Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  On the stubble I walked up and down lost in reflection, while Edelgard, helped (officiously I thought, but I did not care enough to mind) by Menzies-Legh, stuffed our belongings into bags. She had asked no questions. If she had I would not have answered them, being little in the mood as you can imagine to put up with wives. I just told her, on her return from seeing Jellaby off, of my decision to cross by that night’s boat, and bade her get our things together. She said nothing, but at once began to pack. She did not even inquire why we were not going to look at London first, as we had originally planned. London? Who cared for London .? My mood was not one in which a man bothers about London. With reference to that city it can best be described by the single monosyllable Tcha.

  I will not linger over the packing, or relate how when it was finished Edelgard indulged in a prolonged farewell (with embraces, if you please) of the two uninteresting fledglings, in a fervent shaking of both Menzies-Legh’s hands combined with an invitation — I heard it — to stay with us in Storchwerder, and the pressing upon old James in a remote corner of something that looked suspiciously like a portion of her dress-allowance; or how she then set out by my side for the station steeped in that which we call Ahschiedsstimmungy old James preceding us with our luggage while the others took care for the last time of the camp; or with what abandonment of apparent affectionate regret she hung herself out of the train window as we presently passed along the bottom of the field and waved her handkerchief. Such rankness of sentiment could only make me shrug my shoulders, filled as I was by my own absorbing thoughts.

  I did glance up, though, and there on the stubble, surrounded by every sort of litter, stood the three familiar brown vehicles blistering in the sun, with Menzies-Legh and the fledglings kneedeep in straw and saucepans and bags and other forlorn discomforts, watching us depart.

  Strange how alien the whole thing seemed, how little connection it seemed to have with me now that the sparkling bubbles (if I may refer to Frau von Eckthum as bubbles) had disappeared and only the dregs were left. I could not help feeling glad, as I raised my hat in courteous acknowledgment of the frantic wavings of the fledglings, that I was finally out of all the mess.

  Menzies-Legh gravely returned my salute; our train rounded a curve; and camp and caravaners disappeared at once and forever into the unrecallable past.

  CHAPTER XXI

  THUS our caravaning came to an end. I could hardly believe it when I thought how at that hour of the day before I was lying beneath the hop-poles of Frogs’ Hole Farm with the greater part, as I supposed, of the tour before me; I could hardly believe that here we were again, Edelgard and I, tête-à-tête in a railway carriage and with a future of, if I may coin a word, tete-a-teteness stretching uninterruptedly ahead as far as imagination could be induced to look. And not only just ordinary tete-a-tetenessy but with the complication of one of the tetesy so to speak, being rankly rebellious and unwifely. How long would it take, I wondered, glancing at her as she sat in the corner opposite me, to bring her back to the reason in which she used before we came to England to take delight?

  I glanced at her, and I found she was looking at me; and immediately on catching my eye she leaned forward and said:

  “Otto, what was it you did?”

  They were the first words she had spoken to me that day, and very naturally failing to see any point in them I requested her not to be subtle, which is courteous for senseless.

  “Why,” said she, not heeding this warning, “did the party break up? What was it you did?”

  Were there ever such questions? But I recollected she could not dream how things really were, and therefore was not as much put out as I would otherwise have been at the characteristically wifely fashion of at once when anything seemed to be going wrong attributing it to her husband.

  I therefore good-humouredly applied the Aunt Bockhugel remedy to her, and was willing to leave it at that if she had let me. She, however, preferred to quarrel. Without the least attempt to change the Bockhugel face she said, “My dear Otto — poor Aunt Bockhugel. Won’t we leave her in peace? But tell me what it was you did.”

  Then I became vexed, for really the assumption of superiority, of the right to criticize and blame, went further than a reasonable man can permit. What I said as we journeyed up to London I will not here repeat; it has been said before and will be said often enough again so long as husbands have to have wives: but how about the responsibility resting on the wives? I remembered the cheerful mood I had been in on getting up, and felt no small degree of resentment at the manner in which my wife was trying to wipe it out. Give me a chance, and I am the kindest of men; take away my chance, and what can I do?

  And so, my friends, as it were with a wrangle ended our sojourn on British soil. I lay down my pen, and become lost in many reflections as I think of all these things. Long ago have we settled down again to our ordinary Storchwerder life, with an Emilie instead of a Clothilde in the kitchen. Long ago we paid our calls announcing to our large circle that we were back. We have taken up the threads of duty, we have resumed regulated existence; and gradually as the weeks melt into months and the influence of Storchwerder presses more heavily upon her, I have observed that my wife shows an increasing tendency once more to find her level. I need not have worried; I need not have wondered how I could bring her to reason. Storchwerder is doing it. Its atmosphere and associations are very potent. They are being, I am thankful to say, too strong for Edelgard. After a few preliminary convulsions she began to cook my meals and look after my welfare as dutifully as before, and other effects no doubt will follow. At present she is more silent than before the tour, and does not laugh as readily as she used when I chance to be in a jesting mood; also at times a British microbe that has escaped the vigilance of those beneficent little creatures Science tells us are in our blood on the alert to devour intrusive foreigners crops up and causes her to comment on my sayings and doings rather a la Mrs. Menzies-Legh, but I frown her down or apply the Aunt Bockhugel, and in another few months I trust all will be exactly as it used to be. I myself am exactly as I used to be — a plain, outspoken, patriotic, Christian gentleman, going steadily along the path of duty, neither looking to the right nor to the left (if I did I should not see Frau von Eckthun for she is still in England), and using my humble abilities to do what I can for the glory of my country and my Emperor.

