I have decided not to show Edelgard my manuscript again, and my reason
is that I may have a freer hand. For the same reason I will not, as we
at first proposed, send it round by itself among our relations, but will
either accompany it in person or invite our relations to a cozy
beer-evening, with a simple little cold something to follow, and read
aloud such portions of it as I think fit, omitting of course much that I
say about Edelgard and probably also a good deal that I say about
everybody else. A reasonable man is not a woman, and does not willingly
pander to a love of gossip. Besides, as I have already hinted, the
Edelgard who came back from England is by no means the Edelgard who went
there. It will wear off, I am confident, in time, and we will return to
the _status quo ante_--(how naturally that came out: it gratifies me to
see I still remember)--a _status quo_ full of trust and obedience on the
one side and of kind and wise guidance on the other. Surely I have a
right to refuse to be driven, except by a silken thread? When I,
noticing a tendency on Edelgard’s part to attempt to substitute, if I
may so express it, leather, asked her the above question, will it be
believed that what she answered was Bosh?
It gave me a great shock to hear her talk like that. Bosh is not a
German expression at all. It is purest English. And it amazes me with
what rapidity she picked it and similar portions of the language up,
adding them in quantities to the knowledge she already possessed of the
tongue, a fairly complete knowledge (she having been well educated), but
altogether excluding words of that sort. Of course I am aware it was all
Jellaby’s fault--but more of him in his proper place; I will not now
dwell on later incidents while my narrative is still only at the point
where everything was eager anticipation and preparation.
Our caravan had been hired; I had sent, at Frau von Eckthum’s direction,
the money to the owner, the price (unfortunately) having to be paid
beforehand; and August the first, the very day of my wedding with poor
Marie-Luise, was to see us start. Naturally there was much to do and
arrange, but it was pleasurable work such as getting a suit of civilian
clothes adapted to the uses it would be put to, searching for stockings
to match the knickerbockers, and for a hat that would be useful in both
wet weather and sunshine.
“It will be all sunshine,” said Frau von Eckthum with her really
unusually pretty smile (it includes the sudden appearance of two
dimples) when I expressed fears as to the effect of rain on the Panama
that I finally bought and which, not being a real one, made me anxious.
We saw her several times because of our need for hints as to luggage,
meeting place, etc., and I found her each time more charming. When she
was on her feet, too, her dress hid the shoes; and she was really
helpful, and was apparently looking forward greatly to showing us the
beauties of her sister’s more or less native land.
As soon as my costume was ready I put it on and drove out to see her.
The stockings had been a difficulty because I could not bear, accustomed
as I am to cotton socks, their woollen feet. This was at last surmounted
by cutting off their feet and sewing my ordinary sock feet on to the
woollen legs. It answered splendidly, and Edelgard assured me that with
care no portion of the sock (which was not of the same colour) would
protrude. She herself had sent to Berlin to Wertheim for one of the
tailor-made dresses in his catalogue, which turned out to be of really
astonishing value for the money, and in which she looked very nice. With
a tartan silk blouse and a little Tyrolese hat and a pheasant’s feather
stuck in it she was so much transformed that I declared I could not
believe it was our silver wedding journey, and I felt exactly as I did
twenty-five years before.
“But it is not our silver wedding journey,” she said with some
sharpness.
“Dear wife,” I retorted surprised, “you know very well that it is mine,
and what is mine is also by law yours, and that therefore without the
least admissible logical doubt it _is_ yours.”
She made a sudden gesture with her shoulders that was almost like
impatience; but I, knowing what victims the best of women are to
incomprehensible moods, went out and bought her a pretty little bag with
a leather strap to wear over one shoulder and complete her attire, thus
proving to her that a reasonable man is not a child and knows when and
how to be indulgent.
Frau von Eckthum, who was going to stay with her sister for a fortnight
before they both joined us (the sister, I regretted to hear, was coming
too), left in the middle of July. Flitz, at that time incomprehensibly
to me, made excuses for not taking part in the caravan tour, but since
then light has been thrown on his behaviour: he said, I remember, that
he could not leave his pigs.
“Much better not leave his sister,” said Edelgard who, I fancy, was just
then a little envious of Frau von Eckthum.
“Dear wife,” I said gently, “_we_ shall be there to take care of her
and he knows she is safe in our hands. Besides, we do not want Flitz. He
is the last man I can imagine myself ever wanting.”
