Darkness had, if not actually gathered, certainly approached within
measurable distance, substantially aided by lowering storm-clouds, by
the time we were ready to start. Not that we were, as a fact, ever ready
to start, because the two young girls of the party, with truly British
inconsideration for others, had chosen to do that which Menzies-Legh in
fantastic idiom described as not turning up. I heard him say it several
times before I was able, by carefully comparing it with the context, to
discover his meaning. The moment I discovered it I of course saw its
truth: turned up they certainly had not, and though too well-bred to say
it aloud I privately applauded him every time he remarked, with an
accumulating emphasis, “Bother those girls.”
For the first two hours nobody had time to bother them, and to get some
notion of the busy scene the yard presented my hearers must imagine a
bivouac during our manoeuvres in which the soldiers shall all be
recruits just joined and where there shall be no superior to direct
them. I know to imagine this requires imagination, but only he who does
it will be able to form an approximately correct notion of what the yard
looked like and sounded like while the whole party (except the two girls
who were not there) did their unpacking.
It will be obvious on a moment’s reflection that portmanteaus, etc., had
to be opened on the bare earth in the midst, so to speak, of untamed
nature, with threatening clouds driving over them, and rude winds
seizing what they could of their contents and wantoning with them about
the yard. It will be equally obvious that these contents had to be
handed up one by one by the person below to the person in the caravan
who was putting them away and the person below having less to do would
be quicker in his movements, while the person above having more to do
would be--I suppose naturally but I think with a little self-control it
ought not to be so--quicker in her temper; and so she was, and quite
unjustifiably, because though she might have the double work of sorting
and putting away I, on the other hand, had to stoop so continuously that
I was very shortly in a condition of actual physical distress. The young
men, who might have helped and at first did help Frau von Eckthum
(though I consider they were on more than delicate ground while they did
it) were prevented being of use because one had brought a bull terrier,
a most dangerous looking beast, and the other--probably out of
compliment to us--a white Pomeranian; and the bull terrier, without the
least warning or preliminary growl such as our decent German dogs emit
before proceeding to action, suddenly fixed his teeth into the
Pomeranian and left them there. The howls of the Pomeranian may be
imagined. The bull terrier, on the other hand, said nothing at all. At
once the hubbub in the yard was increased tenfold. No efforts of its
master could make the bull terrier let go. Menzies-Legh called for
pepper, and the women-folk ransacked the larders in the rear of the
vans, but though there were cruets there was no pepper. At length the
little lady of the garden, whose special gift it seemed to appear at the
right moment, judging no doubt that the sounds in the yard could not
altogether be explained by caravaners unpacking, came out with a pot
full, and throwing it into the bull terrier’s face he was obliged to let
go in order to sneeze.
During the rest of the afternoon the young men could help no one because
they were engaged in the care of their dogs, the owner of the Pomeranian
attending to its wounds and the owner of the bull terrier preventing a
repetition of its conduct. And Menzies-Legh came up to me and said in
his singularly trailing melancholy voice, did I not think they were
jolly dogs and going to be a great comfort to us.
“Oh, quite,” said I, unable exactly to understand what he meant.
Still less was I able to understand the attitude of the dogs’ masters
toward each other. Not thus would our fiery German youth have behaved.
Undoubtedly in a similar situation they would have come to blows, or in
any case to the class of words that can only be honourably wiped out in
the blood of a duel. But these lymphatic Englishmen, both of them
straggly, pale persons in clothes so shabby and so much too big that I
was at a loss to conceive how they could appear in them before ladies,
hung on each to his dog in perfect silence, and when it was over and the
aggressor’s owner, said he was sorry, the Pomeranian’s owner, instead of
confronting him with the fury of a man who has been wronged and owes it
to his virility not to endure it, actually tried to pretend that
somehow, by some means, it was all his dog’s fault or his own in
allowing him to be near the other, and therefore it was he who, in their
jargon, was “frightfully sorry.” Such is the softness of this much too
rich and far too comfortable nation. Merely to see it made me blush to
be a man; but I became calm again on recollecting that the variety of
man I happened to be was, under God, a German. And I discovered later
that neither of them ever touch an honest mug of beer, but drink
instead--will it be believed?--water.
