My hearers will I hope appreciate the frankness with which I show them
all my sides, good and bad. I do so with my eyes open, aware that some
of you may very possibly think less well of me for having been, for
instance, such a prey to supernatural dread. Allow me, however, to point
out that if you do you are wrong. You suffer from a confusion of
thought. And I will show you why. My wife, you will have noticed, had on
the occasion described few or no fears. Did this prove courage?
Certainly not. It merely proved the thicker spiritual skin of woman.
Quite without that finer sensibility that has made men able to produce
works of genius while women have been able only to produce (a merely
mechanical process) young, she felt nothing apparently but a bovine
surprise. Clearly, if you have no imagination neither can you have any
fears. A dead man is not frightened. An almost dead man does not care
much either. The less dead a man is the more do possible combinations
suggest themselves to him. It is imagination and sensibility, or the
want of them, that removes you further or brings you nearer to the
animals. Consequently (I trust I am being followed?) when imagination
and sensibility are busiest, as they were during those moments I lay
waiting and listening in my berth, you reach the highest point of
aloofness from the superiority to the brute creation; your vitality is
at its greatest; you are, in a word, if I may be permitted to coin an
epigram, _least dead_. Therefore, my friends, it is plain that at that
very moment when you (possibly) may have thought I was showing my
weakest side I was doing the exact opposite, and you will not, having
intelligently followed the argument, say at the end of it as my poor
little wife did, “But how?”
I do not wish, however, to leave you longer under the impression that
the deserted farmhouse was haunted. It may have been of course, but it
was not on that night of last August. What was happening was that a
party from the parsonage--a holiday party of young and rather inclined
to be noisy people, which had overflowed the bounds of the accommodation
there--was utilizing the long, empty front room as an impromptu (I
believe that is the expression) ball-room. The farm belonged to the
pastor--observe the fatness of these British ecclesiastics--and it was
the practice of his family during the holidays to come down sometimes in
the evening and dance in it. All this I found out after Edelgard had
dressed and gone across to see for herself what the lights and stamping
meant. She insisted on doing so in spite of my warnings, and came back
after a long interval to tell me the above, her face flushed and her
eyes bright, for she had seized the opportunity, regardless of what I
might be feeling waiting alone, to dance too.
“You danced too?” I exclaimed.
“Do come, Otto. It is such fun,” said she.
“With whom did you dance, may I inquire?” I asked, for the thought of
the Baroness von Ottringel dancing with the first comer in a foreign
farm was of course most disagreeable to me.
“Mr. Jellaby,” said she. “Do come.”
“Jellaby? What is he doing there?”
“Dancing. And so is everybody. They are all there. That’s why their
caravans were so quiet. Do come.”
And she ran out again, a childishly eager expression on her face, into
the night.
“Edelgard!” I called.
But though she must have heard me she did not come back.
Relieved, puzzled, vexed, and curious together, I did get up and dress,
and on lighting a candle and looking at my watch I was astonished to
find that it was only a quarter to ten. For a moment I could not credit
my eyes, and I shook the watch and held it to my ears, but it was
going, as steadily as usual, and all I could do was to reflect as I
dressed on what may happen to you if you go to bed and to sleep at seven
o’clock.
And how soundly I must have done it. But of course I was unusually
weary, and not feeling at all well. Two hours’ excellent sleep, however,
had done wonders for me so great are my recuperative powers, and I must
say I could not help smiling as I crossed the yard and went up to the
house at the remembrance of Menzies-Legh’s glass of tea. He would not
see much milk about me now, thought I, as I strode, giving my moustache
ends a final upward push and guided by the music, into the room in which
they were dancing.
The dance came to an end as I entered, and a sudden hush seemed to fall
upon the company. It was composed of boys and young girls attired in
evening garments next to which the clothes of the caravaners,
weather-beaten children of the road, looked odd and grimy indeed. The
tender lady, it is true, had put on a white and cobwebby kind of blouse,
which together with her short walking skirt and the innocent droop of
her fair hair about her little ears made her look at the most eighteen,
and Mrs. Menzies-Legh had tricked herself out in white too, producing
indeed for our admiration a white skirt as well as a white blouse, and
achieving at the most by these efforts an air of (no doubt spurious)
cleanliness; but the others were still all spattered and disfigured by
the muddy accumulations of the past day.
