This was a singular conversation.
I passed round the back of the house and along a footpath I found there,
turning it over in my mind. Less than ever did I like Menzies-Legh. In
spite of the compliments about my physique I liked him less than ever.
And how very annoying it is when a person you do not like is right; bad
enough if you do like him, but intolerable if you do not. As I proceeded
along the footpath with my eyes on the ground I saw at every step those
four glasses of tea, particularly my one, the one that sparkled so
brilliantly at first and was afterward so easily ruined. Absorbed in
this contemplation I did not notice whither my steps were tending till I
was pulled up suddenly by a church door. The path had led me to that,
and then, as I saw, skirted along a fringe of tombstones to a gate in a
wall beyond which appeared the chimneys of what was no doubt the
parsonage.
The church door was open, and I went in--for I was tired, and here were
pews; ruffled, and here was peace. The droning of a voice led me to
conclude (rightly) that a service was in progress, for I had learned by
this time that in England the churches constantly burst out into
services, regardless of the sort of day it is--whether, I mean, it is a
Sunday or not. I entered, and selecting a pew with a red cushion along
its seat and a comfortable footstool sat down.
The pastor was reading the Scriptures out of a Bible supported,
according to the unaccountable British custom, on the back of a Prussian
eagle. This prophetic bird--the first swallow, as it were, of that
summer which I trust will not long be delayed, when Luther’s translation
will rest on its back and be read aloud by a German pastor to a
congregation forced to understand by the simple methods we bring to bear
on our Polish (also acquired) subjects--eyed me with a human
intelligence. We eyed each other, in fact, as old friends might who meet
after troublous experiences in an alien land.
Except for this bird, who seemed to me quite human in his expression of
alert sympathy, the pastor and I were alone in the building; and I sat
there marvelling at the wasteful folly that pays a man to read and pray
daily to a set of empty pews. Ought he not rather to stay at home and
keep an eye on his wife? To do, indeed, anything sooner than conduct a
service which nobody evidently wants? I call it heathenism; I call it
idolatry; and so would any other plain man who heard and saw empty
pews, things of wood and cushions, being addressed as brethren, and
dearly beloved ones into the bargain.
When he had done at the eagle he crossed over to another place and began
reciting something else; but very soon, after only a few words, he
stopped dead and looked at me.
I wondered why, for I had not done anything. Even, however, with that
innocence of conscience in the background, it does make a man
uncomfortable when a pastor will not go on but fixes his eyes on you
sitting harmless in your pew, and I found myself unable to return his
gaze. The eagle was staring at me with a startling expression of
comprehension, almost as if he too were thinking that a pastor
officiating has such an undoubted advantage over the persons in the pews
that it is cowardice to use it. My discomfort increased considerably
when I saw the pastor descend from his place and bear down on me, his
eyes still fixing me, his white clothing fluttering out behind him.
What, I asked myself greatly perturbed, could the creature possibly
want? I soon found out, for thrusting an open Prayer-book toward me he
pointed to a verse of what appeared to be a poem, and whispered:
“Will you kindly stand up and take your part in the service?”
Even had I known how, surely I had no part nor lot in such a form of
worship.
“Sir,” I said, not heeding the outstretched book, but feeling about in
my breast-pocket, “permit me to present you with my card. You will then
see----”
He, however, in his turn refused to heed the outstretched card. He did
not so much as look at it.
“I cannot _oblige_ you to,” he whispered, as though our conversation
were unfit for the eagle’s ears; and leaving the open book on the little
shelf in the front of the pew he strode back again to his place and
resumed his reading, doing what he called my part as well as his own
with a severity of voice and manner ill-suited to one presumably
addressing the _liebe Gott_.
Well, being there and very comfortable I did not see why I should go. I
was behaving quite inoffensively, sitting still and holding my tongue,
and the comfort of being in a building with no fresh air in it was
greater than you, my friends, who only know fresh air at intervals and
in properly limited quantities, will be able to understand. So I stayed
till the end, till he, after a profusion of prayers, got up from his
knees and walked away into some obscure portion of the church where I
could no longer observe his movements, and then, not desiring to meet
him, I sought the path that had led me thither and hurriedly descended
the hill to our melancholy camp. Once I thought I heard footsteps behind
me and I hastened mine, getting as quickly round a bend that would
conceal me from any one following me as a tired man could manage, and it
was not till I had reached and climbed into the Elsa that I felt really
safe.
The three caravans were as usual drawn up in a parallel line with mine
in the middle, and their door ends facing the farm. To be in the middle
is a most awkward situation, for you cannot speak the least word of
caution (or forgiveness, as the case may be) to your wife without
running grave risk of being overheard. Often I used carefully to shut
all the windows and draw the door curtain, hoping thus to obtain a
greater freedom of speech, though this was of little use with the Ilsa
and the Ailsa on either side, their windows open, and perhaps a group of
caravaners sitting on the ground immediately beneath.