Now it must not be supposed that at this point of my holiday I had
already ceased to enjoy it. On the contrary, I was enjoying myself in my
quiet way very much. Not only does the study of character greatly
interest me, but I am blest with a sense of humour united to that
toughness of disposition which stops a man from saying, however much he
may want to, die. Therefore I bore the unpacking and the arranging and
the advice I got from everybody and the questions I was asked by
everybody and the calls here and the calls there and the wind that did
not cease a moment and the rain that pelted down at intervals, without a
murmur. I had paid for my holiday, and I meant to enjoy it. But it did
seem to me a strange way of taking pleasure for wealthy people like the
Menzies-Leghs, who could have gone to the best hotel in the gayest
resort, and who instead were bent into their portmanteaus as double as I
was, doing work that their footmen would have scorned; and when during
an extra sharp squall we had hastily shut our portmanteaus and all
scrambled into our respective--I was going to say kennels, but I will be
just and say caravans, I expressed this surprise to Edelgard, she said
Mrs. Menzies-Legh had told her while I was at luncheon that both she
and her sister desired for a time to remove themselves as far as
possible from what she called the ministrations of menials. They wished,
said Edelgard, quoting Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s words, to endeavour to fulfil
the Scriptures and work with their hands the things which are good; and
Edelgard, who was much amused by the reference to the Scriptures, agreed
with me, who was also greatly diverted, that it is a game, this working
with one’s hands, that only seems desirable to those so much surfeited
with all that is worth having that they cease to be able to distinguish
its value, and that it would be interesting to watch how long the two
pampered ladies enjoyed playing it. Edelgard of course had no fears for
herself, for she is a most admirably trained _hausfrau_, and the keeping
of our tiny wheeled house in order would be easy enough after the
keeping in order of our flat at home and the constant supervision,
amounting on washing days to goading, of Clothilde. But the two sisters
had not had the advantage of a husband who kept them to their work from
the beginning, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh was a ne’er-do-well, spoiled, and
encouraged to do nothing whatever except, so far as I could see,
practise how best to pretend she was clever.
By six we were ready to start. From six to seven we bothered the girls.
At seven serious consultations commenced as to what had better be done.
Start we must, for kind though our host and hostess were I do not think
they wanted us to camp in their front yard; if they did they did not say
so, and it became every moment more apparent that a stormy night was
drawing nearer across the hills. Menzies-Legh, with growing uneasiness,
asked his wife I suppose a dozen times what on earth, as he put it, had
become of the girls; whether she thought he had better go and look for
them; whether she thought they had had an accident; whether she thought
they had lost the address or themselves; to all of which she answered
that she thought nothing except that they were naughty girls who would
be suitably scolded when they did come.
The little lady of the garden came on the scene at this juncture with
her usual happy tact, and suggested that it being late and we being new
at it and therefore no doubt going to take longer arranging our camp
this first night than we afterward would, we should start along the road
to a bit of common about half a mile further on and there, with no
attempt at anything like a march, settle for the night. We would then,
she pointed out, either meet the girls or, if they came another way, she
would send them round to us.
Such sensible suggestions could only, as the English say, be jumped at.
In a moment all was bustle. We had been sitting disconsolately each on
his ladder arguing (not without touches of what threatened to become
recrimination), and we now briskly put them away and prepared to be off.
With some difficulty the horses, who did not wish to go, were put in,
the dogs were chained behind separate vans, the ladders slung underneath
(this was no easy job, but one of the straggly young men came to our
assistance just as Edelgard was about to get under our caravan and find
out how to do it, and showed such unexpected skill that I put him down
as being probably in the bolt and screw trade), adieux and appropriate
speeches were made to our kind entertainer, and off we went.