Though they stopped dancing as I came in I had time to receive a
photograph on my mind’s eye of the various members of our party: of
Jellaby, loose-collared and wispy-haired, gyrating with poor Frau von
Eckthum, of Edelgard, flushed with childish enjoyment, in the grip of a
boy who might very well have been her own if I had married her a few
years sooner and if it were conceivable that I could ever have produced
anything so undeveloped and half-grown, and of, if you please,
Menzies-Legh in all his elderliness, dancing with an object the short
voluminousness of whose clothing proclaimed a condition of unripeness
even greater than that of the two fledglings--dancing, in a word, with a
child.
That he should dance at all was, you will agree, sufficiently unworthy
but at least if he must make himself publicly foolish he might have done
it with some one more suited to his years, some one of the age of the
lady, for instance--singularly unlike one’s idea of a ghost--standing at
the upper end of the room playing the violin that had half an hour
previously been so incomprehensible to me.
On seeing me enter he stopped dead, and his face resumed the familiar
look of lowering gloom. The other couples followed his example, and the
violin, after a brief hesitation, whined away into passivity.
“Capital,” said I heartily to Menzies-Legh, who happened to have been in
the act of dancing past the door I came in by. “Capital. Enjoy yourself,
my friend. You are doing admirably well for what you told me is a weed.
In a German ball-room you would, I assure you, create an immense
sensation, for it is not the custom there for gentlemen over
thirty--which,” I amended, bowing, “I may be entirely wrong in presuming
that you are--for gentlemen over thirty----”
But he interrupted me to remark with the intelligence that characterized
him (after all, what ailed the man was, I believe, principally
stupidity) that this was not a German ball-room.
“Ah,” said I, “you are right there, my friend. That indeed is what you
English call a different pair of shoes. If it were, do you know where
the gentlemen over thirty would be?”
He spoiled the neat answer I had all ready of “Not there” by, instead of
seeking information, observing with his customary boorishness, “Confound
the gentlemen over thirty,” and walking his long-stockinged partner
away.
“Otto,” whispered my wife, hurrying up, “you must come and be
introduced to the people who are kindly letting us dance here.”
“Not unless they are of decent birth,” I said firmly.
“Whether they are or not you must come,” said she. “The lady who is
playing is----”
“I know, I know, she is a ghost,” said I, unable to forbear smiling at
my own jest; and I think my hearers will agree that a man who can make
fun of himself may certainly be said to be at least fairly equipped with
a sense of humour.
Edelgard stared. “She is the pastor’s wife,” she said. “It is her party.
It is so kind of her to let us in. You must come and be introduced.”
“She is a ghost,” I persisted, greatly diverted by the notion, for I
felt a reaction of cheerfulness, and never was a lady more substantial
than the one with the violin; “she is a ghost, and a highly unattractive
specimen of the sect. Dear wife, only ghosts should be introduced to
other ghosts. I am flesh and blood, and will therefore go instead and
release the little Eckthum from the flesh and blood persistencies of
Jellaby.”
“But Otto, you must come,” said Edelgard, laying her hand on my arm as I
prepared to move in the direction of the charming victim; “you can’t be
rude. She is your hostess----”
“She is my ghostess,” said I, very divertingly I thought; so
divertingly that I was seized by a barely controllable desire to indulge
in open mirth.
Edelgard, however, with the blank incomprehension of the droll so often
to be observed in women, did not so much as smile.
“Otto,” said she, “you absolutely _must_----”
“Must, dear wife,” said I with returning gravity, “is a word no woman of
tact ever lets her husband hear. I see no must why I, being who I am,
should request an introduction to a Frau Pastor. I would not in
Storchwerder. Still less will I at Frog’s Hole Farm.”
“But you are her guest----”
“I am not. I came.”
“But it is so nice of her to allow you to come.”
“It is not niceness. She is delighted at the honour.”
“But Otto, you simply _can’t_----”
I was about to move off definitely to the corner where Frau von Eckthum
sat helpless in the talons of Jellaby when who should enter the door
just in front of which Edelgard was wrangling but the creature I had
last parted from on unfriendly terms in the church a few hours before.
