Chapter XVI

There is a place about six hours’ march from Bodiam called Frogs’ Hole Farm, a deserted house lying low among hop-fields, a dank spot in a hollow with the ground rising abruptly round it on every side, a place of perpetual shade and astonishing solitude.

To this, led by the wayward Fate that had guided our vague movements from the beginning, we steadily journeyed during the whole of the next day. We were not, of course, aware of it--one never is, as no doubt my hearers have noticed too--but that that was the ultimate object of every one of our painful steps during an exceptionally long march, and that our little arguments at crossroads and hesitations as to which we would take were only the triflings of Fate, contemptuously willing to let us think we were choosing, dawned upon us at four o’clock exactly, when we lumbered in single file along a cart track at the edge of a hop-field and emerged one by one into the back yard of Frogs’ Hole Farm.

The house stood (and very likely still does) on the other side of a dilapidated fence, in a square of rank garden. A line of shabby firs with many branches missing ran along the north side of it; a pond, green with slime, occupied the middle of what was once its lawn; and the last tenant had left in such an apparent hurry that he had not cleared up his packing materials, and the path to the front door was still littered with the straw and newspapers of his departure.

The house was square with many windows, so that in whatever corner we camped we were subject to the glassy and empty stare of two rows of them. Though it was only four o’clock when we arrived the sun was already hidden behind the big trees that crowned the hill to the west, and the place seemed to have settled down for the night. Ghostly? Very ghostly, my friends; but then even a villa of the reddest and newest type if it is not lived in is ghostly in the shiver of twilight; at least, that is what I heard Mrs. Menzies-Legh say to Edelgard, who was standing near the broken fence surveying the forlorn residence with obvious misgiving.

We had asked no one’s permission to camp there, not deeming it necessary when we heard from a labourer on the turnpike road that down an obscure lane and through a hop-field we would find all we required. Space there was certainly of every kind: empty sheds, empty barns, empty oast-houses, and, if we had chosen to open one of the rickety windows, an empty house. Space there was in plenty; but an inhabited farm with milk and butter in it would have been more convenient. Besides, there did undoubtedly lie--as Mrs. Menzies-Legh said--a sort of shiver over the place, an ominously complete silence and motionlessness of leaf and bough, and nowhere round could I see either a roof or a chimney, no, not so much as a thread of smoke issuing upward from between the hills to show me that we were not alone.

Well, I am not one to mind much if leaves do not move and a place is silent. A man does not regard these matters in the way ladies do, but I must say even I--and my friends will be able to measure from that the uncanniness of our surroundings--even I remembered with a certain regret that Lord Sigismund’s very savage and very watchful dog had gone with his master and was therefore no longer with us. Nor had we even Jellaby’s, which, inferior as it was, was yet a dog, no doubt with some amount of practice in barking, for it was still at the veterinary surgeon’s, a gentleman by now left far behind folded among the embosoming hills.

My hearers must be indulgent if my style from time to time is tinged with poetic expressions such as this about the veterinary surgeon and the hills, for they must not forget that the party I was with could hardly open any of its mouths without using words plain men like myself do not as a rule even recollect. It exuded poetry. Poetry rolled off it as naturally and as continuously as water off a duck’s back. Mrs. Menzies-Legh was an especial offender in this respect, but I have heard her gloomy husband, and Jellaby too, run her very close. After a week of it I found myself rather inclined also to talk of things like embosoming hills, and writing now about the caravan tour I cannot always avoid falling into a strain so intimately, in my memory, associated with it. They were a strange set of human beings gathered together beneath those temporary and inadequate roofs. I hope my hearers _see_ them.

Our march that day had been more silent than usual, for the party was greatly subject, as I was gradually discovering, to ups and downs in its spirits, and I suppose the dreary influence of Bodiam together with the defection of Lord Sigismund lay heavily upon them, for that day was undoubtedly a day of downs. The weather was autumnal. It did not rain, but sky and earth were equally leaden, and I only saw very occasional gleams of sunshine reflected in the puddles on which my eyes were necessarily fixed if I would successfully avoid them. At a place called Brede, a bleak hamlet exposed on the top of a hill, we were to have met Lord Sigismund but instead there was only an emissary from him with a letter for Mrs. Menzies-Legh, which she read in silence, handed to her husband in silence, waited while he read it in silence, and then without any comment gave the signal to resume the march. How differently Germans would have behaved I need not tell you, for news is a thing no German will omit to share with his neighbours, discussing it thoroughly, _lang und breit_, from every possible and impossible point of view, which is, I maintain, the human way, and the other way is inhuman.

