“The children of England----” I remarked, when they had gone their way,
their arms linked together, to Lord Sigismund who was hurrying past to
the river with a bucket--but he interrupted me by shouting over his
shoulder:
“Will you stay and light the fire, or come with us and forage for food?”
Light the fire? Why, what are women for? Even Hermann, my servant, would
rebel if he instead of Clothilde had to light fires. But, on the other
hand, forage? Go back across that immense field and walk from shop to
shop on feet that had for some time past been unable to walk at all? And
then return weighed down with the results?
“Do you understand fires, Baron?” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, appearing
suddenly behind me.
“As much, I suppose, as intelligence unaided by experience does,” said I
unwillingly.
“Oh, but of course you do,” said she, putting a box of matches--one of
those enormous English boxes that never failed to arouse my amused
contempt, for they did not light a single fire or candle more than
their handy little continental brethren--into my right hand, and the red
handkerchiefful of sticks bought that morning into my left, “of course
you do. You must have got quite used to them in the wars.”
“What wars?” I asked sharply. “You surely do not imagine that I----”
“Oh, were you too young for Sedan and all that?” she asked, as she
crossed over the very long and very green grass toward a distant ditch
and I found that I was expected to cross with her.
“I was so young,” I said, more nettled than my hearers will perhaps
understand, but then I was tired out and no longer able to bear much,
“so young that I had not even reached the stage of being born.”
“Not really?” said she.
“Yes,” said I. “I was still spending my birthdays among the angels.”
This, of course, was not strictly true, but one likes to take off a few
years in the presence of a woman who has left her _Gotha Almanach_ at
home, and it was, I felt, a picturesque notion--I mean about the
birthdays and the angels.
“Not really?” said she again.
And what, I thought, as we walked on together, is all this talk about
young and not young? If a man is not young in the forties when will he
be? I have never concealed my age, which is about five or six and
forty, with perhaps a year or two added on, but as I take little notice
of birthdays it is just as likely the year or two ought to be added off,
and the forties are universally acknowledged by all persons who are in
them to be the very flower and prime of life, or rather the beginning of
the very flower and prime, the beginning of the final unfolding of the
last crumple in the last petal.
I should have thought this state of things was visible enough in me,
plain enough to any ordinary onlooker. I have neither a gray hair nor a
wrinkle. My moustache is as uninterruptedly blond as ever. My face is
perfectly smooth. And when my hat is on there is no difference whatever
between me and a person of thirty. Of course I am not a narrow man,
weedy in the way in which Jellaby is weedy, and unable as he is unable
to fill out my clothes; but it is laughable that just breadth should
have made those two fledglings place me in the same category as an
exceedingly venerable and obviously crippled old gentleman.
I expect the truth is that in England children are ill-trained and
educated, and their perceptions are allowed to remain rudimentary. It
must be so, for so few of them wear spectacles. Clearly education is not
carried on with anything like our systematic rigor, for except on Lord
Sigismund I had up to then nowhere seen these artificial aids to
eyesight, and in Germany at least two-thirds of our young people, as a
result of their application, wear either spectacles or _pince-nez_. They
may well be proud of them. They are the visible proof of a youth spent
entirely at its books, the hoisted standard of an ordered and studious
life.
“The children of England----” I began vigorously to Mrs. Menzies-Legh,
desirous of expressing a few of my objections to them to a lady who
could not be supposed to mind, she being one of my own countrywomen--but
she too interrupted me.
“This is the most sheltered place,” she said, pointing to the dry ditch.
“You’ll find more sticks in that little wood. You will want heaps more.”
And she left me.
Well, I had never made a fire in my life. I stood there for a moment in
great hesitation as to how to begin. They should not say I was
unwilling, those ant-like groups over by the caravans so feverishly
hurrying hither and thither, but to do a thing one must begin it, and as
there are no doubt several ways of lighting a fire, even as there are
several ways of doing anything else in life, I stood uncertain while I
asked myself which of these several ways (all of them, I must concede,
unknown to me) I ought to choose.
The ditch had a hedge on its farther side, and through a gap in it I saw
the wood, cleared in places and overgrown between the remaining stumps
by bracken and brambles, wherein I was, as Mrs. Menzies-Legh said, to
find more sticks. The first thing to be done, then, was to find the
sticks, for the handkerchief contained the merest handful; and this was
a hard task among brambles at the end of a dinnerless day, and likely,
besides, to prove ruinous to my stockings.