It was perfectly natural that Edelgard should be a little envious, and I
felt it was and did not therefore in any way check her. I need not
remind those relatives who will next winter listen to this that the
Flitzes of Flitzburg, of whom Frau von Eckthum was one, are a most
ancient and still more penniless family. Frau von Eckthum and her gaunt
sister (last time she was staying in Prussia both Edelgard and I were
struck with her extreme gauntness) each married a wealthy man by two
most extraordinary strokes of luck; for what man nowadays will marry a
girl who cannot take, if not the lion’s share, at least a very
substantial one of the household expenses upon herself? What is the use
of a father if he cannot provide his daughter with the money required
suitably to support her husband and his children? I myself have never
been a father, so that I am qualified to speak with perfect
impartiality; that is, strictly, I was one twice, but only for so few
minutes each time that they can hardly be said to count. The two von
Flitz girls married so young and so well, and have been, without in any
way really deserving it, so snugly wrapped in comfort ever since (Frau
von Eckthum actually losing her husband two years after marriage and
coming into everything) that naturally Edelgard cannot be expected to
like it. Edelgard had a portion herself of six thousand marks a year
besides an unusual quantity of house linen, which enabled her at
last--she was twenty-four when I married her--to find a good husband;
and she cannot understand by what wiles the two sisters, without a penny
or a table cloth, secured theirs at eighteen. She does not see that they
are--“were” is the better word in the case of the gaunt
sister--attractive; but then the type is so completely opposed to her
own that she would not be likely to. Certainly I agree that a married
woman verging, as the sister must be, on thirty should settle down to a
smooth head and at least the beginnings of a suitable embonpoint. We do
not want wives like lieutenants in a cavalry regiment; and Edelgard is
not altogether wrong when she says that both Frau von Eckthum and her
sister make her think of those lean and elegant young men. Your lean
woman with her restlessness of limb and brain is far indeed removed from
the soft amplitudes and slow movements of her who is the ideal wife of
every German better-class bosom. Privately, however, I feel I can at
least understand that there may have been something to be said at the
time for the Englishman’s conduct, and I more than understand that of
the deceased Eckthum. No one can deny that his widow is
undoubtedly--well, well; let me return to the narrative.
We had naturally told everybody we met what we were going to do, and it
was intensely amusing to see the astonishment created. Bad health for
the rest of our days was the smallest of the evils predicted. Also our
digestions were much commiserated. “Oh,” said I with jaunty recklessness
at that, “we shall live on boiled hedgehogs, preceded by mice
soup,”--for I had studied the article _Gipsies_ in our Encyclopædia, and
discovered that they often eat the above fare.
The faces of our friends when I happened to be in this jocose vein were
a study. “God in heaven,” they cried, “what will become of your poor
wife?”
But a sense of humour carries a man through anything, and I did not
allow myself to be daunted. Indeed it was not likely, I reminded myself
sometimes when inclined to be thoughtful at night, that Frau von
Eckthum, who so obviously was delicately nurtured, would consent to eat
hedgehogs or risk years in which all her attractiveness would evaporate
on a sofa of sickness.
“Oh, but Frau von Eckthum----!” was the invariable reply, accompanied by
a shrug when I reassured the ladies of our circle by pointing this out.
I am aware Frau von Eckthum is unpopular in Storchwerder. Perhaps it is
because the art of conversation is considerably developed there, and she
will not talk. I know she will not go to its balls, refuses its dinners,
and turns her back on its coffees. I know she is with difficulty induced
to sit on its philanthropic boards, and when she finally has been
induced to sit on them does not do so after all but stays at home. I
know she is different from the type of woman prevailing in our town, the
plain, flat-haired, tightly buttoned up, God-fearing wife and mother,
who looks up to her husband and after her children, and is extremely
intelligent in the kitchen and not at all intelligent out of it. I know
that this is the type that has made our great nation what it is,
hoisting it up on ample shoulders to the first place in the world, and I
know that we would have to request heaven to help us if we ever changed
it. But--she is an attractive lady.
Truly it is an excellent thing to be able to put down one’s opinions on
paper as they occur to one without risk of irritating interruption--I
hope my hearers will not interrupt at the reading aloud--and now that I
have at last begun to write a book--for years I have intended doing
so--I see clearly the superiority of writing over speaking. It is the
same kind of superiority that the pulpit enjoys over the (very properly)
muzzled pews. When, during my stay on British soil, I said anything,
however short, of the nature of the above remarks about our German wives
and mothers, it was most annoying the way I was interrupted and the sort
of questions that were instantly put me by, chiefly, the gaunt sister.