“Is not Lord Sigismund coming to-day?” I asked Mrs. Menzies-Legh the first moment she came within earshot.

“I’m afraid not,” said she.

“To-morrow?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What, not again at all?” I exclaimed, for this was indeed bad news.

“I’m afraid not.”

And, contrary to her practice she dropped behind.

“Why is not Lord Sigismund coming back?” I shouted to Menzies-Legh, whose caravan was following mine, mine as usual being in the middle; and I walked on backward through all the puddles so as to face him, being unable to leave my horse.

“Eh?” said he.

How like an ill-conditioned carter he looked, trudging gloomily along, his coat off, his battered hat pushed back from his sullen forehead! Another week, I thought, and he would be perfectly indistinguishable from the worst example of a real one.

“Why is not Lord Sigismund coming back?” I repeated, my hands up to my mouth in order to carry my question right up to his heavy ears.

“He’s prevented.”

“Prevented?”

“Eh?”

“Prevented by what?”

“Eh?”

This was wilfulness: it must have been.

“What--has--prevented--him?” I roared.

“Look out--your van will be in the ditch.”

And turning quickly I was just in time to pull the tiresome brute of a horse, who never could be left to himself an instant, straight again.

I walked on shrugging my shoulders. Menzies-Legh was without any doubt as ill-conditioned a specimen of manhood as I have ever come across.

At the four crossroads beyond Brede, on the party’s pausing as usual to argue over the signpost while Fate, with Frogs’ Hole Farm up her sleeve, laughed in the background, I laid my hand on Jellaby’s arm--its thinness quite made me jump--and said, “Where is Lord Sigismund?”

“Gone home, I believe, with his father.”

“Why is he not coming back?”

“He’s prevented.”

“But by what? Is he ill?”

“Oh, no. He’s just--just prevented, you know.”

And Jellaby slipped his arm out of my grasp and went to stare with the others up at the signpost.

On the road we finally decided to take, while they were all clustering round the labourer I have mentioned who directed us to the deserted farm, I approached Frau von Eckthum who stood on the outer fringe of the cluster, and said in the gentler voice I instinctively used when speaking to her, “I hear Lord Sigismund is not coming back.”

Gently as my voice was, it yet made her start; she generally did start when spoken to, being unusually (it adds to her attractiveness) highly strung.

(“She doesn’t when I speak to her,” said Edelgard, on my commenting to her on this characteristic.

“My dear, you are merely another woman,” I replied--somewhat sharply, for Edelgard is really often unendurably obtuse.)

“I hear Lord Sigismund is not coming back,” I said, then, very gently, to the tender lady.

“Oh?” said she.

For the first time I could have wished a wider range of speech.

“He has been prevented, I hear.”

“Oh?”

“Do you know what has prevented him?”

She looked at me and then at the others absorbed by the labourer with a funny little look (altogether feminine) of helplessness, though it could not of course have been that; then, adding another letter but not unfortunately another word to her vocabulary, she said “No”--or rather “N-n-n-o,” for she hesitated.

And up bustled Jellaby as I was about to press my inquiries, and taking me by the elbow (the familiarity of this sort of person!) led me aside to overwhelm me with voluble directions as to the turnings to Frogs’ Hole Farm.

Well, it was undoubtedly a blow to find by far the most interesting and amiable member of the party (with the exception of Frau von Eckthum) gone, and gone without a word, without an explanation, a farewell, or a regret. It was Lord Sigismund’s presence, the presence of one so unquestionably of my own social standing, of one whose relations could all bear any amount of scrutiny and were not like Edelgard’s Aunt Bockhügel (of whom perhaps more presently) a dark and doubtful spot round which conversation had to make careful _détours_--it was undoubtedly,

I say, Lord Sigismund who had given the expedition its decent air of being just an aristocratic whim, stamped it, marked it, raised it altogether above mere appearances. He was a Christian gentleman; more, he was the only one of the party who could cook. Were we, then, to be thrown for future sustenance entirely on Jellaby’s porridge?

