THE CARAVANERS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_Elizabeth and Her German Garden_
_Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen_
_Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther_
_Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight_
_The Solitary Summer_
[Illustration: _The fitful flicker of the lanterns played over rapidly
cooling eggs and grave faces_]
THE CARAVANERS
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN”
[Illustration: colophon]
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR LITLE
NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1910
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ILLUSTRATIONS
The fitful flicker of the lanterns played over rapidly
cooling eggs and grave faces _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
I never saw such little shoes 14
Edelgard most inconsiderately leaving me to bear
the entire burden of opening and shutting our
things 38
The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted
this last obstacle 50
It was an unnerving spectacle 80
“Dear Baron,” said she, “do you think it is wrong
to carry stew-pots?” 100
Thus, as it were, with blacking, did I cement my
friendship with Lord Sigismund 102
Edelgard posing--and what a pose; good heavens,
what a pose! 114
“But surely not here,” murmured Frau von Eckthum 124
The two nondescripts, who were passing, lingered
to look 134
“But, lieber Otto, is it then my fault that you
have forgotten the paper?” 142
“Do you, Jellaby,” I then inquired, “really understand
how best to treat a sausage?” 182
“’Ere ’e is” 200
An imposing lady in the pew in front of us sat sideways
in her corner and examined us with calm
attention 230
The old gentleman was in the act of addressing
me in his turn 268
Gentle as my voice was, it yet made her start 294
THE CARAVANERS
CHAPTER I
In June this year there were a few fine days, and we supposed the summer
had really come at last. The effect was to make us feel our flat (which
is really a very nice, well-planned one on the second floor at the
corner overlooking the cemetery, and not at all stuffy) but a dull place
after all, and think with something like longing of the country. It was
the year of the fifth anniversary of our wedding, and having decided to
mark the occasion by a trip abroad in the proper holiday season of
August we could not afford, neither did we desire, to spend money on
trips into the country in June. My wife, therefore, suggested that we
should devote a few afternoons to a series of short excursions within a
radius of, say, from five to ten miles round our town, and visit one
after the other those of our acquaintances who live near enough to
Storchwerder and farm their own estates. “In this way,” said she, “we
shall get much fresh air at little cost.”
After a time I agreed. Not immediately, of course, for a reasonable man
will take care to consider the suggestions made by his wife from every
point of view before consenting to follow them or allowing her to follow
them. Women do not reason: they have instincts; and instincts would land
them in strange places sometimes if it were not that their husbands are
there to illuminate the path for them and behave, if one may so express
it, as a kind of guiding and very clever glow-worm. As for those who
have not succeeded in getting husbands, the flotsam and jetsam, so to
speak, of their sex, all I can say is, God help them.
There was nothing, however, to be advanced against Edelgard’s idea in
this case; on the contrary, there was much to commend it. We should get
fresh air; we should be fed (well fed, and, if we chose, to excess, but
of course we know how to be reasonable); and we should pay nothing. As
Major of the artillery regiment stationed at Storchwerder I am obliged
anyhow to keep a couple of horses (they are fed at the cost of the
regiment), and I also in the natural order of things have one of the men
of my battalion in my flat as servant and coachman, who costs me little
more than his keep and may not give me notice. All, then, that was
wanting was a vehicle, and we could, as Edelgard pointed out, easily
borrow our Colonel’s wagonette for a few afternoons, so there was our
equipage complete, and without spending a penny.
* * * * *
The estates round Storchwerder are big and we found on counting up that
five calls would cover the entire circle of our country acquaintance.
There might have been a sixth, but for reasons with which I entirely
concurred my dear wife did not choose to include it. Lines have to be
drawn, and I do not think an altogether bad definition of a gentleman or
a lady would be one who draws them. Indeed, Edelgard was in some doubt
as to whether there should be even five, a member of the five (not in
this case actually the land-owner but the brother of the widowed lady
owning it, who lives with her and looks after her interests) being a
person we neither of us can care much about, because he is not only
unsound politically, with a decided leaning disgraceful in a man of his
birth and which he hardly takes any trouble to hide toward those views
the middle classes and Socialist sort of people call (God save the
mark!) enlightened, but he is also either unable or unwilling--Edelgard
and I could never make up our minds which--to keep his sister in order.
