Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  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) cleanness; 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 Menzie
s-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 cant”

  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 wellborn?) 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?’’