  And now having finished the narrative there is nothing more to do but to buy a red pencil and put marks on it. Many, I fear, will be those marks. Unfortunate is the fact that you cannot be sincere without at the same time being indiscreet. But I trust that what remains will be treated by my hearers with the indulgence due to a man who has only been desirous of telling the whole truth, or in other words (and which amount, I take it, to precisely the same thing) of concealing nothing.

  POST SCRIPTUM

  A TERRIBLE thing has happened.

  Finished a week ago and the invitations to come and listen already in the post, with the flat being cleaned in preparation and beer, and sandwiches almost, as it were, on the threshold, I have been obliged to take my manuscript once more out of the locked drawer which conceals it from Edelgard’s eyes in order to record a most lamentable occurrence.

  My wife received a letter this morning from Mrs. Menzies-Legh informing her that Frau von Eckthum is about to be married to Jellaby.

  No words can express the shock this has given me. No words can express my horror at such a union. Left to herself, helpless in the clutches of her English relatives, the gentle creature’s very virtues — her pliability, her tender womanliness — have become the means of bringing about the catastrophe. She was influenced, persuaded, a prey. It is six months since she was handed over entirely to the Menzies-Leghs, six months of no doubt steady resistance, ending probably in her health breaking down and in her giving in. It hardly bears thinking of. A Briton. A Socialist. A man in flannel. No family. No money. And the most terrible opinions. My shock and horror are so great, so profound, that I have ca
ncelled the invitations and will lock this up perhaps forever, certainly for some weeks; for how could I possibly read aloud the story of our harmonious and delightful intercourse with the tragic sequel public knowledge?

  And my wife, when she read the letter at breakfast, clapped her hands and cried, “Isn’t it splendid — oh, Otto, aren’t you glad?”

  THE END

  THE PASTOR’S WIFE

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  PART II

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  PART III

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CHAPTER XXXV

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  The original frontispiece

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  On that April afternoon all the wallflowers of the world seemed to her released body to have been piled up at the top of Regent Street so that she should walk in fragrance.

  She was in this exalted mood, the little mouse-coloured young lady slipping along southwards from Harley Street, because she had just had a tooth out. After weeks of miserable indifference she was quivering with responsiveness again, feeling the relish of life, the tang of it, the jollity of all this bustle and hurrying past of busy people. And the beauty of it, the beauty of it, she thought, fighting a tendency to loiter in the middle of the traffic to have a good look — the beauty of the sky across the roofs of the houses, the delicacy of the mistiness that hung down there over the curve of the street, the loveliness of the lights beginning to shine in the shop windows. Surely the colour of London was an exquisite thing. It was like a pearl that late afternoon, something very gentle and pale, with faint blue shadows. And as for its smell, she doubted, indeed, whether heaven itself could smell better, certainly not so interesting. “And anyhow,” she said to herself, lifting her head a moment in appreciation, “it can’t possibly smell more alive.”

  She herself had certainly never been more alive. She felt electric. She would not have been surprised if sparks had come crackling out of the tips of her sober gloves. Not only was she suddenly and incredibly relieved from acute pain, but for the first time in her life of twenty-two years she was alone. This by itself, without the business of the tooth, was enough to make a dutiful, willing, and hardworked daughter tingle. She would have tingled if by some glorious chance a whole free day had come to her merely inside the grey walls of the garden at home; but to be free and idle in London, to have them all so far away, her family down there in the west, to have them so necessarily silent, so oddly vague already and pallid in the distance! Yet she had only left them that morning; it was only nine hours since her father, handsome as an archangel, silvery of head and gaitered of leg, had waved her off from the doorstep with offended resignation. “And do not return, Ingeborg,” he had called into the fly where she sat holding her face and trying not to rock, “till you are completely set right. Even a week. Even ten days. Have them all seen to.”