My wife was mending, and did not look up when I came in. How differently
she behaved at home. She not only used to look up when I came in, she
got up, and got up quickly too, hastening at the first sound of my
return to meet me in the passage, and greeting me with the smiles of a
dutiful and accordingly contented wife.
Shutting the Elsa’s windows I drew her attention to this.
“But there isn’t a passage,” said she, still with her head bent over a
sock.
Really Edelgard should take care to be specially feminine, for she
certainly will never shine on the strength of her brains.
“Dear wife,” I began--and then the complete futility of trying to thresh
any single subject out in that airy, sound-carrying dwelling stopped me.
I sat down on the yellow box instead, and remarked that I was extremely
fatigued.
“So am I,” said she.
“My feet ache so,” I said, “that I fear there may be something serious
the matter with them.”
“So do mine,” said she.
This, I may observe, was a new and irritating habit she had got into:
whatever I complained of in the way of unaccountable symptoms in divers
portions of my frame, instead of sympathizing and suggesting remedies
she said hers (whatever it was) did it too.
“Your feet cannot possibly,” said I, “be in the terrible condition mine
are in. In the first place mine are bigger, and accordingly afford more
scope for disorders. I have shooting pains in them resembling neuralgia,
and no doubt traceable to some nervous source.”
“So have I,” said she.
“I think bathing might do them good,” I said, determined not to become
angry. “Will you get me some hot water, please?”
“Why?” said she.
She had never said such a thing to me before. I could only gaze at her
in a profound surprise.
“Why?” I repeated at length, keeping studiously calm. “What an
extraordinary question. I could give you a thousand reasons if I chose,
such as that I desire to bathe them; that hot water--rather luckily for
itself--has no feet, and therefore has to be fetched; and that a wife
has to do as she is told. But I will, my dear Edelgard, confine myself
to the counter inquiry, and ask why not?”
“I, too, my dear Otto,” said she--and she spoke with great composure,
her head bent over her mending, “could give you a thousand answers to
that if I chose, such as that I desire to get this sock finished--yours,
by the way; that I have walked exactly as far as you have; that I see no
reason why you should not, as there are no servants here, fetch your own
hot water; and that your wishing or not wishing to bathe your feet has
really, if you come to think of it, nothing to do with me. But I will
confine myself just to saying that I prefer not to go.”
It can be imagined with what feelings--not mixed but unmitigated--I
listened to this. And after five years! Five years of patience and
guidance.
“Is this my Edelgard?” I managed to say, recovering speech enough for
those four words but otherwise struck dumb.
“Your Edelgard?” she repeated musingly as she continued to mend, and not
even looking at me. “Your boots, your handkerchief, your gloves, your
socks--yes----”
I confess I could not follow, and could only listen amazed.
“But not your Edelgard. At least, not more than you are my Otto.”
“But--my boots?” I repeated, really dazed.
“Yes,” she said, folding up the finished sock, “they really are yours.
Your property. But you should not suppose that I am a kind of living
boot, made to be trodden on. I, my dear Otto, am a human being, and no
human being is another human being’s property.”
A flash of light illuminated my brain. “Jellaby!” I cried.
“Hullo?” was the immediate answer from outside. “Want me, Baron?”
“No, no! No, _no_! No, NO!” I cried leaping up and dragging the door
curtain to, as though that could possibly deaden our conversation. “He
has been infecting you,” I continued, in a whisper so much charged with
indignation that it hissed, “with his poisonous----”
Then I recollected that he could probably hear every word, and muttering
an imprecation on caravans I relapsed on to the yellow box and said with
forced calm as I scrutinized her face:
“Dear wife, you have no idea how exactly you resemble your Aunt
Bockhügel when you put on that expression.”
For the first time this failed to have an effect. Up to then to be told
she looked like her Aunt Bockhügel had always brought her back with a
jerk to smiles; even if she had to wrench a smile into position she did
so, for the Aunt Bockhügel is the sore point in Edelgard’s family, the
spot, the smudge across its brightness, the excrescence on its tree, the
canker in its bud, the worm destroying its fruit, the night frost
paralyzing its blossoms. She cannot be suppressed. She cannot be
explained. Everybody knows she is there. She was one of the reasons that
made me walk about my room the whole of the night before I proposed
marriage to Edelgard, a prey to doubts as to how far a man may go in
recklessness in the matter of the aunts he fastens upon his possible
children. The Ottringels can show no such relatives; at least there is
one, but she looms almost equal to the rest owing to the mirage created
by fogs of antiquity and distance. But Edelgard’s aunt is contemporary
and conspicuous. Of a vulgar soul at her very birth, as soon as she came
of age she deliberately left the ranks of the nobility and united
herself to a dentist. We go there to be treated for toothache, because
they take us (owing to the relationship) on unusually favourable terms;
otherwise we do not know them. There is however an undoubted resemblance
to Edelgard in her less pleasant moods, a thickened, heavier, and older
Edelgard, and my wife, well aware of it (for I help her to check it as
much as possible by pointing it out whenever it occurs) has been on each
occasion eager to readjust her features without loss of time. On this
one she was not. Nay, she relaxed still more, and into a profounder
likeness.