Attired this time from chin to boots in a long and narrow buttoned-down
black garment suggestive of that of the Pope’s priests, with a gold
cross dangling on his chest, his eye immediately caught mine and the
genial smile of the party-giver with which he had come in died away.
Evidently he had been there earlier, for Edelgard as though she were
well acquainted with him darted forward (where, alas, remained the
dignity of the well-born?) and very officiously introduced me to him. Me
to him, observe.
“Let me,” said my wife, “introduce my husband, Baron Ottringel.”
And she did.
It was of course the pastor who ought to have been introduced to me on
such neutral ground as an impromptu ball-room, but Edelgard had, as the
caravan tour lengthened, acquired the habit of using the presence of a
third person in order to do as she chose, with no reference whatever to
my known wishes. This is a habit specially annoying to a man of my
disposition, peppery perhaps, but essentially _bon enfant_, who likes to
get his cautions and reprimands over and done with and forgotten, rather
than be forced to allow them to accumulate and brood over them
indefinitely.
Rendered helpless by my own good breeding--a quality which leads to many
a discomfort in life--I was accordingly introduced for all the world as
though I were the inferior, and could only show my sensibility of the
fact by a conspicuous stiffening.
“Otto thinks it is so very kind of you to let us come in,” said
Edelgard, all smiles and with an augmentation of officiousness and
defiance of me that was incredible.
“I am glad you were able to,” replied the pastor looking at me,
politeness in his voice and chill in his eye. It was plain the creature
was still angry because, in church, I would not pray.
“You are very good,” said I, bowing with at least an equal chill.
“Otto wishes,” continued the shameless Edelgard, reckless of the private
hours with me ahead, “to be introduced to your--to Mrs.--Mrs.----”
“Raggett,” supplied the pastor.
And I would certainly have been dragged up then and there to the round
red ghost at the top of the room while Edelgard, no doubt, triumphed in
the background, if it had not itself come to the rescue by striking up
another tune on its fiddle.
“Presently,” said the pastor, now become crystallized for me into
Raggett. “Presently. Then with pleasure.”
And his glassy eye, fixed on mine, had little of pleasure in it.
At this point Edelgard danced away with Jellaby from under my very nose.
I made an instinctive movement toward the slender figure alone in the
corner, but even as I moved a half-grown boy secured her and hurried her
off among the dancers. Looking round, I saw no one else I could go and
talk to; even Mrs. Menzies-Legh was not available. There was nothing
for it, therefore, but unadulterated Raggett.
“It is nice,” observed this person, watching the dancers--he had a hooky
profile as well as a glassy eye--“to see young people enjoying
themselves.”
I bowed, determined to keep within the limits of strict iciness; but as
Jellaby and my wife whirled past I could not forbear adding:
“Especially when the young people are so mature that they are fully
aware of the extent of their own enjoyment.”
“Yes,” said he; without, however, any real responsiveness.
“It is only,” said I, “when a woman is mature, and more than mature,
that she begins to enjoy being young.”
“Yes,” said he; still with no real responsiveness.
“You may possibly,” said I, nettled by this indifference, “regard that
as a paradox.”
“No,” said he.
“It is, however,” said I more loudly, “not one.”
“No,” said he.
“It is on the contrary,” said I still louder, “a rather subtle but
undeniable truth.”
“Yes,” said he; and I then perceived that he was not listening.
I do not know what my hearers feel, but I fancy they feel with me that
when a gentleman of birth and position is amiable enough to talk to a
person of neither it is particularly galling to discover that that
person is so unable to grasp the true aspect of the situation as to
neglect even to follow the conversation. Good breeding (as I have before
remarked, a great hinderer) prevents one’s explaining who one is and
emphasizing who the other person is and doing then and there a sum of
subtraction between one’s own value and his and offering him the result
for his closer inspection, so what is one to do? Stiffen and go dumb, I
suppose. Good breeding allows no more. Alas, there are many and heavy
drawbacks to being a gentleman.
Raggett had evidently not been listening to a word I said, for after his
last abstracted “Yes,” he suddenly turned the glassiness of his eye full
upon me.
“I did not know,” he said, “when I saw you in church----”
Really the breeding that could go back to the church and what happened
there was too bad for words. My impulse was to stop him by saying “Shall
we dance?” but I was too uncertain of the extent, nay of the existence,
of his powers of seeing fun to venture.
