, I reflected, it was useless to look for the courtesy we in Germany delight to pay to rank and standing among people who had neither of these things themselves. For what was Menzies-Legh? A man with much money (which is vulgar) and no title at all. Neither in the army, nor in the navy, nor in the diplomatic service, not even the younger son of a titled family, which in England, as perhaps my hearers have heard with surprise, is a circumstance sometimes sufficient to tear the title a man would have had in any other country from him and send him forth a naked Mr. into the world--Menzies-Legh, I suppose, after the fashion of our friend the fabled fox in a similar situation, saw no dignity in, nor any reason why he should be polite to, noble foreign grapes. And his wife’s original good German blood had become so thoroughly undermined by the action of British microbes that I could no longer regard her as a daughter of one of our oldest families; while as for the two young men, on asking Menzies-Legh the previous evening over that damp and dreary supper of insufficient eggs who they were, being forced to do so by his not having as a German gentleman would have done given me every information at the earliest opportunity of his own accord, with details as to income, connections, etc., so that I would know the exact shade of cordiality my behaviour toward them was to be tinged with--on asking Menzies-Legh, I repeat, he merely told me that the one with the spectacles and the hollow cheeks and the bull terrier was Browne, who was going into the Church, and the other with the Pomeranian and the round, hairless face was Jellaby.

Concerning Jellaby he said no more. Who and what he was except pure Jellaby I would have been left to find out by degrees as best I could if I had not pressed him further, and inquired whether Jellaby also were going into the Church, and if not what was he going into?

Menzies-Legh replied--not with the lively and detailed interest a German gentleman would have displayed talking about the personal affairs of a friend, but with an appearance of being bored that very extraordinarily came over him whenever I endeavoured to talk to him on topics of real interest, and disappeared whenever he was either doing dull things such as marching, or cleaning his caravan, or discussing tiresome trivialities with the others such as some foolish poem lately appeared, or the best kind of kitchen ranges to put into the cottages he was building for old women on his estates--that Jellaby was not going into anything, being in already; and that what he was in was the House of Commons, where he was not only a member of the Labour Party but also a Socialist.

I need not say that I was considerably upset. Here I was going to live, as the English say, cheek by jowl for a substantial period with a Socialist member of Parliament, and it was even then plain to me that the caravan mode of life encourages, if I may so express it, a degree of cheek by jowlishness unsurpassed, nay, unattained, by any other with which I am acquainted. To descend to allegory, and taking a Prussian officer of noble family as the cheek, how terrible to him of all persons on God’s earth must be a radical jowl. Since I am an officer and a gentleman it goes without saying that I am also a Conservative. You cannot be one without the others, at least not comfortably, in Germany. Like the three Graces, these other three go also hand in hand. The King of Prussia is, I am certain, in his heart passionately Conservative. So also I have every reason to believe is God Almighty. And from the Conservative point of view (which is the only right one) all Liberals are bad--bad, unworthy, and unfit; persons with whom one would never dream of either dining or talking; persons dwelling in so low a mental and moral depth that to dwell in one still lower seems almost extravagantly impossible. Yet in that lower depth, moving about like those blind monsters science tells us inhabit the everlasting darkness of the bottom of the seas, beyond the reach of light, of air, and of every Christian decency, dwells the Socialist. And who can be a more impartial critic than myself? Excluded by my profession from any opinion or share in politics I am able to look on with the undisturbed impartiality of the disinterested, and I see these persons as a danger to my country, a danger to my King, and a danger (if I had any) to my posterity. In consequence I was very cold to Jellaby when he asked me to pass him something at supper--I think it was the salt. It is true he is prevented by his nationality from riddling our Reichstag with his poisonous theories (not a day would I have endured his company if he had been a German) but the broad principle remained, and as I dressed I reflected with much ruefulness that even as it was his presence was almost compromising, and I could not but blame Frau von Eckthum for not having informed me of its imminence beforehand.

And the other--the future pastor, Browne. A pastor is necessary and even very well at a christening, a marriage, or an interment; but for mingling purposes on common social ground--no. Sometimes at public dinners in Storchwerder there has been one in the background, but he very properly remained in it; and once or twice dining with our country neighbours their pastor and his wife were present, and the pastor said grace and his wife said nothing, and they felt they were not of our class, and if they had not felt it of themselves they would very quickly have been made to feel it by others. This is all as it should be: perfectly natural and proper; and it was equally natural and proper that on finding I was required to do what the English call hobnob with a future pastor I should object. I did object strongly. And decided, while I dressed, that my attitude toward both Jellaby and Browne should be of the chilliest coolness.

