Chapter VI

It was twelve o’clock before we left Grib’s (or Grip’s) Common, lurching off it by another grassy lane down into the road in the direction of Mereworth, and leaving, as we afterward discovered, several portions of our equipment behind us.

“What a lovely, sparkling world!” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, coming and walking beside me.

I was struggling with the tempers of my very obstinate horse, so could only gasp a brief assent.

The road was narrow, and wound along hard and smooth between hedges she seemed to find attractive, for every few yards she stopped to pull something green out of them and take it along with her. The heavy rain in the night had naturally left things wet, and there being a bright sun the drops on the blades of grass and on the tips of the leaves could not help sparkling, but there was nothing remarkable in that, and I would not have noticed it if she had not looked round with such apparent extreme delight and sniffed in the air as if she were in a first-class perfumery shop _Unter den Linden_ where there really are things worth sniffing. Also she appeared to think there was something very wonderful about the sky, which was just the ordinary blue one has a right to expect in summer sprinkled over with the usual number of white fine-weather clouds, for she gazed up at that too, and evidently with the greatest pleasure.

“_Schwärmerisch_,” said I to myself; and was internally slightly amused.

My hearers will agree with me that such raptures are well enough in a young girl in a white gown, with blue eyes and the washed-out virginal appearance one does not dislike at eighteen before Love the Artist has pounced on it and painted it pink, and they will also, I think, agree that the older and married women must take care to be at all times quiet. Ejaculations of a poetic or ecstatic nature should not, as a rule, pass their lips. They may ejaculate perhaps over a young baby (if it is their own) but that is the one exception; and there is a good reason for this one, the possession of a young baby implying as a general rule a corresponding youth in its mother. I do not think, however, that it is nice when a woman ejaculates over, say, her tenth young baby. The baby, of course, will still be sufficiently young for it is a fresh one, but it is not a fresh mother, and by that time she should have stiffened into stolidity, and apart from the hours devoted to instructing her servant, silence. Indeed, the perfect woman does not talk at all. Who wants to hear her? All that we ask of her is that she shall listen intelligently when we wish, for a change, to tell her about our own thoughts, and that she should be at hand when we want anything. Surely this is not much to ask. Matches, ash-trays, and one’s wife should be, so to speak, on every table; and I maintain that the perfect wife copies the conduct of the matches and the ash-trays, and combines being useful with being dumb.

These are my views, and as I drove my caravan along the gravelly road I ruminated on them. The great brute of a horse, overfed and under-worked, was constantly endeavouring to pass the Ailsa which was in front of us, and as that meant in that narrow lane taking the Elsa up the bank as a preliminary, I was as constantly endeavouring to thwart him. And the sun being hot and I (if I may so put it) a very meltable man, I soon grew tired of this constant tugging and looked round for Edelgard to come and take her turn.

She was nowhere to be seen.

“Have you dropped anything?” asked Frau von Eckthum, who was walking a little way behind.

“No,” said I; adding, with much readiness, “but my wife has dropped me.”

“Oh!” said she.

I kept the horse back till she caught me up, while her leaner sister, who did not slacken her pace, went on ahead. Then I explained my theory about wives and matches. She listened attentively, in just the way the really clever woman knows best how to impress us favourably does, busying herself as she listened in tying some flowers she had gathered into a bunch, and not doing anything so foolish as to interrupt.

Every now and then as I warmed and drove my different points home, she just looked at me with thoughtful interest. It was delightful. I forgot the annoying horse, the heat of the sun, the chill of the wind, the bad breakfast, and all the other inconveniences, and saw how charming a caravan tour can be. “Given,” I thought, “the right people and fine weather, such a holiday is bound to be agreeable.”

The day was undoubtedly fine, and as for the right people they were amply represented by the lady at my side. Never had I found so good a listener. She listened to everything. She took no mean advantage of one’s breath-pauses to hurry in observations of her own as so many women do. And the way she looked at me when anything struck her particularly was sufficient to show how keenly appreciative she was. After all there is nothing so enjoyable as a conversation with a thoroughly competent listener. The first five miles flew. It seemed to me that we had hardly left Grip’s Common before we were pulling up at a wayside inn and sinking on to the bench in front of it and calling for drink.

What the others all drank was milk, or a gray, frothy liquid they said was ginger-beer--childish, sweet stuff, with little enough beer about it, heaven knows, and quite unfit one would think for the stomach of a real man. Jellaby brought Frau von Eckthum a glass of it, and even provided the two nondescripts with refreshments, and they took his attentions quite as a matter of course, instead of adopting the graceful German method of ministering to the wants of the sterner and therefore more thirsty sex.

The road stretched straight and white as far as one could see on either hand. On it stood the string of caravans, with old James watering the horses in the sun. Under the shadow of the inn we sat and rested, the three Englishmen, to my surprise, in their shirt-sleeves, a condition in which no German gentleman would ever show himself to a lady.

“Why? Are there so many holes in them?” asked the younger and more pink and white of the nondescripts, on hearing me remark on this difference of custom to Mrs. Menzies-Legh; and she looked at me with an air of grave interest.

Of course I did not answer, but inwardly criticized the upbringing of the English child. It is characteristic of the nation that Mrs. Menzies-Legh did not so much as say Hush to her.

On the right, the direction in which we were going to travel, the road dipped down into a valley with distant hills beyond, and the company, between their sips of milk, talked much about the blueness of this distance. Also they talked much about the greenness of the Mereworth woods rustling opposite, and the way the sun shone; as though woods in summer were ever anything but green, and as though the sun, when it was there at all, could do anything but go on shining!

I was on the point of becoming impatient at such talk and suggesting that if they would only leave off drinking milk they would probably see things differently, when Frau von Eckthum came and sat down beside me on the bench, her ginger-beer in one hand and a biscuit, also made of ginger, in the other (the thought of what they must taste like together made me shiver) and said in her attractive voice:

“I hope you are going to enjoy your holiday. I feel responsible, you know.” And she looked at me with her pretty smile.

I liked to think of the gentle lady as a kind of godmother, and made the proper reply, chivalrous and sugared, and was asking myself what it is that gives other people’s wives a charm one’s own never did, never could, and never will possess, when the door-curtain of the Elsa was pulled aside, and Edelgard, whose absence at our _siesta_ I had not noticed, stepped out on to the platform.

Lord Sigismund and Jellaby immediately got up and unhooked the steps and held them for her to come down by. Menzies-Legh also went across and offered her a hand. I alone sat still, as well I might; for not only am I her husband, but it is absurd to put false notions of her importance into a woman’s head who has not had such attentions paid her since she was eighteen and what we call _appetitlich_.

Besides, I was rooted to the bench by amazement at her extraordinary appearance. No wonder she was not to be seen when duty ought to have kept her at my side helping me with the horse. She had not walked one of those five hot miles. She had been sitting in the caravan, busily cutting her skirt short, altering her hair, and transforming herself into as close a copy as she could manage of Mrs. Menzies-Legh and her sister.

Small indeed was the resemblance now to the Christian gentlewoman one wishes one’s wife to seem to be. Few were the traces of Prussia. I declare I would not have recognized her had I met her casually in the road; and to think she had dared do it without a word, without asking my permission, without even asking my opinion! Her nice new felt hat with its pheasant’s wing had almost disappeared beneath a gauze veil arranged after the fashion adopted by the sisters. Heaven knows where she got it, or out of what other garment, now of course ruined, she had cut and contrived it; and what is the use of having a pheasant’s wing if you hide it? Her hair, up to then so tight and inconspicuous, was loosened, her skirt showed almost all of both her boots. The whole figure was strangely like that of the two sisters, a little thickened, a little emphasized.

What galled me was the implied entire indifference to my authority. My mind’s indignant eye saw the snap her fingers were executing in its face. Also, one’s own wife is undoubtedly a thing apart. It is proper and delightful that the wives of others should be attractive, but one’s own ought to be adorned solely with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit combined with that other ornament, an enduring desire to keep the husband God has given her comfortable and therefore happy. Without these two a wife cannot be regarded as a fit object for her husband’s esteem. I plainly saw that I would find it impossible to esteem mine in that skirt. I do not know what she had done to her feet, but they looked much smaller than I had been accustomed to suppose them as she came down the steps assisted by the three gentlemen. My full beer-glass, held neglected in my hand, dripped unheeded on to the road as I stared stupidly at this apparition. Rapidly I selected the first few of the phrases I would address to her the moment we found ourselves alone. There should be an immediate stop put to this loosening of the earth round the roots of the great and sheltering tree of a husband’s authority.

“Poor silly sheep,” I could not help murmuring, those animals flashing into my mind as a legitimate development of the sheltering-tree image.

Then I felt there was a quotation atmosphere about them, and was sure Horace or Virgil--elusive bugbears of my boyhood--must have said something that began like that and went on appropriately if only I could remember it. I regretted that having forgotten it I was unable to quote it, to myself as it were, but yet just loud enough for the lady beside me to hear. She, however, heard what I did say, and looked at me inquiringly.

“If I were to explain, dear lady,” said I, instantly responding to the look, “you would not understand.”

“Oh,” said she.

“I was thinking in symbols.”

“Oh,” said she.

“It is one of my mental tricks,” I said, my gaze however contracting sternly as it fell on Edelgard’s approaching form.

“Oh,” said she.

Certainly she is a quiet lady. But how stimulating. Her solitary oh’s are more packed with expressiveness than other women’s hour-long tirades.

She too was watching Edelgard coming toward us across the sun-beaten bit of road, her head slightly turned away from me but not so much that I could not see she was smiling at my wife. Of course she must have been amused at such a slavish imitation; but with her usual kindness she made room on the bench for her and, without alluding to the transformation, suggested refreshment.