Yet to keep the woman one is responsible for in order whether she be
sister, or wife, or mother, or daughter, or even under certain
favourable conditions aunt (a difficult race sometimes, as may be seen
by the case of Edelgard’s Aunt Bockhügel, of whom perhaps more later) is
really quite easy. It is only a question of beginning in time, as you
mean to go on in fact, and of being especially firm whenever you feel
internally least so. It is so easy that I never could understand the
difficulty. It is so easy that when my wife at this point brought me my
eleven o’clock bread and ham and butter and interrupted me by looking
over my shoulder, I smiled up at her, my thoughts still running on this
theme, and taking the hand that put down the plate said, “Is it not,
dear wife?”
“Is what not?” she asked--rather stupidly I thought, for she had read
what I had written to the end; then without giving me time to reply she
said, “Are you not going to write the story of our experiences in
England after all, Otto?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“To lend round among our relations next winter?”
“Certainly,” said I.
“Then had you not better begin?”
“Dear wife,” said I, “it is what I am doing.”
“Then,” said she, “do not waste time going off the rails.”
And sitting down in the window she resumed her work of enlarging the
armholes of my shirts.
This, I may remark, was tartness. Before she went to England she was
never tart. However, let me continue.
I wonder what she means by rails. (I shall revise all this, of course,
and no doubt will strike out portions) I wonder if she means I ought to
begin with my name and address. It seems unnecessary, for I am naturally
as well known to persons in Storchwerder as the postman. On the other
hand this is my first attempt (which explains why I wonder at all what
Edelgard may or may not mean, beginners doing well, I suppose, to be
humble) at what poetic and literary and other persons of bad form call,
I believe, wooing the Muse. What an expression! And I wonder what Muse.
I would like to ask Edelgard whether she--but no, it would almost seem
as if I were seeking her advice, which is a reversing of the proper
relative positions of husband and wife. So at this point, instead of
adopting a course so easily disastrous, I turned my head and said
quietly:
“Dear wife, our English experiences _did_ begin with our visits to the
neighbours. If it had not been for those visits we would probably not
last summer have seen Frau von Eckthum at all, and if we had not come
within reach of her persuasive tongue we would have gone on our silver
wedding journey to Italy or Switzerland, as we had so often planned,
and left that accursed island across the Channel alone.”
I paused; and as Edelgard said nothing, which is what she says when she
is unconvinced, I continued with the patience I always show her up to
the point at which it would become weakness, to explain the difference
between the exact and thorough methods of men, their liking for going to
the root of a matter and beginning at the real beginning, and the
jumping tendencies of women, who jump to things such as conclusions
without paying the least heed to all the important places they have
passed over while they were, so to speak, in the air.
“But we get there first,” said Edelgard.
I frowned a little. A few months ago--before, that is, our time on
British soil--she would not have made such a retort. She used never to
retort, and the harmony of our wedded life was consequently unclouded. I
think she saw me frown but she took no notice--another novelty in her
behaviour; so, after waiting a moment, I determined to continue the
narrative.