  For the collapse of Ingeborg, daunted into just a silent feverish thing of pain, had convulsed the ordered life at home. Her family bore it for a week with perfect manners and hardly a look of reproach. Then they sent her to the Redchester dentist, a hitherto sufficient man, who tortured her with tentative stoppings and turned what had been dull and smooth into excitement and jerks. Then, unable to resist a feeling that self-control would have greatly helped, it began to find the etiquette of Christian behaviour, which insisted on its going on being silent while she more and more let herself go, irksome. The Bishop wanted things in vain. Three times he had to see himself off alone at the station and not be met when he came back. Buttons, because they were not tightened on in time, burst from his gaiters, and did it in remote places like railway carriages. Letters were unanswered, important ones. Engagements, vital ones, through lack of reminders went unkept. At last it became plain, when she seemed not even to wish to answer when spoken to or to move when called, that this apathy and creeping away to hide could not further be endured. Against all tradition, against every home principle, they let a young unmarried daughter loose. With offended reluctance they sent her to London to a celebrity in teeth — after all it was not as if she had been going just to enjoy herself— “And your aunt will please forgive us,” said the Bishop, “for taking her in this manner unawares.”

  The aunt, a serious strong lady, was engaged for political meetings in the north, and had gone away to them that very morning, leaving a letter and her house at Ingeborg’s disposal for so long as the dentist needed her. The dentist, being the best that money could buy, hardly needed her at all. He pounced unerringly and at once on the right tooth and pulled it out. There were no stoppings, no delays, no pain, and no aunt. Never was a life more beautifully cleared. Ingeborg went away down Harley Street free, and with ten pounds in her pocket. For the rest of this one day, for an hour or two to-morrow morning before setting out for Paddington and home, she could do exactly as she liked.

  “Why, there’s nothing to prevent me going anywhere this evening,” she thought, stopping dead as the full glory of the situation slowly dawned on her. “Why, I could go out somewhere really grand to dinner, just as people do I expect in all the books I’m not let read, and then I could go to the play — nobody could prevent me. Why, I could go to a music-hall if I chose, and still nobody could prevent me!”

  Audacious imaginings that made her laugh — she had not laughed for weeks — darted in and out of her busy brain. She saw herself in her mouse-coloured dress reducing waiters in marble and gilt places to respect and slavery by showing them her ten pounds. She built up lurid fabrics of possible daring deeds, and smiled at the reflection of herself in shop windows as she passed, at the sobriety, the irreproachableness of the sheath containing these molten imaginings. Why, she might hire a car — just telephone, and there you were with it round in five minutes, and go off in the twilight to Richmond Park or Windsor. She had never been to Richmond Park or Windsor; she had never been anywhere; but she was sure there would be bats and stars out there, and water, and the soft duskiness of trees and the smell of wet earth, and she could drive about them a little, slowly, so as to feel it all, and then come back and have supper somewhere — have supper at the Ritz, she thought, of which she had read hastily out of the corner of an eye between two appearances of the Bishop, in the more interesting portions of the Times — just saunter in, you know. Or she could have dinner first; yes, dinner first — dinner at Claridge’s. No, not at Claridge’s; she had an aunt who stayed there, another one, her mother’s sister, rich and powerful, and it was always best not to stir up rich and powerful aunts. Dinner at the Thackeray Hôtel, perhaps. That was where her father’s relations stayed, fine-looking serious men who once were curates and, yet earlier, good and handsome babies. It was near the British Museum, she had heard. Its name and surroundings suggested magnificence of a nobler sort than the Ritz. Yes, she would dine at the Thackeray Hôtel and be splendid.

  Here, coming to a window full of food, she became aware that, wonderfully, and for the first time for weeks, she was hungry; so hungry that she didn’t want dinner or supper or anything future, but something n
ow. She went in; and all her gilded visions of the Ritz and the Thackeray Hôtel were swamped in one huge cup (she felt how legitimate and appropriate a drink it was for a bishop’s daughter without a chaperon, and ordered the biggest size costing four-pence) of Aerated Bread Shop cocoa.

  It was six o’clock when she emerged, amazingly nourished, from that strange place where long-backed elderly men with tired eyes were hurriedly eating poached eggs on chilly little clothless marble tables, and continued down Regent Street.

  She now felt strangely settled in her mind. She no longer wanted to go to the Ritz. Indeed the notion of dining anywhere with the cocoa clothing her internally as with a garment — a thick winter garment, almost she thought like the closer kinds of fur — was revolting. She still felt enterprising, but a little clogged. She thought now more of things like fresh air and exercise. Not now for her the heat and glitter of a music-hall. There was a taste in that pure drink that was irreconcilable with music-halls, a satisfying property in its unadulteratedness, its careful cleanliness, that reminded her she was the daughter of a bishop. Walking away from the Aerated Bread Shop rather gravely, she remembered that she had a mother on a sofa; an only sister who was so beautiful that it was touching; and a class of boys, once unruly and now looking up to her — in fact, that she had a position to keep up. She was still happy, but happy now in a thoroughly nice way; and she would probably have gone back in this warmed and solaced condition to her aunt’s house in Bedford Square and an evening with a book and an early bed if her eye had not been caught by a poster outside an office sort of place she was passing, a picture of water and mountains, with written on it in big letters: