Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  Mrs. Menzies-Legh walked with me. Directly she saw I was. alone, the others hurrying on ahead at a pace I did not care to keep up with, she loitered behind till I overtook her and walked with me.

  I have made no secret of the fact that this lady seemed to mark me during the tour for her special prey. You, my hearers, must have noticed it by now, for I conceal nothing. I can safely say I was not to blame, for in no way did I encourage her. Not only must she have been over thirty, but more than once she had allowed herself to do that which can only be described as poking fun at me. Besides, I do not care for the type. I dislike the least suggestion of wiriness in woman; and there was nothing of her bodily (except wire) and far too much intellectually — I mean so far as a woman can be intellectual, which, of course, is not far at all. I therefore feel entirely conscience-clear, and carefully avoiding any comments which might give the impression of vanity on my part, merely state the bare facts that the lady was constantly at my elbow, that my elbow was reluctant, and that no other member of the party clung to it like that.

  There she sat with me, for instance, in the ruins, pretending she was tired too, though of course she was not, for never was any one more active, and for want of a better listener — Frau von Eckthum had from the first melted away among the shadows — I was obliged to talk to her in the above strain. However, one cannot really talk to such a woman, not really converse with her. She soon reminded me of this fact (which I well knew) by inquiring whether I did not think people were very apt to call that Providence which was in reality nothing more nor less than their own selves— “Or,” she added (profanely) “if they’re in another mood they call it the Devil, but it is always just themselves.”

  Well, I had not come through the mud to Bodiam to be profane, so I gathered my wraps about me and prepared to go.

  “But I do see your point,” she said, noticing these preparations, and realizing, perhaps, that she had gone too far. “Things do sometimes happen very unluckily, and punishments are out of all proportion to the offence. I think, for instance, it was perfectly terrible for you that you should have been scolding your wife”

  “Not scolding. Rebuking.”

  “It’s the same thing”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Rebuking her, then, up to the very moment — oh, it would have killed me!”

  And she shivered.

  “My dear lady,” said I, slightly amused, “a man has certain duties, and he performs them. Sometimes they are unpleasant, and he still performs them. If he allowed himself to be killed each time there would be a mighty dearth of husbands in the world, and what would you all do then?”

  Women however have no sense of humour, and she was unable to catch at this straw of it offered her for the purpose of lightening the conversation. On the contrary, she turned her head and looking at me gravely (pretty eyes, wasted) she said, “But how much better never, never, to do your duty,”

  “Really “ I protested.

  “Yes. If it means being unkind.”

  “Unkind? Is a mother unkind who rebukes her child?’’

  “Oh, call it by its proper name — scolding, preaching, advising, abusing — it’s all unkind, wickedly unkind.”

  “Abusing, my dear lady?”

  “Come, now. Baron, what you said to the Duke”

  “Ah. That was an unfortunate accident. I did what under any other circumstances would have been my duty, and Providence

  “Oh, Baron dear, leave Providence alone. And leave your duty alone. A tongue doing its duty is such a terrible instrument of destruction. Why, you can almost see all the little Loves and Charities turning paler and paler and weaker and weaker the longer it wags, and shrivelling up quite at last and being snuffed out. Really I have been thankful on my knees every time I have not said what I was going to say when I’ve been annoyed.”

  “Indeed? “ said I, ironically.

  I might have added that no great strain could have been put upon her knees, for I could conceive no woman less likely to be silent if she wanted to speak. But, candidly, what did it matter? I have always found it quite impossible to take a woman seriously, even when I am attracted; and heaven knows I had no desire to sit on stones in that wet place while this one spread out her little stock of ill-assimilated wisdom for my (presumable) improvement.

  I therefore began to button up my cloak with an unmistakable finality, determined to seek the others and suggest a return to the camp.

  ‘‘You forget,’’ I said, while I buttoned, “that an outburst of annoyance has nothing whatever to do with the calm discharge of a reasonable man’s obligations.”

  “What, you’ve been quite calm and happy when you’ve been doing what you call rebuke f ‘ said she, looking up at me. “Oh, Baron.” And she shook her head and smiled.

  “Calm, I hope and believe, but not happy. Nor did I expect to be. Duty has nothing to do with one’s happiness.”