But before I go straight on with it I should like to explain why we, an
officer and his wife who naturally do not like spending money, should
have contemplated so costly a holiday as a trip abroad. The fact is, for
a long time past we had made up our minds to do so in the fifth year of
our marriage, and for the following reason: Before I married Edelgard I
had been a widower for one year, and before being a widower I was
married for no fewer than nineteen years. This sounds as though I must
be old, but I need not tell my readers who see me constantly that I am
not. The best of all witnesses are the eyes; also, I began my marrying
unusually young. My first wife was one of the Mecklenburg Lunewitzes,
the elder (and infinitely superior) branch. If she had lived, I would
last year have been celebrating our silver wedding on August 1st, and
there would have been much feasting and merry-making arranged for us,
and many acceptable gifts in silver from our relations, friends, and
acquaintances. The regiment would have been obliged to recognize it, and
perhaps our two servants would have clubbed together and expressed their
devotion in a metal form. All this I feel I have missed, and through no
fault of my own. I fail to see why I should be deprived of every benefit
of such a celebration, for have I not, with an interruption of twelve
months forced upon me, been actually married twenty-five years? And why,
because my poor Marie-Luise was unable to go on living, should I have to
attain to the very high number of (practically) five and twenty years’
matrimony without the least notice being taken of it? I had been
explaining this to Edelgard for a long time, and the nearer the date
drew on which in the natural order of things I would have been reaping a
silver harvest and have been put in a position to gauge the esteem in
which I was held, the more emphatic did I become. Edelgard seemed at
first unable to understand, but she was very teachable, and gradually
found my logic irresistible. Indeed, once she grasped the point she was
even more strongly of opinion than I was that something ought to be done
to mark the occasion, and quite saw that if Marie-Luise failed me it was
not my fault, and that I at least had done my part and gone on steadily
being married ever since. From recognizing this to being indignant that
our friends would probably take no notice of the anniversary was but,
for her, a step; and many were the talks we had together on the subject,
and many the suggestions we both of us made for bringing our friends
round to our point of view. We finally decided that, however much they
might ignore it, we ourselves would do what was right, and accordingly
we planned a silver-honeymoon trip to the land proper to romance, Italy,
beginning it on the first of August, which was the date of my marriage
twenty-five years before with Marie-Luise.
I have gone into this matter at some length because I wished to explain
clearly to those of our relations who will have this lent to them why
we undertook a journey so, in the ordinary course of things,
extravagant; and having, I hope, done this satisfactorily, will now
proceed with the narrative.
We borrowed the Colonel’s wagonette; I wrote five letters announcing our
visit and asking (a mere formality, of course) if it would be agreeable;
the answers arrived assuring us in every tone of well-bred enthusiasm
that it would; I donned my parade uniform; Edelgard put on her new
summer finery; we gave careful instructions to Clothilde, our cook,
helping her to carry them out by locking everything up; and off we
started in holiday spirits, driven by my orderly, Hermann, and watched
by the whole street.
At each house we were received with becoming hospitality. They were all
families of our own standing, members of that chivalrous, God-fearing
and well-born band that upholds the best traditions of the Fatherland
and gathers in spirit if not (owing to circumstances) in body, like a
protecting phalanx around our Emperor’s throne. First we had coffee and
cakes and a variety of sandwiches (at one of the houses there were no
sandwiches, only cakes, and we both discussed this unaccountable
omission during the drive home); then I was taken to view the pigs by
our host, or the cows, or whatever happened to be his special pride,
but in four cases out of the five it was pigs, and while I was away
Edelgard sat on the lawn or the terrace or wherever the family usually
sat (only one had a terrace) and conversed on subjects interesting to
women-folk, such as Clothilde and Hermann and I know not what; then,
after having thoroughly exhausted the pigs and been in my turn
thoroughly exhausted by them, for naturally a Prussian officer on active
service cannot be expected to take the same interest in these creatures
so long as they are raw as a man does who devotes his life to them, we
rejoined the ladies and strolled in the lighter talk suited to our
listeners about the grounds, endeavouring with our handkerchiefs to
drive away the mosquitoes, till summoned to supper; and after supper,
which usually consisted of one excellent hot dish and a variety of cold
ones, preceded by _bouillon_ in cups and followed by some elegant sweet
and beautiful fruit (except at Frau von Eckthum’s, our local young
widow’s, where it was a regular dinner of six or seven courses, she
being what is known as ultra-modern, her sister having married an
Englishman), after supper, I repeat, having sat a while smoking on the
lawn or terrace drinking coffee and liqueurs and secretly congratulating
ourselves on not having in our town to live with so many and such hungry
mosquitoes, we took our leave and drove back to Storchwerder, refreshed
always and sometimes pleased as well.
