Chapter XVII: 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.