But of that more in its place. I am still at the point where she had not
yet loomed on my horizon, and all was pleasurable anticipation.
We left our home on August 1st, punctually as we had arranged, after
some very hard-worked days at the end during which the furniture was
beaten and strewn with napthalin (against moths), curtains, etc., taken
down and piled neatly in heaps, pictures covered up in newspapers, and
groceries carefully weighed and locked up. I spent these days at the
Club, for my leave had begun on the 25th of July and there was nothing
for me to do. And I must say, though the discomfort in our flat was
intense, when I returned to it in the evening in order to go to bed I
was never anything but patient with the unappetisingly heated and
disheveled Edelgard. And she noticed it and was grateful. It would be
hard to say what would make her grateful now. These last bad days,
however, came to their natural end, and the morning of the first arrived
and by ten we had taken leave, with many last injunctions, of Clothilde
who showed an amount of concern at our departure that gratified us, and
were on the station platform with Hermann standing respectfully behind
us carrying our hand luggage in both his gloved hands, and with what he
could not carry piled about his feet, while I could see by the
expression on their faces that the few strangers present recognized we
were people of good family or, as England would say, of the Upper Ten.
We had no luggage for registration because of the new law by which every
_kilo_ has to be paid for, but we each had a well-filled, substantial
hold-all and a leather portmanteau, and into these we had succeeded in
packing most of the things Frau von Eckthum had from time to time
suggested we might want. Edelgard is a good packer, and got far more in
than I should have thought possible, and what was left over was stowed
away in different bags and baskets. Also we took a plentiful supply of
vaseline and bandages. “For,” as I remarked to Edelgard when she giddily
did not want to, quoting the most modern (though rightly disapproved of
in Storchwerder) of English writers, “you never can possibly
tell,”--besides a good sized ox-tongue, smoked specially for us by our
Storchwerder butcher and which was later on to be concealed in our
caravan for private use in case of need at night.
The train did not start till 10:45, but we wanted to be early in order
to see who would come to see us off; and it was a very good thing we
were in such good time, for hardly a quarter of an hour had elapsed
before, to my dismay, I recollected that I had left my Panama at home.
It was Edelgard’s fault, who had persuaded me to wear a cap for the
journey and carry my Panama in my hand, and I had put it down on some
table and in the heat of departure forgotten it. I was deeply annoyed,
for the whole point of the type of costume I had chosen would be missed
without just that kind of hat, and, at my sudden exclamation and
subsequent explanation of my exclamation, Edelgard showed that she felt
her position by becoming exceedingly red.
There was nothing for it but to leave her there and rush off in a
_droschke_ to our deserted flat. Hurrying up the stairs two steps at a
time and letting myself in with my latch-key I immediately found the
Panama on the head of one of the privates in my own battalion, who was
lolling in my chair at the breakfast-table I had so lately left being
plied with our food by the miserable Clothilde, she sitting on
Edelgard’s chair and most shamelessly imitating her mistress’s manner
when she is affectionately persuading me to eat a little bit more.
The wretched soldier, I presume, was endeavouring to imitate me, for he
called her a dear little hare, an endearment I sometimes apply to my
wife, on Clothilde’s addressing him as Edelgard sometimes does (or
rather did) me in her softer moments as sweet snail. The man’s imitation
of me was a very poor affair, but Clothilde hit my wife off astoundingly
well, and both creatures were so riotously mirthful that they neither
heard nor saw me as I stood struck dumb in the door. The clock on the
wall, however, chiming the half-hour recalled me to the necessity for
instant action, and rushing forward I snatched the Panama off the amazed
man’s head, hurled a furious dismissal at Clothilde, and was out of the
house and in the _droschke_ before they could so much as pray for mercy.
Immediately on arriving at the station I took Hermann aside and gave him
instructions about the removal within an hour of Clothilde, and then,
swallowing my agitation with a gulp of the man of the world, I was able
to chat courteously and amiably with friends who had collected to see us
off, and even to make little jokes as though nothing whatever had
happened. Of course directly the last smile had died away at the
carriage window and the last handkerchief had been fluttered and the
last promise to send many picture postcards had been made, and our
friends had become mere black and shapeless masses without bodies, parts
or passions on the grey of the receding platform, I recounted the affair
to Edelgard, and she was so much upset that she actually wanted to get
out at the next station and give up our holiday and go back and look
after her house.
Strangely enough, what upset her more than the soldier’s being feasted
at our expense and more than his wearing my new hat while he feasted,
was the fact that I had dismissed Clothilde.
“Where and when am I to get another?” was her question, repeated with a
plaintiveness that was at length wearisome. “And what will become of all
our things now during our absence?”
“Would you have had me not dismiss her instantly, then?” I cried at
last, goaded by this persistence. “Is every shamelessness to be endured?
Why, if the woman were a man and of my own station, honour would demand
that I should fight a duel with her.”
“But you cannot fight a duel with a cook,” said Edelgard stupidly.
“Did I not expressly say that I could not?” I retorted; and having with
this reached the point where patience becomes a weakness I was obliged
to put it aside and explain to her with vigour that I am not only not a
fool but decline to be talked to as if I were. And when I had done, she
having given no further rise to discussion, we were both silent for the
rest of the way to Berlin.
This was not a bright beginning to my holiday, and I thought with some
gloom of the difference between it and the start twenty-five years
before with my poor Marie-Luise. There was no Clothilde then, and no
Panama hat (for they were not yet the fashion), and all was peace.
Unwilling, however, to send Edelgard, as the English say, any longer to
Coventry--we are both good English scholars as my hearers know--when we
got into the _droschke_ in Berlin that was to take us across to the
Potsdamer Bahnhof (from which station we departed for London _via_
Flushing) I took her hand, and turning (not without effort) an unclouded
face to her, said some little things which enabled her to become aware
that I was willing once again to overlook and forgive.
Now I do not propose to describe the journey to London. So many of our
friends know people who have done it that it is not necessary for me to
dwell upon it further than to say that, being all new to us, it was not
without its charm--at least, up to the moment when it became so late
that there were no more meals taking place in the restaurant-car and no
more attractive trays being held up to our windows at the stations on
the way. About what happened later in the night I would not willingly
speak: suffice it to say that I had not before realized the immense and
apparently endless distance of England from the good dry land of the
Continent. Edelgard, indeed, behaved the whole way up to London as if
she had not yet got to England at all; and I was forced at last to
comment very seriously on her conduct, for it looked as much like
wilfulness as any conduct I can remember to have witnessed.
We reached London at the uncomfortable hour of 8 A.M., or thereabouts,
chilled, unwell, and disordered. Although it was only the second of
August a damp autumn draught pervaded the station. Shivering, we went
into the sort of sheep-pen in which our luggage was searched for
dutiable articles, Edelgard most inconsiderately leaving me to bear the
entire burden of opening and shutting our things, while she huddled into
a corner and assumed (very conveniently) the air of a sufferer. I had to
speak to her quite sharply once when I could not fit the key of her
portmanteau into its lock and remind her that I am not a lady’s maid,
but even this did not rouse her, and she continued to huddle
apathetically. It is absurd for a wife to collapse at the very moment
when she ought to be most helpful; the whole theory of the helpmeet is
shattered by such behaviour. And what can I possibly know about Customs?
She looked on quite unmoved while I struggled to replace the disturbed
contents of our bags, and my glances, in turn appealing and indignant,
did not make her even raise her head. There were too many strangers
between us for me to be able to do more than glance, so
[Illustration: _Edelgard most inconsiderately leaving me to bear the
entire burden of opening and shutting our things_]
reserving what I had to say for a more private moment I got the bags
shut as well as I could, directed the most stupid porter (who was also
apparently deaf, for each time I said anything to him he answered
perfectly irrelevantly with the first letter of the alphabet) I have
ever met to conduct me and the luggage to the refreshment room, and far
too greatly displeased with Edelgard to take any further notice of her,
walked on after the man leaving her to follow or not as she chose.
I think people must have detected as I strode along that I was a
Prussian officer, for so many looked at me with interest. I wished I had
had my uniform and spurs on, so that for once the non-martial island
could have seen what the real thing is like. It was strange to me to be
in a crowd of nothing but civilians. In spite of the early hour every
arriving train disgorged myriads of them of both sexes. Not the flash of
a button was to be seen; not the clink of a sabre to be heard; but, will
it be believed? at least every third person arriving carried a bunch of
flowers, often wrapped in tissue paper and always as carefully as though
it had been a specially good _belegtes Brödchen_. That seemed to me very
characteristic of the effeminate and non-military nation. In Prussia
useless persons like old women sometimes transport bunches of flowers
from one point to another--but that a man should be seen doing so, a man
going evidently to his office, with his bag of business papers and his
grave face, is a sight I never expected to see. The softness of this
conduct greatly struck me. I could understand a packet of some good
thing to eat between meals being brought, some tit-bit from the home
kitchen--but a bunch of flowers! Well, well; let them go on in their
effeminacy. It is what has always preceded a fall, and the fat little
land will be a luscious morsel some day for muscular continental (and
almost certainly German) jaws.
We had arranged to go straight that very day to the place in Kent where
the caravans and Frau von Eckthum and her sister were waiting for us,
leaving the sights of London for the end of our holiday, by which time
our already extremely good though slow and slightly literary English (by
which I mean that we talked more as the language is written than other
people do, and that we were singularly pure in the matter of slang)
would have developed into an up-to-date agility; and there being about
an hour and a half’s time before the train for Wrotham started--which it
conveniently did from the same station we arrived at--our idea was to
have breakfast first and then, perhaps, to wash. This we accordingly did
in the station restaurant, and made the astonishing acquaintance of
British coffee and butter. Why, such stuff would not be tolerated for a
moment in the poorest wayside inn in Germany, and I told the waiter so
very plainly; but he only stared with an extremely stupid face, and when
I had done speaking said “Eh?”
It was what the porter had said each time I addressed him, and I had
already, therefore, not then knowing what it was or how it was spelt,
had about as much of it as I could stand.
“Sir,” said I, endeavoring to annihilate the man with that most powerful
engine of destruction, a witticism, “what has the first letter of the
alphabet to do with everything I say?”
“Eh?” said he.
“Suppose, sir,” said I, “I were to confine my remarks to you to a
strictly logical sequence, and when you say A merely reply B--do you
imagine we should ever come to a satisfactory understanding?”
“Eh?” said he.
“Yet, sir,” I continued, becoming angry, for this was deliberate
impertinence, “it is certain that one letter of the alphabet is every
bit as good as another for conversational purposes.”
“Eh?” said he; and began to cast glances about him for help.
“This,” said I to Edelgard, “is typical. It is what you must expect in
England.”
The head waiter here caught one of the man’s glances and hurried up.
“This gentleman,” said I, addressing the head waiter and pointing to his
colleague, “is both impertinent and a fool.”
“Yes, sir. German, sir,” said the head waiter, flicking away a crumb.
Well, I gave neither of them a tip. The German was not given one for not
at once explaining his inability to get away from alphabetical repartee
and so shamefully hiding the nationality he ought to have openly
rejoiced in, and the head waiter because of the following conversation:
“Can’t get ’em to talk their own tongue, sir,” said he, when I
indignantly inquired why he had not. “None of ’em will, sir. Hear ’em
putting German gentry who don’t know English to the greatest
inconvenience. ‘Eh?’ this one’ll say--it’s what he picks up his first
week, sir. ‘A thousand damns,’ say the German gentry, or something to
that effect. ‘All right,’ says the waiter--that’s what he picks up his
second week--and makes it worse. Then the German gentry gets really put
out, and I see ’em almost foamin’ at the mouth. Impatient set of people,
sir----”
“I conclude,” said I, interrupting him with a frown, “that the object of
these poor exiled fellows is to learn the language as rapidly as
possible and get back to their own country.”
“Or else they’re ashamed of theirs, sir,” said he, scribbling down the
bill. “Rolls, sir? Eight, sir? Thank you, sir----”
“Ashamed?”
“Quite right, sir. Nasty cursin’ language. Not fit for a young man to
get into the habit of. Most of the words got a swear about ’em
somewhere, sir.”
“Perhaps you are not aware,” said I icily, “that at this very moment you
are speaking to a German gentleman.”
“Sorry, sir. Didn’t notice it. No offence meant. Two coffees, four
boiled eggs, eight--you did say eight rolls, sir? Compliment really, you
know, sir.”
“Compliment!” I exclaimed, as he whisked away with the money to the
paying desk; and when he came back I pocketed, with elaborate
deliberation, every particle of change.
“That is how,” said I to Edelgard while he watched me, “one should treat
these fellows.”
To which she, restored by the hot coffee to speaking point, replied
(rather stupidly I thought),
“Is it?”