“--that you were not English, or I should not have asked----”
“Sir,” I interrupted, endeavouring to get him at all cost out of the
church, “who, after all, _is_ English?”
He looked surprised. “Well,” said he, “I am.”
“Why, you do not know. You cannot possibly be certain. Go back a
thousand years and, as I lately read in an ingenious but none the less
probably right book, the whole of Europe was filled with your fathers
and mothers. Starting with your two parents and four grandparents and
going backward multiplying as you go, the sixteen great-grandparents are
already almost unmanageable, and a century or two further back you find
them irrepressibly overflowing your little island and spreading
themselves across Europe as thickly and as adhesively as so much jam,
until in days a trifle more remote not a person living of white skin but
was your father, unless he was your mother. Take,” I continued, as he
showed signs of wanting to interrupt--“take any example you choose, you
will find the same inextricable confusion everywhere. And not only
physically--spiritually. Take any example. Anything at random. Take our
late lamented Kaiser Friedrich, who married a daughter of your royal
house. It is our custom to regard and even to call our Kaiser and
Kaiserin the Father and Mother of the nation. The entire nation
therefore is, in a spiritual sense, half English. So, accordingly, am I.
So, accordingly, to push the point a step further, you become their
nephew, and therefore a quarter German--a spiritual German quarter, even
as I am a spiritual English half. There is no end to the confusion. Have
you observed, sir, that the moment one begins to think everything does
become confused?”
“Are you not dancing?” said he, fidgetting and looking about him.
I think one is often angry with people because, having assumed on first
acquaintance that they are on one’s own level of intelligence, their
speech and actions presently prove that they are not. This is unjust;
but, like most unjust things, natural. I, however, as a reasonable man
do my best to fight against it, and on Raggett’s asking this question
for all response to the opportunity I gave him of embarking on an
interesting discussion, I checked my natural annoyance by realizing that
he was what Menzies-Legh probably was, merely stupid. Stupidity, my
hearers will agree, is of various kinds, and one kind is want of
interest in what is interesting. Of course this particular stupid was
hopelessly ill-bred besides, for what can be more so than meeting a
series of, to put them at their lowest, suggestive remarks by inquiring
if one is not dancing?
“My dear sir,” I said, preserving my own manners at least, “in my
country it is not the custom for married gentlemen over thirty to
dance. Perhaps you were paying me the compliment (often, I must say,
paid me before) of supposing I am not yet that age, but I assure you
that I am. Nor do ladies continue to dance in our country once their
early youth is past and their outlines become--shall we say, bolder?
Seats are then provided for them round the walls, and on them they
remain in suitable passivity until the oasis afforded by the Lancers is
reached, when the elder gentlemen pour gallantly out of the room in
which they play cards all the evening and lead them through its
intricacies with the ceremony that satisfies Society’s sense of the
becoming. In this country, on the contrary----”
“Really,” he interrupted, his habit of fidgetting more pronounced than
ever, “you talk English with such a flow and volume that after all you
very well might have joined----”
I now saw that the man was a fanatic, a type of unbalanced person I have
always particularly disliked. Good breeding is little if at all
appreciated by fanatics, and I might have been excused if, at this
point, I had flung mine to the winds. I did not do so, however, but
merely interrupted him in my turn by informing him with cold
courteousness that I was a Lutheran.
“And Lutherans,” I added, “do not pray. At least, not audibly, and
certainly never in duets. More,” I continued, putting up my hand as he
opened his mouth to speak, “more. I am a philosopher, and the prayers of
a philosopher cannot be confined within the limits of any formula.
Formulas are for the undeveloped. You tie a child into its chair lest,
untied, it should fall disastrously to the floor. You tie the
undeveloped adult to a creed lest, untied, he should fall goodness
really knows where. The grown man, of full stature in mind as well as
body, requires no tying. His whole life is his creed. Nothing cut and
dried, nothing blatant, nothing gaudily apparent to the outside world,
but a subtle saturation, a continual soaking----”
“Excuse me,” said he, “one of those candles is guttering.”
And he hurried across the room with an expedition I would not have
thought possible in a man so gray and glassy to where, in the windows,
the illuminating rows of candles had been placed.