The groups at the caravans were peeling the potatoes and other
vegetables we had bought at the farm near Grip’s Common that morning,
and were doing it with an expedition that showed how hunger was
triumphing over fatigue. Jellaby hurried to and fro to a small spring
among the bracken fetching water. Menzies-Legh and Lord Sigismund had
disappeared in the distance that led to the shops. Old James was feeding
the horses. I could see the two fledglings sitting on the grass with
bowed heads and flushed cheeks absorbed in the shredding of cabbages.
Mrs. Menzies-Legh had begun, with immense energy, to peel potatoes. Her
gentle sister--I deplored it--was engaged on an onion. Nowhere, look as
I might (for I needed her assistance) could I see my wife.
Then Mrs. Menzies-Legh, raising her eyes from her potatoes, saw me
standing motionless and called out that the vegetables would soon be
ready for the fire, but she feared if I were not quick the fire would
not soon be ready for the vegetables; and thus urged, and contrary to
my first intention, I hastily emptied the sticks out of the
handkerchief into the ditch and began to endeavour to light them.
But they would not light. Match after match flared an instant, then went
out. It was a windy evening, and I saw no reason for supposing that any
match would stay alight long enough to get even one stick to catch fire.
I went down on my knees and interposed my person between the sticks and
the wind, but though the matches then burned to the end (where were my
fingers) the sticks took no more notice than if they had been of iron.
Losing patience I said something aloud and not, I am afraid, quite
complimentary, about wives who neglect their duties and kick in
shortened skirts over the traces of matrimony; and Edelgard’s voice
immediately responded from the other side of the hedge. “But _lieber_
Otto,” it said, “is it then my fault that you have forgotten the paper?”
I straightened myself and looked at her. She had already been on the
search for sticks, for as she advanced to the gap and stood in it I saw
she had an apronful of them. I must say I was surprised at her courage
in confronting me thus alone, when she was aware I must be gravely
displeased with her and could only be waiting for an opportunity to tell
her so. She, however, with the cunning common to wives, called me
_lieber_ Otto as though nothing had happened, did not allude to my
overheard exclamation and sought to soften me with sticks.
I looked at her therefore very coldly. “No,” I said, “I had not
forgotten the paper.”
And this was true, because to forget paper (or indeed anything else) you
must first of all have thought of it, and I had not.
“Perhaps,” I went on, my coldness descending as I spoke below zero,
which is the point in our well-arranged thermometers (either Celsius or
Réaumur, but none of their foolish Fahrenheits) where freezing begins,
“perhaps, since you are so clever, you will have the goodness to light
the fire yourself. Any one,” I continued with emphasis, “can criticize.
We will now, if you please, change places, and you shall bring your
unquestioned gifts to bear on this matter, while I assume the _role_
suited to lesser capacity, and merely criticize.”
This of course, was bitter; but was it not a justified bitterness?
Unfortunately I shall have to suppress the passage I suppose at the
reading aloud, so shall never hear the verdict of my friends; but even
without that verdict (and I well know what it would be, for they all
have wives) even without it I can honestly call my bitterness justified.
Besides, it was very well put.
She listened in silence, and then just said, “Oh, Otto,” and came down
at once into the ditch, and
[Illustration: _“But, lieber Otto, is it then my fault that you have
forgotten the paper?”_]
bending over the sticks began to arrange them quickly on some stones she
picked up.
I did not like to sit down and smoke, which is what I would have done at
home (supposing such a situation as the Ottringels lighting a fire
out-of-doors in Storchwerder were conceivable), because Mrs.
Menzies-Legh would probably have immediately left off peeling her
potatoes to exclaim, and Jellaby would, I dare say, have put down his
buckets and come over to inquire if I were enjoying myself. Not that I
care ten _pfennings_ for their opinions, and I also passionately
disapprove of the whole English attitude toward women; but I am a
fair-minded man, and believe in going as far as is reasonable with the
well-known maxim of behaving in Rome as the Romans behave.
I therefore just stood with my back to the caravans and watched
Edelgard. In less time than I take to write it she had piled up the
sticks, stuffed a bit of newspaper she drew from her apron underneath
them, lit them by means (as I noted) of a single match, and behold the
fire, crackling and blazing and leaping upward or outward as the wind
drove it.