The last of these visits was to Frau von Eckthum and her brother Graf
Flitz von Flitzburg, who, as is well known, being himself unmarried,
lives with her and looks after the estate left by the deceased Eckthum,
thereby stepping into shoes so comfortable that they may more properly
be spoken of as slippers. All had gone well up to that, nor was I
conscious till much later that that had not gone well too; for only on
looking back do we see the distance we have come and the way in which
the road, at first so promising, led us before we knew where we were
into a wilderness plentiful in stones. During our first four visits we
had naturally talked about our plan to take a trip in August in Italy.
Our friends, obviously surprised, and with the expression on their faces
that has its source in thoughts of legacies, first enthusiastically
applauded and then pointed out that it would be hot. August, they said,
would be an impossible month in Italy: go where we would we should not
meet a single German. This had not struck us before, and after our first
disappointment we willingly listened to their advice rather to choose
Switzerland, with its excellent hotels and crowds of our countrymen.
Several times in the course of these conversations did we try to explain
the honeymoon nature of the journey, but were met with so much of what
I strongly suspect to have been wilful obtuseness that to our chagrin we
began to see there was probably nothing to be done. Edelgard said she
wished it would occur to them if, owing to the unusual circumstances,
they did not intend to give us actual ash-trays and match-boxes, to join
together in defraying the cost of the wedding journey of such
respectable silver-honeymooners; but I do not think that at any time
they had the least intention of doing anything at all for us--on the
contrary, they made us quite uneasy by the sums they declared we would
have to disburse; and on our last visit (to Frau von Eckthum) happening
to bewail the amount of good German money that was going to be dragged
out of us by the rascally Swiss, she (Frau von Eckthum) said, “Why not
come to England?”
At the moment I was so much engaged mentally reprobating the way in
which she was lying back in a low garden chair with one foot crossed
over the other and both feet encased in such thin stockings that they
might just as well not have been stockings at all, that I did not
immediately notice the otherwise striking expression, “Come.” “Go” would
of course have been the usual and expected form; but the substitution, I
repeat, escaped me at the moment because of my attention being otherwise
engaged. I never
[Illustration: _I never saw such little shoes_]
saw such little shoes. Has a woman a right to be conspicuous at the
extremities? So conspicuous--Frau von Eckthum’s hands also easily become
absorbing--that one is unable connectedly to follow the conversation? I
doubt it: but she is an attractive lady. There sat Edelgard, straight
and seemly, the perfect flower of a stricter type of virtuous German
womanhood, her feet properly placed side by side on the grass and
clothed, as I knew, in decent wool with the flat-heeled boots of the
Christian gentlewoman, and I must say the type--in one’s wife, that
is--is preferable. I rather wondered whether Flitz noticed the contrast
between the two ladies. I glanced at him, but his face was as usual a
complete blank. I wondered whether he could or could not make his sister
sit up if he had wished to; and for the hundredth time I felt I never
could really like the man, for from the point of view of a brother one’s
sister should certainly sit up. She is, however, an attractive lady:
alas that her stockings should be so persistently thin.
“England,” I heard Edelgard saying, “is not, I think, a suitable place.”
It was then that I consciously noticed that Frau von Eckthum had said
“Come.”
“Why not?” she asked; and her simple way of asking questions, or
answering them with others of her own without waiting to adorn them or
round them off with the title of the person addressed, has helped, I
know, to make her unpopular in Storchwerder society.
“I have heard,” said Edelgard cautiously, no doubt bearing in mind that
to hosts whose sister had married an Englishman and was still living
with him one would not say all one would like to about it, “I have heard
that it is not a place to go to if the object is scenery.”
“Oh?” said Frau von Eckthum. Then she added--intelligently, I
thought--“But there always is scenery.”