“It’s true,” she said, not even looking at me but staring out of the
window; “it’s true about the boots.”
“Aunt Bockhügel! Aunt Bockhügel!” I cried softly, clapping my hands.
She actually took no notice, but continued to stare abstractedly out of
the window; and feeling how impossible it was to talk really naturally
to her with Jellaby just outside, I chose the better part and with a
movement I could not wholly suppress of impatience got up and left her.
Jellaby, as I suspected, was sitting on the ground leaning against one
of our wheels as though it were a wheel belonging to his precious
community and not ours, hired and paid for. Was it possible that he
selected this wheel out of the twelve he could have chosen from because
it was my wife’s wheel?
“Do you want anything?” he asked, looking up and taking his pipe out of
his mouth; and I just had enough self-control to shake my head and hurry
on, for I felt if I had stopped I would have fallen upon him and rattled
him about as a terrier rattles a rat.
But what terrible things caravans are when you have to share one with a
person with whom you have reason to be angry! Of all their sides this is
beyond doubt the worst; worse than when the rain comes in on to your
bed, worse than when the wind threatens to blow them over during the
night, or half of them sinks into the mud and has to be dug out
laboriously in the morning. It may be imagined with what feelings I
wandered forth into the chill evening, homeless, bearing as I felt a
strong resemblance to that Biblical dove which was driven forth from the
shelter of the ark and had no idea what to do next. Of course I was not
going to fetch the hot water and return with it, as it were (to pursue
my simile), in my beak. Every husband throughout Germany will understand
the impossibility of doing that--picture Edelgard’s triumph if I had!
Yet I could not at the end of a laborious day wander indefinitely
out-of-doors; besides, I might meet the pastor.
The rest of the party were apparently in their caravans, judging from
the streams of conversation issuing forth, and there was no one but old
James reclining on a sack in the corner of a distant shed to offer me
the solace of companionship. With a sudden mounting to my head of a
mighty wave of indignation and determination not to be shut out of my
own caravan, I turned and quickly retraced my steps.
“Hullo, Baron,” said Jellaby, still propped against my wheel. “Had
enough of it already?”
“More than enough of some things,” I said, eyeing him meaningly as I
made my way, much impeded by my mackintosh, up the ladder at an oblique
angle (it never could or would stand straight) against our door.
“For instance?” he inquired.
“I am unwell,” I answered shortly, evading a quarrel--for why should I
allow myself to be angered by a wisp like that?--and entering the Elsa
drew the curtain sharply to on his expressions of conventional regret.
Edelgard had not changed her position. She did not look up.
I pulled off my outer garments and flung them on the floor, and sitting
down with emphasis on the yellow box unlaced and kicked off my boots
and pulled off my stockings.
Edelgard raised her head and fixed her eyes on me with a careful
imitation of surprise.
“What is it, Otto?” she said. “Have you been invited out to dine?”
I suppose she considered this amusing, but of course it was not, and I
jerked myself free of my braces without answering.
“Won’t you tell me what it is?” she asked again.
For all answer I crawled into my berth and pulled the coverings up to my
ears and turned my face to the wall; for indeed I was at the end both of
my patience and my strength. I had had two days’ running full of
disagreeable incidents, and Menzies-Legh’s fatal drop of milk seemed at
last to have fallen into the brightness of my original strong tea. I
ached enough to make his prophesied rheumatism a very near peril, and
was not at all sure as I lay there that it had not already begun its
work upon me, beginning it with an alarming promise of system and
thoroughness at the very beginning, _i. e._, my feet.
“Poor Otto,” said Edelgard, getting up and laying her hand on my
forehead; adding, after a moment, “It is nice and cool.”
“Cool? I should think so,” said I shivering. “I am frozen.”
She got a rug out of the yellow box and laid it over me, tucking in the
side.
“So tired?” she said presently, as she tidied up my clothes.
“Ill,” I murmured.
“What is it?”
“Oh, leave me, leave me. You do not really care. Leave me.”
At this she paused in her occupation to gaze, I fancy, at my back as I
lay resolutely turned away.
“It is very early to go to bed,” she said after a while.
“Not when a man is ill.”
“It isn’t seven yet.”
“Oh, do not, I beg you, argue with me. If you cannot have sympathy you
can at least leave me. It is all I ask.”
This silenced her, and she moved about the van more careful not to sway
it, so that presently I was able to fall into an exhausted sleep.