Nor did he come back, I am glad to say, for I found him terribly
fatiguing; and I remained alone, leaning against the wall by the door.
Down at the further end of the room danced my gentle friend, and also
her sister; also all the other members of our party except Menzies-Legh
who, recalled to decency by my good-natured shafts, spent the rest of
his time soberly either helping the pastor pinch off candle-wicks or
turning over the ghost’s music for it.
Desiring to watch Frau von Eckthum more conveniently (for I assure you
it was a pretty sight to see her grace, and how the same tune that made
my wife whirl moved her to nothing more ruffling than an appearance of
being wafted) and also in order to be at hand should Jellaby become too
tactless, I went down to where our party seemed to be gathered in a knot
and took up my position near them against another portion of the wall.
I had hardly done so before they seemed to have melted away to the upper
end.
As they did not come back I presently strolled after them. They then
appeared to melt back again to the bottom.
It was very odd. It was almost like an optical illusion. When I went up,
they went down; when I went down, they went up. I felt at last as one
may feel who plays at see-saw, and began to doubt whether I were really
on firm ground--on _terra cotta_, as I (amusingly, I thought) called it
to Edelgard when we alighted from the steamer at Queenboro’,
endeavouring to restore her spirits and make her laugh. (Quite in vain I
may add, which inclined me to wonder, I remember, whether the illiteracy
which is one of the leading characteristics of people’s wives had made
it impossible for her to understand even so simple a classical play on
words as that. In the train I realized that it was not illiteracy but
the crossing; and I will say for Edelgard that up to the time the
English spirit of criticism got, like a devastating microbe, hold of her
German womanliness, she had invariably laughed when I chose to jest.)
But gradually the profitless see-sawing began to tire me. The dance
ended, another began, and still my little white-bloused friend had not
once been within reach. I made a determined effort to get to her in the
pauses between the dances in order to offer to break the German rule on
her behalf and give her one dance (for I fancy she was vexed that I did
not) and also to help her out of the clutches of Jellaby, but I might as
well have tried to dance with and help a moonbeam. She was here, she was
there, she was everywhere, except where I happened to be. Once I had
almost achieved success when, just as I was sure of her, she ran up to
the ghost resting at that moment from its labours and embarked in an
apparently endless and absorbing discussion with it, deaf and blind to
all beside; and as I had made up my mind that nothing would induce me to
extend my Raggett acquaintance by causing myself to be introduced to the
psychical phenomenon bearing that name, I was forced to retreat.
Moodily, though. My first hilarity was extinguished. _Bon enfant_ though
I am I cannot go on being _bon enfant_ forever--I must have, so to
speak, the encouragement of a bottle at intervals; and I was thinking of
taking Edelgard away and giving her, before the others returned to their
caravans, a brief description of what maturity combined with calf-like
enjoyment looks like to bystanders, when Mrs. Menzies-Legh passing on
the arm of a partner caught sight of my face, let her partner go, and
came up to me.
“I suppose,” she said (and she had at least the grace to hesitate), “it
would be no good asking--asking you to--dance?”
I stared at her in undisguised astonishment.
“Are you not dreadfully bored, standing there alone?” she said, as I did
not answer. “Won’t you--” (again she had the grace to hesitate)--“won’t
you--dance?”
Pointedly, and still staring amazed, I inquired of her with whom, for
really I could hardly believe----
“With me, if--if you will,” said she, a rather lame attempt at a smile
and a distinctly anxious look in her eyes showing that at least it was
only a momentary aberration.
Momentary or not, however, I am not the man to smile with feigned
gratification when what is needed is rebuke, especially in the case of
this lady who of all others needed one so often and so badly.
“Why,” I exclaimed, not caring to conceal my opinion, “why--this is
matriarchy!”
And turning on my heel I made my way at once to my wife, stopped her
whirlings, drew her away from her partner’s arm (Jellaby’s, by the way),
made her take her husband’s and without a word led her out of the room.
But, as I passed the door I saw the look of (I should think pretended)
astonishment of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s face give way to the appearance of
the dimple, to a sudden screwing together of the upper and lower
eyelashes, and my friends will be able to form a notion of how complete
was the havoc England had wrought in all she had been taught to
understand and reverence in her youth when I tell them that what she was
manifestly trying not to do was to laugh.