“Edelgard means lofty scenery,” said I gently, for we were both holding
cups of the Eckthum tea (this was the only house in which we were made
to drink tea instead of our aromatic and far more filling national
beverage) in our hands, and I have always held one ought to humour the
persons whose hospitality one happens to be enjoying--“Or enduring,”
said Edelgard cleverly when, on our way home, I mentioned this to her.
“Or enduring,” I agreed after a slight pause, forced on reflection to
see that it is not true hospitality to oblige your visitors to go
without their coffee by employing the unworthy and barbarically simple
expedient of not allowing it to appear. But of course that was Flitz. He
behaves, I think, much too much as though the place belonged to him.
Flitz, who knows England well, having spent several years there at our
Embassy, said it was the most delightful country in the world. The
unpatriotic implication contained in this assertion caused Edelgard and
myself to exchange glances, and no doubt she was thinking, as I was,
that it would be a sad and bad day for Prussia if many of its gentleman
had sisters who made misguided marriages with foreigners, the foreign
brother-in-law being so often the thin end of that wedge which at its
thick one is a denial of our right to regard ourselves as specially
raised by Almighty God to occupy the first place among the nations, and
a dislike (I have heard with my own ears a man at a meeting express it)
an actual dislike--I can only call it hideous--of the glorious cement of
blood and iron by means of which we intend to stick there.
“But I was chiefly thinking,” said Frau von Eckthum, her head well back
in the cushions and her eyes fixed pensively on the summer clouds
sailing over our heads, “of what you were saying about expense.”
“Dear lady,” I said, “I have been told by all who have done it that
travelling in England is the most expensive holiday you can take. The
hotels are ruinous as well as bad, the meals are uneatable as well as
dear, the cabs cost you a fortune, and the inhabitants are rude.”
I spoke with heat, because I was roused (justly) by Flitz’s unpatriotic
attitude, but it was a tempered heat owing to the undoubted
(Storchwerder cannot deny it) personal attractiveness of our hostess.
Why are not all women attractive? What habitual lambs our sex would
become if they were.
“Dear Baron,” said she in her pretty, gentle voice, “do come over and
see for yourself. I would like, I think, to convert you. Look at
this”--she picked up some papers lying on the grass by her chair, and
spreading out one showed me a picture--“do you not think it nice? And,
if you want to be economical, it only costs fourteen pounds for a whole
month.”
The picture she held out to me was one bearing a strong resemblance to
the gipsy carts that are continually (and very rightly) being sent
somewhere else by our local police; a little less gaudy perhaps, a
little squarer and more solid, but undoubtedly a near relation.
“It is a caravan,” said Frau von Eckthum, in answer to the question
contained in my eyebrows; and turning the sheet she showed me another
picture representing the same vehicle’s inside.
Edelgard got up and looked over my shoulder.
What we saw was certainly very nice. Edelgard said so at once. There
were flowered curtains, and a shelf with books, and a comfortable chair
with a cushion near a big window, and at the end two pretty beds placed
one above the other as in a ship.
“A thing like this,” said Frau von Eckthum, “does away at once with
hotels, waiters, and expense. It costs fourteen pounds for two persons
for a whole month, and all your days are spent in the sun.”
She then explained her plan, which was to hire one of these vehicles for
the month of August and lead a completely free and bohemian existence
during that time, wandering through the English lanes, which she
described as flowery, and drawing up for the night in a secluded spot
near some little streamlet, to the music of whose gentle rippling, as
Edelgard always easily inclined to sentiment suggested, she would
probably be lulled to sleep.
“Come too,” said she, smiling up at us as we looked over her shoulder.
“Two hundred and eighty marks is fourteen pounds,” said I, making mental
calculations.
“For two people,” said Edelgard, obviously doing the same.
“No hotels,” said our hostess.
“No hotels,” echoed Edelgard.
“Only lovely green fields,” said our hostess.
“And no waiters,” said Edelgard.