That afternoon, dining in the mud of the deserted farmyard, we had sausages; a dinner that had only been served once before, and which was a sign in itself that the kitchen resources were strained. I have already described how Jellaby cooked sausages, goading them round and round the pan, prodding them, pursuing them, giving them no rest in which to turn brown quietly--as foolish a way with a sausage as ever I have seen. For the second time during the tour we ate them pink, filling up as best we might with potatoes, a practice we had got quite used to, though to you, my hearers, who only know potatoes as an adjunct, it will seem a pitiable state of things. So it was; but when one is hungry to the point of starvation a hot potato is an attractive object, and two hot potatoes are exactly doubly so. Anyhow my respect for them has increased tenfold since my holiday, and I insist now on their being eaten in much larger quantities than they used to be in our kitchen, for do I not know how thoroughly they fill? And servants quarrel if they have too much meat.

“That is poor food for a man like you, Baron,” said Menzies-Legh, suddenly addressing me from the other end of the table.

He had been watching me industriously scraping--picture, my friends, Baron von Ottringel thus reduced--scraping, I say, the last remnants of the potatoes out of the saucepan after the ladies had gone, accompanied by Jellaby, to begin washing up.

It was so long since he had spoken to me of his own accord that I paused in my scraping to stare at him. Then, with my natural readiness at that sort of thing, I drew his attention to his bad manners earlier in the afternoon by baldly answering “Eh?”

“I wonder you stand it,” he said, taking no notice of the little lesson.

“Pray will you tell me how it is to be helped?” I inquired. “Roast goose does not, I have observed, grow on the hedges in your country.” (This, I felt, was an excellent retort.)

“But it flourishes in London and other big towns,” said he--a foolish thing to say to a man sitting in the back yard of Frogs’ Hole Farm. “Have a cigarette,” he added; and he pushed his case toward me.

I lit one, slightly surprised at the change for the better in his behaviour, and he got up and came and sat on the vacant camp-stool beside me.

“Hunger,” said I, continuing the conversation, “is the best sauce, and as I am constantly hungry it follows that I cannot complain of not having enough sauce. In fact, I am beginning to feel that gipsying is a very health-giving pursuit.”

“Damp--damp,” said Menzies-Legh, shaking his head and screwing up his mouth in a disapproval that astonished me.

“What?” I said. “It may be a little damp if the weather is damp, but one must get used to hardships.”

“Only to find,” said he, “that one’s constitution has been undermined.”

“What?” said I, unable to understand this change of attitude.

“Undermined for life,” said he, impressively.

“My dear sir, I have heard you myself, under the most adverse circumstances, repeatedly remark that it was healthy and jolly.”

“My dear Baron,” said he, “I am not like you. Neither Jellaby, nor I, nor Browne either, for that matter, has your physique. We are physically, compared to you--to be quite frank--mere weeds.”

“Oh, come now, my dear sir, I cannot permit you--you undervalue--of slighter build, perhaps, but hardly----”

“It is true. Weeds. Mere weeds. And my point is that we, accordingly, are not nearly so likely as you are to suffer in the long run from the privations and exposure of a bad-weather holiday like this.”

“Well now, you must pardon me if I entirely fail to see----”

“Why, my dear Baron, it’s as plain as daylight. Our constitutions will not be undermined for the shatteringly good reason that we have none to undermine.”

My hearers will agree that, logically, the position was incontrovertible, and yet I doubted.

Observing my silence, and probably guessing its cause, he took up an empty glass and poured some tea into it from the teapot at which Frau von Eckthum had been slaking her thirst in spite of my warnings (I had, alas, no right to forbid) that so much tea drinking would make her still more liable to start when suddenly addressed.

“Look here,” said he.

I looked.

“You can see this tea.”

“Certainly.”

“Clear, isn’t it? A beautiful clear brown. A tribute to the spring water here. You can see the house and all its windows through it, it is so perfectly transparent.”

And he held it up, and shutting one eye stared through it with the other.

“Well?” I inquired.

“Well, now look at this.”