Now in this narrative nothing is to be hidden, for I desire it to be a real and sincere human document, and I am the last man, having made a mistake, to pass it over in silence. My friends shall see me as I am, with all my human weaknesses and, I hope, some at least of my human strengths. Not that there is anything to be ashamed of in the matter of him Menzies-Legh spoke baldly of as Browne--rather should Menzies-Legh have been ashamed of leading me through his uncommunicativeness into a natural error; for how could I be supposed to realize that the singular nation places the Church as a profession on practically the same level as the only three that to us have a level at all, namely, the Army, the Navy, and the Service diplomatic or ministerial of the State?

To Browne, therefore, when I finally climbed down from my caravan into the soaking grass that awaited me at the bottom and found him breakfasting alone, the others being scattered about in the condition of feverish yet sterile activity that is characteristic of caravan life, I behaved in a manner perfectly suitable applied to an ordinary pastor who should begin to talk to me with an air of equality--I was, that is, exceedingly stiff.

He pushed the coffee-pot toward me: I received it with a cold bow. He talked of the rain in the night and his fears that my wife had been disturbed by it: I replied with an evasive shrug. He spoke cheerily of the brightness of the morning, and the promise it held of a pleasant day: I responded with nothing more convivial than Perhaps or Indeed--at this moment I cannot recall which. He suggested that I should partake of a thick repulsive substance he was eating which he described as porridge and as the work of Jellaby, and which was, he said, extraordinarily good stuff to march on: I sternly repressed a very witty retort that occurred to me and declined by means of a monosyllable. In a word, I was stiff.

Judge then of my vexation and dismay when I discovered not ten minutes later by the merest accident while being taken by Mrs. Menzies-Legh to a farm in order that I might carry back the vegetables she proposed to buy at it, that the young gentleman not only has a title but is the son of one of the greatest of English families. He is a younger son of the Duke of Hereford, that wealthy and well-known nobleman whose sister was not considered (on the whole) unworthy to marry our Prince of Grossburg-Niederhausen, and far from being mere Browne in the way in which Jellaby was and remained mere Jellaby, the young gentleman I had been deliberately discouraging was Browne indeed, but with the transfiguring addition of Sigismund and Lord.

Mrs. Menzies-Legh, with the same careless indifference I had observed in her husband, spoke of him briefly as Sidge. He was, it appeared, a distant cousin of her husband’s. I had to question her closely and perseveringly before I could extract these details from her, she being apparently far more interested in the question as to whether the woman at the farm would not only sell us vegetables but also a large iron vessel in which to stew them. Yet it is clearly of great importance first, that one should be in good company, and secondly, that one should be told one is in it, because if one is not told how in the world is one to know? And my hearers will, I am sure, sympathize with me in the disagreeable situation in which I found myself, for never was there, I trust and believe, a more polite man than myself, a man more aware of what he owes to his own birth and breeding and those of others, a man more careful to discharge punctiliously all the little (but so important) nameless acts of courtesy where and whenever they are due, and it greatly distressed me to think I had unwittingly rejected the advances of the nephew of an aunt whom the entire German nation agrees to address on her envelopes as Serene.

While I bore back the iron vessel called a stew-pot which Mrs. Menzies-Legh had unfortunately persuaded the farmer’s wife to sell her, and also a basket (in my other hand) full of big, unruly vegetables such as cabbages, and smooth, green objects, unknown to me but resembling shortened and widened cucumbers, that would not keep still and continually rolled into the road, I wished that at least I had eaten the porridge. It could not have killed me, and it was churlish to refuse. The manner of my refusal had made the original churlishness still more churlish. I made up my mind to seek out Lord Sigismund without delay and endeavour by a tactful word to set matters right between us, for one of my principles is never to be ashamed of acknowledging when I have been in the wrong; and so much preoccupied was I deciding on the exact form the tactful word was to take that I had hardly time to object to the nature and size of my burdens. Besides, I was beginning to realize that burdens were going to be my fate. There was little hope of escaping them, since the other members of the party bore similar ones and seemed to think it natural. Mrs. Menzies-Legh at that moment was herself carrying a bundle of little sticks for lighting fires, tied up in a big red handkerchief the farmer’s wife had sold her, and also a parcel of butter, and she walked along perfectly indifferent to the odd figure she would cut and the wrong impression she would give should we by any chance meet any of the gentlefolk of the district. And one should always remember, I consider, when one wishes to let one’s self go, that the world is very small, and that it is at least possible that the last person one would choose as a witness may be watching one through an apparently deserted hedge with his eyeglasses up. Besides, there is no pleasure in behaving as though you were a servant, and old James certainly ought to have accompanied us and carried our purchases back. Of what use is a man servant, however untidy, who is nowhere to be seen when washing up begins or shopping takes place? Being forced to pause a moment and put the stew-pot down in order to rest my hand (which ached) I inquired somewhat pointedly of my companion what she supposed the inhabitants of Storchwerder would say if they could see us at that moment.