Edelgard as she sat down shot a very curious glance at me round the corner of her head-wrappings. I was surprised to see little that could be called apology in her way of sitting down, and looked in vain for the red spot that used to appear on each cheek at home when she was aware that she had done wrong and that it was not going to be passed over. She was sheltered from immediate steps on my part by Frau von Eckthum who sat between us, and when Jellaby approached her with a glass of milk she actually took it without so much as breathing the honest word beer.

This was too much. I threw back my head and laughed as heartily as I have ever seen a man laugh. Edelgard and milk! Why, I do not believe she had drunk it pure like that since the day she parted from the last of her infancy’s bottles. Edelgard becoming squeamish; Edelgard posing--and what a pose; good heavens, what a pose! Edelgard, one of Prussia’s daughters, one of Prussia’s noblemen’s daughters, accepting milk instead of beer, and accepting it at the hands of a Socialist in shirt sleeves. A vision of Storchwerder’s face if it could see these things rose before me. Of course I laughed. Not, mind you, without some slight tinge of bitterness, for laughter may be bitter and hearty at the same time, but on the whole I think I did credit to my unfailing sense of humour in spite of very great provocation, and I laughed till even the horses pricked up their ears and turned their heads and stared.

Nobody else smiled. On the contrary--it cannot be true that laughter is infectious--they watched me with a serious, amusingly serious, surprise. Edelgard did not watch. She knew better than that. Carefully she concealed her face in the milk, feeling no doubt it was the best place for it, and unable to leave off drinking the stuff because of the problem of how to meet my eyes once she did. Frau von Eckthum regarded me with much the same attentive interest she had

shown when I was explaining some of my views to her on the march--I mean, of course, my views on wives, but language is full of pitfalls. The Menzies-Legh niece (they called her Jane) paused in the middle of a banana to stare. Her friend, who answered to the singular name (let us hope it was merely a _sobriquet_) of Jumps, forgot to continue greedily pressing biscuits into her mouth, and, forgetting also that her mouth was open to receive them, left it in that condition. Mrs. Menzies-Legh got up and snap-shotted me. Menzies-Legh leaned forward when I had had my laugh nearly out and said: “Come, Baron, let us share the joke?” But his melancholy voice belied his words, and looking round at him I thought he seemed little in the mood for sharing anything. I never saw such a solemn, dull face; it shrivelled up my merriment just to see it. So I merely shrugged one of my shoulders and said it was a German joke.

“Ah,” said Menzies-Legh; and did not press me further. And Jellaby, wiping his forehead (on which lay perpetually a long, lank strand of hair which he was as perpetually brushing aside with his hand, apparently desirous of not having it there, but only apparently, for five seconds with any competent barber would have rid him of it forever)--Jellaby, I say, asking Menzies-Legh in his womanish tenor voice if the green shadows in the wood opposite did not remind him of some painter friend’s work, they began talking pictures as though they were as important every bit as the great objects of life--wealth, and war, and a foot on the neck of the nations.

Well, it was impossible to help contrasting their sluggishness with a party of Germans under similar conditions. Edelgard would have been greeted with one immense roar of laughter on her appearing suddenly in her new guise. She would have been assailed with questions, pelted with mocking comments, and I might have expressed my own disapproval frankly and openly and no one would have thought it anything but natural. There, however, in that hypocritical country they one and all pretended not to have seen any change at all; and there was something so depressing about so many stiff and lantern jaws whichever way I turned my head that after my one Homeric burst I found myself unable to go on. A joke soon palls if nobody else can see it. In silence I drank my beer: and realized that my opinion of the nation is low.

It was chiefly Menzies-Legh and Jellaby who sent down the mercury, I reflected, as we resumed the march. One gets impressions, one knows not how or why, nor does one know when. I had not spoken much to either, yet there the impressions were. It was not likely that I could be mistaken, for I suppose that of all people in the world a Prussian officer is the least likely to be that. He is too shrewd, too quick, of too disciplined an intelligence. It is these qualities that keep him at the top of the European tree, combined, indeed, with his power of concentrating his entire being into one noble determination to stay on it. Again descending to allegory, I can see Menzies-Legh and Jellaby and all the other slow-spoken and slow-thoughted Englishmen flapping ineffectually among the lower and more comfortable branches of the tree of nations. Yes, they are more sheltered there; they have roomier nests; less wind and sun; less distance to fly in order to fetch the waiting grub from the moss beneath; but what about the Prussian eagle sitting at the top, his beak flashing in the light, his watchful eye never off them? Some day he will swoop down on them when they are, as usual, asleep, clear out their and similar well-lined nests, and have the place to himself--becoming, as the well-known picture has it (for I too can allude to pictures), in all his glory _Enfin seul_.

The road went down straight and long and white into the flat. High dusty hedges shut us in on either side. Across the end, which looked an interminable way off, lay the blue distance the milk drinkers admired. The three caravans creaked over the loose stones. Their brown varnish glistened blindingly in the sun. The horses plodded onward with hanging heads, subdued, no doubt, by the growing number of the hours. It was half-past three, and there were no signs of camp or dinner; no signs of our doing anything but walk along like that in the dust, our feet aching, our throats parching, our eyes burning, and our stomachs empty, forever.