  “No, nor with the other one’s,” said she quickly.

  Of course I could have scattered her reasoning to the winds if I had chosen to bring real logic to bear on it, but it would have taken time, she being very unconvinceable, and I really could not be bothered.

  “Let Menzies-Legh convince her,” thought I, making myself ready for the walk back in the rain, aware that I had quite enough to do convincing my own wife.

  “Try praising,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh.

  Not seeing the point, I buttoned in silence.

  “Praising and encouraging. You’d be astonished at the results.”

  In silence, for I would not be at the trouble of asking what it was I was to praise and encourage, I turned up my collar and fastened the little strap across the front. She, seeing I had no further intention of talking, began to get ready too for the plunge out into the rain.

  “You’re not angry. Baron dear?” she asked, leaning across and looking into as much of my face as appeared above the collar.

  This mode of addressing me was one that I had never in any way encouraged, but no amount of stiffening at its use discouraged it. In justice, I must remind you who have met her that her voice is not disagreeable. You will remember it is low, and so far removed from shrillness that it lends a spurious air to everything she says of being more worth listening to than it is. Edelgard described it fancifully, but not altogether badly, as being full of shadows. It vibrated, not unmusically, up and down among these shadows, and when she asked me if I were angry it took on a very fair semblance of sympathetic concern.

  I, however, knew very well that the last thing she really was sympathetic — all the aptitude for sympathy the Flitz family had produced was concentrated in her gentle sister — so I was in no way hoodwinked.

  “My dear lady,” I said, shaking out the folds of my cloak, ‘‘I am not a child.”

  “Sometimes I think,” said she, getting up too, “that you are not enjoying your holiday. That it’s not what you thought it would be. That perhaps we are not a very — not a very congenial party.”

  ‘‘You are very good,” said I, with a stiffness that relegated her at once to an immense and proper distance away, for was not this a tending toward the confidential? And a man has to be careful.

  She looked at me a moment at this, her head a little on one side, considering me. Her want of feminine reserve — conceive Edelgard staring at a living gentleman with the frank attention one brings to bear on an inanimate object — struck me afresh. She seemed absolutely without a vestige of that consciousness of sex, of those arriere-pensies (as our conquered but still intelligent neighbours say) very properly called female modesty. A well brought up German lady soon casts down her eyes when facing a gentleman. She at once recollects that she is a woman and he is a man, and continues to recollect it during the whole time they are together. I am sure in the days when Mrs. Menzies-Legh was yet a Flitz she did so, but England had blunted if not completely destroyed those finer Prussian feelings, and there she stood considering me with what I can only call a perfectly sexl
ess detachment. What, I wondered, was she going to say that would annoy me at the end of it? But she said nothing; she just gave her head a little shake, turned suddenly, and walked away.

  Well, I was not going to walk too — at least, not with her. The ruins were not my property, and she was not my guest, so I felt quite justified in letting her go alone. Chivalry, too, has its limits, and one does not care to waste any of one’s stock of it. No man can be more chivalrous than I if provided with a proper object, but I do not consider that objects are proper once they have reached an age to be able to take care of themselves, neither are they so if Nature has encrusted them in an armour of unattractiveness; in this latter case Nature herself may be said to be chivalrous to them, and they can safely be left to her protection.

  I therefore followed at my leisure in Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s wake, desiring to return to the camp, but not desiring to do it with her. I thought I would search for Frau von Eckthum and she and I would walk back happily together; and, passing under the arch leading into what had been the banqueting hall, I immediately found the object of my search beneath an umbrella which was being held over her head by Jellaby.

  When I was a child, and still in charge of my mother, she, doing her best by me, used to say, “Otto, put yourself in his place,” if my judgments chanced to be ill-considered or headlong.

  I did so; it became a habit; and in consequence I arrived at conclusions I would probably not otherwise have arrived at. So now, coming across my gentle friend beneath Jellaby’s umbrella, I mechanically carried out my mother’s injunction. At once I began to imagine what my feelings would be in her place. How, I rapidly asked myself, would I enjoy such close proximity to the boring Socialist, to the common man of the people if I were a lady of exceptionally refined moral and physical texture, the fine flower and latest blossom of an ancient, aristocratic. Conservative, and right-thinking family? Why, it would be torture; and so was this that I had providentially chanced upon torture.