First marched old James, leading the Ilsa’s horse, with Menzies-Legh
beside him, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, her head wrapped up very curiously in
yards and yards of some transparent fluttering stuff of a most
unpractically feminine nature and her hand grasping a walking stick of a
most aggressively masculine one, marched behind, giving me who followed
(to my surprise I found it was expected of me that far from sitting as I
had intended to do inside our caravan I should trudge along leading our
horse) much unneeded and unasked-for advice. Her absurd head
arrangement, which I afterward learned was called a motor veil,
prevented my seeing anything except egregiously long eyelashes and the
tip of an inquiring and strange to say not over aristocratic
nose--Edelgard’s, true to its many ancestors, is purest hook. Taller and
gaunter than ever in her straight up and down sort of costume, she
stalked beside me her head on a level with mine (and I am by no means a
short man), telling me what I ought to do and what I ought not to do in
the matter of leading a horse; and when she had done that _ad nauseam_,
_ad libitum_, and _ad infinitum_ (I believe I have forgotten nothing at
all of my classics) she turned to my peaceful wife sitting on the Elsa’s
platform and announced that if she stayed up there she would probably
soon be sorry.
* * * * *
In another moment Edelgard was sorry, for unfortunately my horse had had
either too many oats or not enough exercise, and the instant the first
van had lumbered through the gate and out of sight round the corner to
the left he made a sudden and terrifying attempt to follow it at a
gallop.
Those who know caravans know that they must never gallop: not, that is,
if the contents are to remain unbroken and the occupants unbruised. They
also know that no gate is more than exactly wide enough to admit of
their passing through it, and that unless the passing through is
calculated and carried out to a nicety the caravan that emerges will not
be the caravan that went in. Providence that first evening was on my
side, for I never got through any subsequent gate with an equal
neatness. My heart had barely time to leap into my mouth before we were
through and out in the road, and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, catching hold of the
bridle, was able to prevent the beast’s doing what was clearly in his
eye, turn round to the left after his mate with a sharpness that would
have snapped the Elsa in two.
Edelgard, rather pale, scrambled down. The sight of our caravan heaving
over inequalities or lurching as it was turned round was a sight I never
learned to look at without a tightened feeling about the throat.
Anxiously I asked Mrs. Menzies-Legh, when the horse, having reached the
rear of the Ilsa, had settled down again, what would happen if I did not
get through the next gate with an equal skill.
“Everything may happen,” said she, “from the scraping off of the varnish
to the scraping off of a wheel.
“But this is terrible,” I cried. “What would we do with one wheel too
few?”
“We couldn’t do anything till there was a new one.”
“And who would pay----”
I stopped. Aspects of the tour were revealed to me which had not till
then been illuminated. “It depends,” said she, answering my unfinished
question, “whose wheel it was.”
“And suppose my dear wife,” I inquired after a pause during which many
thoughts surged within me, “should have the misfortune to break, say, a
cup?”
“A new cup would have to be provided.”
“And would I--but suppose cups are broken by circumstances over which I
have no control?”
She snatched quickly at the bridle. “Is that the horse?” she asked.
“Is what the horse?”
“The circumstances. If I hadn’t caught him then he’d have had your
caravan in the ditch.”
“My dear lady,” I cried, nettled, “he would have done nothing of the
sort. I was paying attention. As an officer you must admit that my
ignorance of horses cannot be really as extensive as you are pleased to
pretend you think.”
“Dear Baron, when does a woman ever admit?”
A shout from behind drowned the answer that would, I was sure, have
silenced her, for I had not then discovered that no answer ever did. It
was from one of the pale young men, who was making signs to us from the
rear.
“Run back and see what he wants,” commanded Mrs. Menzies-Legh, marching
on at my horse’s head with Edelgard, slightly out of breath, beside her.