No proof, if anything further in that way were needed, could be more
convincing as to the position women are intended by nature to fill.
Their instincts are all of the fire-lighting order, the order that
serves and tends; while to man, the noble dreamer, is reserved the
place in life where there is room, dignity, and uninterruption. Else how
can he dream? And without his dreams there would be no subsequent
crystallization of dreams; and all that we see of good and great and
wealth-bringing was once some undisturbed man’s dream.
But this is philosophy; and you, my friends, who breathe the very air
handed down to you by our Hegels and our Kants, who are born into it and
absorb it whether you want to or not through each one of your infancy’s
pores, you do not need to hear the Ottringel echo of your own familiar
thoughts. We in Storchwerder speak seldom on these subjects for we take
them for granted; and I will not in this place describe too minutely all
that passed through my mind as I watched, in that grassy solitude, at
the hour when the sun in setting lights up everything with extra
splendour, my wife piling sticks on the fire.
Indeed, what did pass through it was of a mixed nature. It seemed so
strange to be there; so strange that that meadow, in all its dampness,
its high hedge round three sides of it, its row of willows brooding over
the sulky river, its wood on the one hand, its barren expanse of
mole-ridden field on the other, and for all view another meadow of exact
similarity behind another row of exactly similar willows across the
Medway, it seemed so strange that all this had been lying there silent
and empty for heaven knows how many years, the exact spot on which
Edelgard and I were standing waiting, as it were, for its prey
throughout the entire period of our married life in Storchwerder and of
my other married life previous to that, while we, all unconscious, went
through the series of actions and thoughts that had at length landed us
on it. Strange fruition of years. Stranger the elaborate leading up to
it. Strangest the inability of man to escape such a destiny. Regarded as
the fruition of years it was certainly paltry, it was certainly a
disproportionate destiny. I had been led from Pomerania, a most remote
place if measured by its distance from the Medway, in order to stand at
evening with damp feet on this exact spot. A believer, you will cry, in
predestination? Perhaps. Anyhow, filled with these reflections (and
others of the same character) and watching my wife doing in silence that
for which she is fitted and intended, my feeling toward her became
softer; I began to excuse; to relent; to forgive. Indeed I have tried to
do my duty. I am not hard, unless she forces me to be. I feel that no
one can guide and help a wife except a husband. And I am older than she
is; and am I not experienced in wives, who have had two, and one of them
for the enormous (sometimes it used to seem endless) period of twenty
years?
I said nothing to her at the moment of a softer nature, being well
aware of the advantage of allowing time, before proceeding to
forgiveness, for the firmer attitude to sink in; and Jellaby bringing
the iron stew-pot Mrs. Menzies-Legh had bought that morning--or rather
dragging it, for he is, as I have said, a weedy creature--across to us,
spilling much of the water it contained on the way, I was obliged to
help him get it on to the fire, fetching at his direction stones to
support it and then considerably scorching my hands in the efforts to
settle the thing safely on the stones.
“Please don’t bother, Baroness,” said Jellaby to Edelgard when she began
to replenish the fire with more sticks. “We’ll do that. You’ll get the
smoke in your eyes.”
But would we not get the smoke in our eyes too? And would not eyes
unused to kitchen work smart far more than eyes that did the kind of
thing at home every day? For I suppose the fires in the kitchen of
Storchwerder smoke sometimes, and Edelgard must have been perfectly
inured to it.
“Oh,” said Edelgard, in the pleasant little voice she manages to have
when speaking to persons who are not her husband, “it is no bother. I do
not mind the smoke.”
“Why, what are we here for?” said Jellaby. And he took the sticks she
was still holding from her hands.
Again the thought crossed my mind that Jellaby must be attracted by
Edelgard; indeed, all three gentlemen. This is an example of the sort of
attention that had been lavished on her ever since we started.
Inconceivable as it seemed, there it was; and the most inconceivable
part of it was that it was boldly done in the very presence of her
husband. I, however, knowing that one should never trust a foreigner,
determined to bring round the talk, as I had decided the day before, to
the number of Edelgard’s birthdays that very evening at supper.