“They wouldn’t say anything,” she replied--but her smile is not equal to her sister’s because she has only one dimple--“they’d faint.”

“Exactly,” said I meaningly; adding, after a pause sufficient to point my words, “and very properly.”

“Dear Baron,” said she, pretending to look all innocent surprise and curling up her eyelashes, “do you think it is wrong to carry stew-pots? You mustn’t carry them, then. Nobody must ever do what they think wrong. That’s what is called perjuring one’s soul--a dreadfully wicked thing to do. Do you suppose I would have you perjure yours for the sake of a miserable stew-pot? Put it down. Don’t touch the accursed thing. Leave it in the ditch. Hang it on the hedge. I’ll send Sidge for it.”

Send Sidge? At once I snatched it up again, remarking that what Lord Sigismund could fetch I hoped Baron von Ottringel could carry; to which she made no answer, but a faint little sound as we resumed our journey came from behind her motor veil, whether of approval and acquiescence or disapproval and contradiction I cannot say, for there was nothing, on looking at her as she

walked beside me, to go on except the tip of a slightly inquiring nose and the tip of a slightly defiant chin and the downward curve of the row of ridiculously long eyelashes that were on the side next to me.

When we got back to the camp we found it in precisely the same condition in which we had left it--that is, in confusion. Every one seemed to be working very hard, and nothing seemed to be different from what it was a full hour before. Indeed, hours seem to have strangely little effect in caravaning: even hours and hours have little; and it is only when you get to hours and hours and hours that you see a change. In our preparations each morning for departure it always appeared to me that they would never have ended but for a sudden desperate unanimous determination to break them off and go.

The two young girls who had not appeared the previous night when I retired to rest had at last, as Menzies-Legh would say, turned up. They had done this, I gathered, early in the morning, having slept with their governess at an inn in Wrotham, she being a discreet person who preferred not to search in rain and darkness for that which when found might not be nice. She had arrived after breakfast, handed over her charges, and taken her departure; and the young girls as I at once saw were not young girls at all, but that nondescript creature with a thick plait down its back and a disconcerting way of staring at one that we in Germany describe as _Backfisch_ and the English, I am told, allude to as flapper.

Lord Sigismund was cleaning boots, seated on the edge of a table in his shirt sleeves with these two nondescripts standing in a row watching him, and I was greatly touched by observing that the boot he was actually engaged upon at the moment of our approach was one of Edelgard’s.

This was magnanimity. More than ever was I sorry about the porridge. I hastily put down the stew-pot and the basket and hurried across to him.

“Pray allow me,” I said, snatching up another boot that stood on the table at his side and plunging a spare brush into the blacking.

“That one’s done,” said he, pipe in mouth.

“Ah, yes--I beg your pardon. Are these----?”

I took up another pair, with some diffidence, for the done ones and the undone ones had a singular resemblance to each other.

“No. But you’d better take off your coat, Baron--it’s hot work.”

So I did. And much relieved to hear by his tone that he bore me no ill will I joined him on the edge of the table; and if any one had told me a week before that a day was at hand when I should clean boots I would, without hesitation,

have challenged him to fight, the extremity of the statement’s incredibleness leaving me no choice but to believe it a deliberate insult.

Thus, as it were with blacking, did I cement my friendship with Lord Sigismund. I think he thought me a thoroughly good fellow who was only, like so many people, a little stiff at breakfast, as I sat there helping him, my hat pushed back off my forehead, one leg swinging, and while I brushed and blackened chatting cheerfully about the inferior position the clergy occupy to the German eye. I am sure he was interested, for he paused several times in his work and looked at me over his spectacles with much attention. As for the two nondescripts, they never took their exceedingly round and unblinking eyes off me for an instant.