“Yes, no horrid waiters,” said our hostess.
“Waiters are so expensive,” said Edelgard.
“You wouldn’t see one,” said our hostess. “Only a nice child in a clean
apron from a farm bringing eggs and cream. And you move about the whole
time, and see the country in a way you never would going from place to
place by train.”
“But,” said I shrewdly, “if we move about something must either pull or
push us, and that something must also be paid for.”
“Oh, yes, there has to be a horse. But think of all the railway tickets
you won’t buy and all the porters you won’t tip,” said Frau von Eckthum.
Edelgard was manifestly impressed. Indeed, we both were. If it were a
question of being in England for little money or being in Switzerland
for much we felt unanimously that it was better to be in England. And
then to travel through it in one of these conveyances was so distinctly
original that we would be objects of the liveliest interest during the
succeeding winter gaieties in Storchwerder. “The von Ottringels are
certainly all that is most modern,” we could already hear our friends
saying to each other, and could already see in our mind’s eye how they
would press round us at _soirées_ and bombard us with questions. We
should be the centre of attraction.
“And think of the nightingales!” cried Edelgard, suddenly recollecting
those poetic birds.
“In August they’re like Germans in Italy,” said Flitz, to whom I had
mentioned our reason for giving up the idea of travelling in that
country.
“How so?” said Edelgard, turning to him with the slight instinctive
stiffening of every really virtuous German lady when speaking to an
unrelated (by blood) man.
“They’re not there,” said Flitz.
Well, of course the moment we were able to look in our Encyclopædia at
home we knew as well as he did that they do not sing in August, but I do
not see how townsfolk are to keep these odds and ends of information
lying loose about in their heads. We do not have the bird in
Storchwerder and are therefore unable to study its habits at first hand
as Flitz can, but I know that all the pieces of poetry I have come
across mention nightingales before they have done, and the consequent
perfectly natural impression left on my mind was that they were always
more or less about. But I do not like Flitz’s tone, and never shall. It
is true I have not actually seen him do it, but one feels instinctively
that he is laughing at one; and there are different ways of laughing,
and not all of them appear on the face. As for politics, if I were not
as an officer debarred from alluding to them and were led to discuss
them with him, I have no doubt that each discussion would end in a duel.
That is, if he would fight. The appalling suspicion has just crossed my
mind that he would not. He is one of those dreadful persons who cloak
their cowardice behind the garb of philosophy. Well, well, I see I am
growing angry with a man ten miles away, whom I have not seen for
months--I, a man of the world sitting in the calm of my own flat,
surrounded by quiet domestic objects such as my wife, my shirt, and my
little meal of bread and ham. Is this reasonable? Certainly not. Let me
change the subject.
The long, then, and the short of our visit to Graf Flitz and his sister
in June last was that we returned home determined to join Frau von
Eckthum’s party, and not a little full of pleasurable anticipations.
When she does talk she has a persuasive tongue. She talked more at this
time than she ever did afterward, but of course there were reasons for
that which I may or may not disclose. Edelgard listened with something
like rapt interest to her really picturesque descriptions, or rather
prophecies, for she had not herself done it before, of the pleasures of
camp life; and I wish it to be clearly understood that Edelgard, who has
since taken the line of telling people it was I, was the one who was
swept off her usually cautious feet and who took it upon herself without
waiting for me to speak to ask Frau von Eckthum to write and hire
another of the carts for us.
Frau von Eckthum laughed, and said she was sure we would like it. Flitz
himself smoked in silence. And Edelgard developed a sudden eloquence in
regard to natural phenomena such as moons and poppies that would have
done credit to a young and sentimental girl. “Think of sitting in the
shade of some mighty beech tree,” she said, for instance (she actually
clasped her hands), “with the beams of the sinking sun slanting through
its branches, and doing one’s needlework.”
And she said other things of the same sort, things that made me, who
knew she was going to be thirty next birthday, gaze upon her with a deep
surprise.