But when supper, after an hour and a half’s waiting, came, I was too
much exhausted to care. We all were very silent. Our remaining strength
had gone out of us like a flickering candle in a wind when we became
aware of the really endless time the potatoes take to boil. Everything
had gone into the pot together. Mrs. Menzies-Legh had declared that was
the shortest, and indeed the only way, for the oil-stoves in the
caravans and their small saucepans had sufficiently proved their
inadequacy the previous night. Henceforth, said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, our
hope was to be in the stew-pot; and as she said it she threw in the
potatoes, the cabbages, the onion sliced by her tender sister, a piece
of butter, a handful of salt, and the bacon her husband and Lord
Sigismund had brought back with them from the village. It all went in
together; but it did not all come out together, for we discovered after
savoury fragrances had teased our nostrils for some time that the
cabbage and the bacon were cooked, while the potatoes, in response to
the proddings of divers anxious forks, remained obstinately hard.
We held a short council, gathered round the stew-pot, as to the best
course to pursue. If we left the bacon and the cabbage in the pot they
would be boiled certainly to a pulp, and perhaps--awful
thought--altogether away, before the potatoes were ready. On the other
hand, to relinquish the potatoes, the chief feature of our supper, would
be impossible. We therefore, after much anxious argument, decided to
take out that which was already cooked, put it carefully on plates, and
at the last moment return it to the pot to be warmed up again.
This was done, and we sat round on the grass to wait. Now was the
moment, now that we were all assembled silent in a circle, to direct the
conversation into the birthday channel, but I found myself so much
enfeebled and the rest so unresponsive that after a faltering beginning,
which had no effect except to draw a few languid gazes upon me, I was
obliged perforce to put it off. Indeed, our thoughts were wholly
concentrated on food; and looking back it is almost incredible to me
that that meagre supper should have roused so eager an interest.
We all sat without speaking, listening to the bubbling of the pot. Now
and then one of the young men thrust more sticks beneath it. The sun had
set long since, and the wind had dropped. The meadow seemed to grow much
damper, and while our faces were being scorched by the fire our backs
were becoming steadily more chilly. The ladies drew their wraps about
them. The gentlemen did that for their comfort which they would not do
for politeness, and put on their coats. I whose coat had never left me,
fetched my mackintosh and hung it over my shoulders, careful to keep it
as much as possible out of reach of the fire-glow in case it should
begin to melt.
Long before, the ladies had spread the tables and cut piles of bread and
butter, and one of them--I expect it was Frau von Eckthum--had concocted
an uncooked pudding out of some cakes they alluded to as sponge, with
some cream and raspberry jam and brandy, which, together with the bacon
and excepting the brandy, were the result of the foraging expedition.
Toward these tables our glances often wandered. We were but human, and
presently, overcome, our bodies wandered thither too.
We ate the bread and butter.
Then we ate the bacon and cabbage, agreeing that it was a pity to let it
get any cooler.
Then we ate the pudding they spoke of--for after this they began to be
able to speak--as a trifle.
And then--and it is as strange to relate as it is difficult to
believe--we returned to the stew-pot and ate every one of the now ready
and steaming hot potatoes; and never, I can safely say, was there
anything so excellent.
Later on, entering our caravan much softened by these various
experiences and by a cup of extremely good coffee made by Edelgard, but
feeling justified in withdrawing, now that darkness had set in, from the
confusions of the washing up, I found my wife searching in the depths of
the yellow box for dishcloths.
I stood in the narrow gangway lighting a cigar, and when I had done
lighting it I realized that I was close to her and alone. One is never
at any time far from anything in these vehicles, but on this occasion
the nearness combined with the privacy suggested that the moment had
arrived for the words I had decided she must hear--kind words, not hard
as I had at first intended, but needful.
I put out my arm, therefore, and proposed to draw her toward me as a
preliminary to peace.
She would not, however, come.
Greatly surprised--for resentment had not till then been one of her
failings--I opened my mouth to speak, but she, before I could do so,
said, “Do you mind not smoking inside the caravan?”
Still more surprised, and indeed amazed (for this was petty) but
determined not to be shaken out of my kindness, I gently began, “Dear
wife----” and was going on when she interrupted me.
“Dear husband,” she said, actually imitating me, “I know what you are
going to say. I always know what you are going to say. I know all the
things you ever can or ever do say.”
She paused a moment, and then added in a firm voice, looking me straight
in the eyes, “By heart.”
And before I could in any way recover my presence of mind she was
through the curtain and down the ladder and had vanished with the
dishcloths in the darkness.