I found that our larder had come undone and was shedding our ox-tongue,
which we had hoped to keep private, on to the road in front of the eyes
of Frau von Eckthum and the two young men. This was owing to Edelgard’s
carelessness, and I was extremely displeased with her. At the back of
each van were two lockers, one containing an oil stove and saucepans and
the other, provided with air-holes, was the larder in which our
provisions were to be kept. Both had doors consisting of flaps that
opened outward and downward and were fastened by a padlock. With gross
carelessness Edelgard, after putting in the tongue, had merely shut the
larder door without padlocking it, and when a sufficient number of jolts
had occurred the flap fell open and the tongue fell out. It was being
followed by some private biscuits we had brought.
Naturally I was upset. Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful
she recedes about a year in my esteem. It takes her a year of
attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on
which she previously stood. She knew this, and used to be careful to try
to keep proper pace, if I may so express it, with my love, and at the
date at which I have arrived in the narrative had not yet given up
trying, so that when by shouting I had made Mrs. Menzies-Legh understand
that the Elsa was to be stopped Edelgard hurried back to inquire what
was wrong, and was properly distressed when she saw the result of her
negligence. Well, repentance may be a good thing, but our ox-tongue was
gone forever; before he could be stopped the Ailsa’s horse, following
close behind, had placed his huge hoof on it and it became pulp.
“How sad,” said Frau von Eckthum gazing upon this ruin. “But so nice of
you, dear Baroness, to think of it. It might just have saved us all from
starvation.”
“Well, it can’t now,” said one of the young men; and he took it on the
point of his stick and cast it into the ditch.
Edelgard began silently to pick up the scattered biscuits. Immediately
both the young men darted forward to do it for her with a sudden
awakening to energy that seemed very odd in persons who slouched along
with their hands in their pockets. It made me wonder whether perhaps
they thought her younger than she was. As we resumed our march, I came
to the conclusion that this must be so, for such activity of assistance
would otherwise be unnatural, and I resolved to take the earliest
opportunity of bringing the conversation round to birthdays and then
carelessly mentioning that my wife’s next one would be her thirtieth. In
this department of all others I am not the man to allow buds to go
unnipped.
We had not been travelling ten minutes before we came to a stony turning
up to the right which old James, who was a native of those parts, said
was the entrance to the common. It seemed strange to camp almost within
a stone’s throw of our starting-place, but the rain was at that moment
pelting down on our defenceless heads, and people hurrying to their snug
homes stopped in spite of it to look at us with a wondering pity, so
that we all wished to get off the road as soon as possible and into the
privacy of furze bushes. The lane was in no sense a hill: it was a
gentle incline, almost immediately reaching flat ground; but it was soft
and stony, and the Ilsa’s horse, after dragging his caravan for a few
yards up it, could get no farther, and when Menzies-Legh put the roller
behind the back wheel to prevent the Ilsa’s returning thither from
whence it had just come the chain of the roller snapped, the roller,
released, rolled away, and the Ilsa began to move backward on top of the
Elsa, which in its turn began to move backward on top of the Ailsa,
which in its turn began to move backward across the road in the
direction of the ditch.
It was an unnerving spectacle; for it must be borne in mind that however
small the caravans seemed when you were inside them when you were
outside they looked like mighty monsters, towering above hedges, filling
up all but wide roads, and striking awe into the hearts even of
motorists, who got out of their way with the eager politeness otherwise
rude persons display when confronted by yet greater powers of being
disagreeable.
Menzies-Legh and the two young men, acting on some shouted directions
from old James, rushed at the stones lying about and selecting the
biggest placed them, I must say with commendable promptness, behind the
Ilsa’s wheels, and what promised to be an appalling catastrophe was
averted. I, who was reassuring Edelgard, was not able to help. She had
asked me with ill-concealed anxiety whether I thought the caravans would
begin to go backward in the night when we were inside them, and I was
doing my best to calm her, only of course I had to point out that it was
extremely windy; and quite a dirty and undesirable workman trudging by
at that moment with his bag of tools on his back and his face set
homeward, she stared after him and said: “Otto, how nice to be going to
a house.”
“Come, come,” said I rallying her--but undoubtedly the weather was
depressing.