How long this lasted I could not on suddenly waking tell, but everything
had grown dark and Edelgard, as I could hear, was asleep above me.
Something had wrenched me out of the depths of slumber in which I was
sunk and had brought me up again with a jerk to that surface known to us
as sentient life. You are aware, my friends, being also living beings
with all the experiences connected with such a condition behind you, you
are aware what such a jerking is. It seems to be a series of flashes.
The first flash reminds you (with an immense shock) that you are not as
you for one comfortable instant supposed in your own safe familiar bed
at home; the second brings back the impression of the loneliness and
weirdness of Frogs’ Hole Farm (or its, in your case, local equivalent)
that you received while yet it was day; the third makes you realize with
a clutching at your heart that _something_ happened before you woke up,
and that _something_ is presently going to happen again. You lie awake
waiting for it, and the entire surface of your body becomes as you wait
uniformly damp. The sound of a person breathing regularly in the
apartment does but emphasize your loneliness. I confess I was unable to
reach out for matches and strike a light, unable to do anything under
that strong impression that something had happened except remain
motionless beneath the bed-coverings. This was no shame to me, my
friends. Face me with cannon, and I have the courage of any man living,
but place me on the edge of the supernatural and I can only stay beneath
the bedclothes and grow most lamentably damp. Such a thin skin of wood
divided me from the night outside. Any one could push back the window
standing out there; any one ordinarily tall would then have his head and
shoulders practically inside the caravan. And there was no dog to warn
us or to frighten such a wretch away. And all my money was beneath my
mattress, the worst place possible to put it in if what you want is not
to be personally disturbed. What was it I had heard? What was it that
called me up from the depths of unconsciousness? As the moments
passed--and except for Edelgard’s regular breathing there was only an
awful emptiness and absence of sound--I tried to persuade myself it was
just the sausages having been so pink at dinner; and the tenseness of my
terror had begun slowly to relax when I was smitten stark again--and by
what, my friends? _By the tuning of a violin._
Now consider, you who frequent concerts and see nothing disturbing in
this sound, consider our situation. Consider the remoteness from the
highway of Frogs’ Hole Farm; how you had, in order to reach it, to
follow the prolonged convolutions of a lane; how you must then come by a
cart track along the edge of a hop-field; how the house lay alone and
empty in a hollow, deserted, forlorn, untidy, out of repair. Consider
further that none of our party had brought a violin and none, to judge
from the absence in their conversation of any allusions to such an
instrument, played on it. No one knows who has not heard one tuned under
the above conditions the blankness of the horror it can strike into
one’s heart. I listened, stiff with fear. It was tuned with a care and
at a length that convinced me that the spirit turning its knobs must be
of a quite unusual musical talent, possessed of an acutely sensitive
ear. How came it that no one else heard it? Was it possible--I curdled
at the thought--that only myself of the party had been chosen by the
powers at work for this ghastly privilege? When the thing broke into a
wild dance, and a great and rhythmical stamping of feet began apparently
quite near and yet equally apparently on boards, I was seized with a
panic that relaxed my stiffness into action and enabled me to thump the
underneath of Edelgard’s mattress with both my fists, and thump and
thump with a desperate vigour that did at last rouse her.
Being half asleep she was more true to my careful training than when
perfectly awake, and on hearing my shouts she unhesitatingly tumbled out
of her berth and leaning into mine asked me with some anxiety what the
matter was.
“The matter? Do you not hear?” I said, clutching her arm with one hand
and holding up the other to enjoin silence.
She woke up entirely.
“Why, what in the world----” she said. Then pulling a window curtain
aside she peeped out. “There’s only the Ailsa there,” she said, “dark
and quiet. And only the Ilsa here,” she added, peeping through the
opposite curtain, “dark and quiet.”
I looked at her, marvelling at the want of imagination in women that
renders it possible for them to go on being stolid in the presence of
what seemed undoubtedly the supernatural. Unconsciously this stolidity,
however, made me feel more like myself; but when on her going to the
door and unbolting it and looking out she made an exclamation and
hastily shut it again, I sank back on my pillow once more _hors de
combat_, so great was the shock. Face me, I say, with cannon, and I can
do anything but expect nothing of me if it is ghosts.
“Otto,” she whispered, holding the door, “come and look.”
I could not speak.
“Get up and come and look,” she whispered again.
Well my friends I had to, or lose forever my moral hold of and headship
over her. Besides, I was drawn somehow to the fatal door. How I got out
of my berth and along the cold floor of the caravan to the end I cannot
conceive. I was obliged to help myself along, I remember, by sliding my
hand over the surface of the yellow box. I muttered, I remember, “I am
ill--I am ill,” and truly never did a man feel more so. And when I got
to the door and looked through the crack she opened, what did I see?
I saw the whole of the lower windows of the farmhouse ablaze with
candles.