  “My dear friend,” I cried, darting forward, “what are you doing here in the wet and darkness unprotected? Permit me to offer you my arm and conduct you to your sister, who is, I believe, preparing to return to camp. Allow me”

  And before Jellaby could frame a sentence I had drawn her hand through my arm and was leading her carefully away.

  He, I regret to say, quite unable (owing to his thick skin) to see when his presence was not desired, came too, making clumsy attempts to hold his umbrella over her and chiefly succeeding, awkward as he is, in jerking the rain off its tips down my neck.

  Well, I could not be rude to him before a lady and roundly tell him to take himself off, but I do not think he enjoyed his walk. To begin with I suddenly remembered that no members of our party, except Edelgard and myself, possessed umbrellas, so that I was able to say with the mildness that is sometimes so telling: “ Jellaby, what umbrella is this?”

  “The Baroness kindly lent it to me,” he replied.

  “Oh, indeed. Community of goods, eh? And what is she doing herself without one, may I inquire?”

  “I took her home. She said she had some sewing to do. I think it was to mend a garment of yours.”

  “Very likely. Then, since it is my wife’s umbrella, and therefore mine, as you will hardly deny, for if two persons become by the marriage law one flesh they must equally become one everything else, and therefore also one umbrella, may I request you instead of inserting it so persistently between my collar and my neck to hand it over to me, and allow its lawful owner to hold it for this lady?’’

  And I took it from him, and looked down at Frau von Eckthum and laughed, for I knew she would be amused at Jellaby’s being treated as he ought to be.

  She, of my own nation and class, must often have been, I think, scandalized at the way the English members of the party behaved to him, absolutely as though he were one of themselves. Her fastidiousness must often and often have been wounded by Jellaby’s appearance and manner of speech, by his flannel collar, his untidy clothes, the wisp of hair forever being brushed aside from his forehead only forever to fall across it again, his slender, almost feminine frame, his round face, and the ridiculous whiteness of his skin. Really, the only way to treat this person was as a kind of joke; not to take him seriously, not to allow oneself to be, as one so often was on the verge of being, angry with him. So I gave the hand resting on my arm a slight pressure expressive of mutual understanding, and looked down at her and laughed.

  The dear lady was not, however, invariably quick of comprehension. As a rule, yes; but once or twice she gave the last touch to her femininity by being divinely stupid, and on this occasion, whether it was because her little feet were wet and therefore cold, or she was not attending to the conversation, or she had had such a dose of Jellaby that her brain refused any new impression, she responded neither to my look nor to my laugh. Her eyes were fixed on the ground, and the delicate and serious outline of her nose was all that I was permitted to see.

  Respecting her mood, as a tactful man naturally would, I did not again directly appeal to her, but laid myself out to amuse her on the way up the hill by talking to Jellaby in a strain of mock solemnity and endeavouring to draw him out for her entertainment. Unfortunately he resisted my well-meant efforts, and was more taciturn than I had yet seen him. He hardly spoke, and she, I fear, was very tired, for only once did she say Oh. So that the conversation ended by being a disquisition on Socialism held solely by myself, listened to by Frau von Eckthum with absorbed and silent interest, and by Jellaby with, I am sure, the greatest rage. Anyhow, I made some very good points, and he did not venture a single protest. Probably his fallacious theories had never had such a thorough pulling to pieces before, for there were two miles to go up hill and I made the pace as slow as possible. My hearers must also bear in mind that I exclusively employed that most deadly weapon for withering purposes, the double-barrelled syringe of irony and wit. Nothing can stand against the poison pumped out of these two, and I could afford to bid Jellaby the cheeriest good night as I helped the tender lady up the steps of her caravan.

  He, it is amusing to relate, barely answered. But the moment he had gone Frau von Eckthum found her tongue again, for on my telling her as she was about to disappear through her doorway how greatly I had enjoyed being able to be of some slight service to her, she paused with her hand on the curtain and looking down at me, said: “What service?”

  ‘‘Rescuing you from Jellaby,” said I.

  “Oh,” said she; and drew back the curtain and went in.

  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.