We had to trace up the lane to the common. This was the first time that
ominous verb fell upon my ear; how often it was destined to do so will
be readily imagined by those of my countrymen who have ever visited the
English county of Sussex supposing, which I doubt, that such there are.
Its meaning is that you are delayed for any length of time from an hour
upward at the bottom of each hill while the united horses drag one
caravan after another to the top. On this first occasion the tracing
chains we had brought with us behaved in the same way the roller chain
had and immediately snapped, and Menzies-Legh, moved to anger, inquired
severely of old James how it was that everything we touched broke; but
he, being innocent, was not very voluble, and Menzies-Legh soon left him
alone. Happily we had another pair of chains with us. All this, however,
meant great delays, and the rain had almost left off, and the sun was
setting in a gloomy bank of leaden clouds across a comfortless distance
and sending forth its last pale beams through thinning raindrops, by the
time the first caravan safely reached the common.
If any of you should by any chance, however remote, visit Panthers, pray
go to Grib’s (or Grip’s--in spite of repeated inquiries I at no time
discovered which it was) Common, and picture to yourselves our first
night in that bleak
[Illustration: _It was an unnerving spectacle_]
refuge. For it was a refuge--the alternative being to march along
blindly till the next morning, which was, of course, equivalent to not
being an alternative at all--but how bleak a one! Gray shadows were
descending on it, cold winds were whirling round it, the grass was,
naturally, dripping, and scattered in and out among the furze bushes
were the empty sardine and other tins of happier sojourners. These last
objects were explained by the presence of a hop-field skirting one side
of the common, a hop-field luckily not yet in that state which attracts
hop-pickers, or the common would hardly have been a place to which
gentlemen care to take their wives. On the opposite side to the
hop-field the ground fell away, and the tips of two hop-kilns peered at
us over the edge. In front of us, concealed by the furze and other
bushes of a prickly, clinging nature, lay the road, along which people
going home to houses, as Edelgard put it, were constantly hurrying. All
round, except on the hop-field side, we could see much farther than we
wanted to across a cheerless stretch of country. The three caravans were
drawn up in a row facing the watery sunset, because the wind chiefly
came from the east (though it also came from all round) and the backs of
the vans offered more resistance to its fury than any other side of
them, there being only one small wooden window in that portion of them
which, being kept carefully shut by us during the whole tour, would have
been infinitely better away.
I hope my hearers _see_ the caravans: if not it seems to me I read in
vain. Square--or almost square--brown boxes on wheels, the door in
front, with a big aperture at the side of it shut at night by a wooden
shutter and affording a pleasant prospect (when there was one) by day, a
much too good-sized window on each side, the bald back with no relief of
any sort unless the larders can be regarded as such, for the little
shutter window I have mentioned became invisible when shut, and inside
an impression (I never use a word other than deliberately), an
impression, then, I say, of snugness, produced by the green carpet, the
green arras lining to the walls, the green eider-down quilts on the
beds, the green portière dividing the main room from the small portion
in front which we used as a dressing room, the flowered curtains, the
row of gaily bound books on a shelf, and the polish of the brass candle
brackets that seemed to hit me every time I moved. What became of this
impression in the case of one reasonable man, too steady to be blown
hither and thither by passing gusts of enthusiasm, perhaps the narrative
will disclose.