And he took another glass and set it beside the first one, and poured both tea and milk into it.

“Look there,” he said.

I looked.

“Jellaby,” said he.

I stared.

Then he took another glass, and poured both tea and milk into it, setting it in a line with the first two.

“Browne,” said he.

I stared.

Then he took a fourth glass, and filled it in the same manner as the second and third and placed it at the end of the line.

“Myself,” said he.

I stared.

“Can you see through either of those three?” he asked, tapping them one after the other.

“No,” said I.

“Now if I put a little more milk into them”--he did--“it makes no difference. They were muddy and thick before, and they remain muddy and thick. _But_”--and he held the milk jug impressively over the first glass--“if I put the least drop into this one”--he did--“see how visible it is. The admirable clearness is instantaneously dimmed. The pollution spreads at once. The entire glass, owing to that single drop, is altered, muddied, ruined.”

“Well?” I inquired, as he paused and stared hard at me.

“Well?” said he. “Do you not see?”

“See what?” said I.

“My point. It’s as clear as the first glass was before I put milk into it. The first glass, my dear Baron, is you, with your sound and perfect constitution.”

I bowed.

“Your splendid health.”

I bowed.

“Your magnificent physique.”

I bowed.

“The other three are myself, and Jellaby, and Browne.”

He paused.

“And the drop of milk,” he said slowly, “is the caravan tour.”

I was confounded; and you, my hearers, will admit that I had every reason to be. Here was an example of what is rightly called irresistible logic, and a reasonable man dare not refuse, once he recognizes it, to bow in silence. Yet I felt very well. I said I did, after a pause during which I was realizing how unassailable Menzies-Legh’s position was, and endeavouring to reconcile its unassailableness with my own healthful sensations.

“You can’t get away from facts,” he answered. “There they are.”

And he indicated with his cigarette the four glasses and the milk jug.

“But,” I repeated, “except for a natural foot-soreness I undoubtedly do feel very well.”

“My dear Baron, it is obvious beyond all argument that the more absolutely well a person is the more easily he must be affected by the smallest upset, by the smallest variation in the environment to which he has got accustomed. Paradox, which plays so large a part in all truths, is rampant here. Those in perfect health are nearer than anybody else to being seriously ill. To keep well you must never be quite so.”

He paused.

“When,” he continued, seeing that I said nothing, “we began caravaning we could not know how persistently cold and wet it was going to be, but now that we do I must say I feel the responsibility of having persuaded you--or of my sister-in-law’s having persuaded you--to join us.”

“But I feel very well,” I repeated.

“And so you will, up to the moment when you do not.”

Of course that was true.

“Rheumatism, now,” he said, shaking his head; “I greatly fear rheumatism for you in the coming winter. And rheumatism once it gets hold of a man doesn’t leave him till it has ravaged each separate organ, including, as everybody knows, that principal organ of all, the heart.”

This was gloomy talk, and yet the man was right. The idea that a holiday, a thing planned and looked forward to with so much pleasure, was to end by ravaging my organs did not lighten the leaden atmosphere that surrounded and weighed upon Frogs’ Hole Farm.

“I cannot alter the weather,” I said at last--irritably, for I felt ruffled.

“No. But I wouldn’t risk it for too long if I were you,” said he.

“Why, I have paid for a month,” I exclaimed, surprised that he should overlook this clinching fact.

“That, set against an impaired constitution, is a very inconsiderable trifle,” said he.

“Not inconsiderable at all,” said I sharply.

“Money is money, and I am not one to throw it away. And what about the van? You cannot abandon an entire van at a great distance from the place it belongs to.”

“Oh,” said he quickly, “we would see to that.”

I got up, for the sight of the glasses full of what I was forced to acknowledge was symbolic truth irritated me. The one representing myself, into which he had put but one drop of milk, was miserably discoloured. I did not like to think of such discolouration being my probable portion, and yet having paid for a month’s caravaning what could I do?

The afternoon was chilly and very damp, and I buttoned my wraps carefully about my throat. Menzies-Legh watched me.

“Well,” said he, getting up and looking first at me and then at the glasses and then at me again, “what do you think of doing, Baron?”

“Going for a little stroll,” I said.

And I went.