Meanwhile the confusion on the common was indescribable. I can even now
on calling it to mind only lift up hands of amazement. To get the three
horses out was in itself no easy task for persons unaccustomed to such
work, but to get the three tables out and try to unfold them and make
them stand straight on the uneven turf was much worse. All things in a
caravan have hinges and flaps, the idea being that they shall take up
little room; but if they take up little room they take up a great deal
of time, and that first night when there was not much of it these patent
arrangements which made each chair and table a separate problem added
considerably to the prevailing chaos. Having at length set them out on
wet grass, table-cloths had to be extracted from the depths of the
yellow boxes in each caravan and spread upon them, and immediately they
blew away on to the furze bushes. Recaptured and respread they
immediately did it again. Mrs. Menzies-Legh, when I ventured to say that
I would not go and fetch them next time they did it, told me to weigh
them down with the knives and forks, but nobody knew where they were,
and their discovery having defied our united intelligences for an
immense amount of precious time was at last the result of the merest
chance, for who could have dreamed they were concealed among the
bedding? As for Edelgard, I completely lost control over her. She seemed
to slip through my fingers like water. She was everywhere, and yet
nowhere. I do not know what she did, but I know that she left me quite
unaided, and I found myself performing the most menial tasks, utterly
unfit for an officer, such as fetching cups and saucers and arranging
spoons in rows. Nor, if I had not witnessed it, would I ever have
believed that the preparation of eggs and coffee was so difficult. What
could be more frugal than such a supper? Yet it took the united efforts
for nearly two hours of seven highly civilized and intelligent beings to
produce it. Edelgard said that that was why it did, but I at once told
her that to reason that the crude and the few are more capable than the
clever and the many was childish.
When, with immense labour and infinite conversation, this meagre fare
was at last placed upon the tables it was so late that we had to light
our lanterns in order to be able to see it; and my hearers who have
never been outside the sheltered homes of Storchwerder and know nothing
about what can happen to them when they do will have difficulty in
picturing us gathered round the tables in that gusty place, vainly
endeavouring to hold our wraps about us, our feet in wet grass and our
heads in a stormy darkness. The fitful flicker of the lanterns played
over rapidly cooling eggs and grave faces. It was indeed a bad
beginning, enough to discourage the stoutest holiday-maker. This was
not a holiday: this was privation combined with exposure. Frau von
Eckthum was wholly silent. Even Mrs. Menzies-Legh, although she tried to
laugh, produced nothing but hollow sounds. Edelgard only spoke once, and
that was to say that the coffee was very bad and might she make it
unaided another time, a remark and a question received with a gloomy
assent. Menzies-Legh was by this time extremely anxious about the girls,
and though his wife still said they were naughty and would be scolded it
was with an ever-fainter conviction. The two young men sat with their
shoulders hunched up to their ears in total silence. No one, however,
was half so much deserving of sympathy as myself and Edelgard, who had
been travelling since the previous morning and more than anybody needed
good food and complete rest. But there were hardly enough scrambled eggs
to go round, most of them having been broken in the jolting up the lane
on to the common, and after the meal, instead of smoking a cigar in the
comparative quiet and actual dryness of one’s caravan, I found that
everybody had to turn to and--will it be believed?--wash up.
“No servants, you know--so free, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh,
pressing a cloth into one of my hands and a fork into the other, and
indicating a saucepan of hot water with a meaning motion of her
forefinger.
Well, I had to. My hearers must not judge me harshly. I am aware that it
was conduct unbecoming in an officer, but the circumstances were
unusual. Menzies-Legh and the young men were doing it too, and I was
taken by surprise. Edelgard, when she saw me thus employed, first
started in astonishment and then said she would do it for me.
“No, no, let him do it,” quickly interposed Mrs. Menzies-Legh, almost as
though she liked me to wash up in the same saucepan as herself.
But I will not dwell on the forks. We were still engaged in the
amazingly difficult and distasteful work of cleaning them when the rain
suddenly descended with renewed fury. This was too much. I slipped away
from Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s side into the darkness, whispered to Edelgard
to follow, and having found my caravan bade her climb in after me and
bolt the door. What became of the remaining forks I do not know--there
are limits to that which a man will do in order to have a clean one.
Stealthily we undressed in the dark so that our lighted windows might
not betray us--“Let them each,” I said to myself with grim humour,
“suppose that we are engaged helping one of the others”--and then,
Edelgard having ascended into the upper berth and I having crawled into
the lower, we lay listening to the loud patter of the rain on the roof
so near our faces (especially Edelgard’s), and marvelled that it should
make a noise that could drown not only every sound outside but also our
voices when we, by shouting, endeavoured to speak.