Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  The Fräulein looked first at the slammed door, then at the sunshade, and then up at me. ‘Quarrelled,’ said the Fräulein’s look as plainly as speech.

  Ambrose looked at me too, and in his eyes was an interrogation.

  Mrs. Harvey-Browne looked at me too, and in her eyes was coldest condemnation. ‘Is it possible,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne’s eyes, ‘that any one can really marry such a person?’

  As for me, I walked downstairs, my face bland with innocence and unconcern. ‘How delightful,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘how truly delightful these walls look, with all the antlers and things on them.’

  ‘Very,’ said Ambrose.

  Mrs. Harvey-Browne was silent. Probably she had resolved never to speak to me again; but when we were at the bottom, and Ambrose was bestowing fees on the Fräulein and the custodian, she said, ‘I did not know your husband was travelling with you.’

  ‘My husband?’ I repeated inquiringly. ‘But he isn’t. He’s at home. Minding, I hope, my neglected children.’

  ‘At home? Then who — then whose husband was that?’

  ‘Was what?’ I asked, following her eyes which were fixed on the door so lately slammed.

  ‘Why, that man in spectacles?’

  ‘Really, how can I tell? Perhaps nobody’s. Certainly not mine.’

  Mrs. Harvey-Browne stared at me in immense surprise. ‘How very extraordinary,’ she said.

  THE SIXTH DAY — Continued

  THE GRANITZ WOODS, SCHWARZER SEE, AND KIEKÖWER

  In the woods behind Binz, alone in the heart of them, near a clearing where in past days somebody must have lived, for ancient fruit trees still mark the place that used to be a garden, there is a single grave on which the dead beech leaves slowly dropping down through the days and nights of many autumns, have heaped a sober cover. On the headstone is a rusty iron plate with this inscription —

  Hier ruht ein Finnischer Krieger

  1806.

  There is no fence round it, and no name on it. Every autumn the beech leaves make the unknown soldier a new brown pall, and through the sparkling frozen winters, except for the thin shadows of naked branches, he lies in sunshine. In the spring the blue hepaticas, children of those that were there the first day, gather about his sodden mound in little flocks of loveliness. Then, after a warm rain, the shadows broaden and draw together, for overhead the leaves are bursting; the wind blowing on to him from the clearing is scented, for the grass out there has violets in it; the pear trees in the deserted garden put on their white robes of promise; and then comes summer, and in the long days there are wanderers in the woods, and the chance passer-by, moved perhaps by some vague sentiment of pity for so much loneliness, throws him a few flowers or a bunch of ferns as he goes his way. There was a cross of bracken lying on the grave when I came upon it, still fresh and tied together with bits of grass, and a wreath of sea-holly hung round the headstone.

  Sitting down by the side of the nameless one to rest, for the sun was high and I began to be tired, it seemed to me as I leaned my face against his cool covering of leaves, still wet with the last rain, that he was very cosily tucked away down there, away from worries and the chill fingers of fear, with everything over so far as he was concerned, and each of the hours destined for him in which hard things were to happen lived through and done with. A curiosity to know how he came to be in the Granitz woods at a time when Rügen, belonging to the French, had nothing to do with Finland, made me pull out my guide-book. But it was blank. The whole time I was journeying round Rügen it was invariably blank when it ought to have been illuminating. What had this man done or left undone that he should have been shut out from the company of those who are buried in churchyards? Why should he, because he was nameless, be outcast as well? Why should his body be held unworthy of a place by the side of persons who, though they were as dead as himself, still went on being respectable? I took off my hat and leaned against the Finnish warrior’s grave and stared up along the smooth beech trunks to the point where the leaves, getting out of the shade, flashed in the sun at the top, and marvelled greatly at the ways of men, who pursue each other with conventions and disapproval even when their object, ceasing to be a man, is nothing but a poor, unresentful, indifferent corpse.

  It is — certainly with me it is — a symptom of fatigue and want of food to marvel at the ways of men. My spirit grows more and more inclined to carp as my body grows more tired and hungry. When I am not too weary and have not given my breakfast to fowls, my thoughts have a cheerful way of fixing themselves entirely on the happy side of things, and life seems extraordinarily charming. But I see nothing happy and my soul is lost in blackness if, for many hours, I have had no food. How useless to talk to a person of the charities if you have not first fed him. How useless to explain that they are scattered at his feet like flowers if you have fed him too much. Both these states, of being over-fed and not fed enough, are equally fatal to the exquisitely sensitive life of the soul. And so it came about that because it was long past luncheon-time, and I had walked far, and it was hot, I found myself growing sentimental over the poor dead Finn; inclined to envy him because he could go on resting there while I had to find a way back to Binz in the heat and excuse my absence to an offended cousin; launching, indignant at his having been denied Christian burial, into a whole sea of woful reflections on the spites and follies of mankind, from which a single piece of bread would have rescued me. And as I was very tired, and it was very hot, and very silent, and very drowsy, my grumblings and disapprovals grew gradually vaguer, grew milder, grew confused, grew intermittent, and I went to sleep.

  Now to go to sleep out of doors on a fine summer afternoon is an extremely pleasant thing to do if nobody comes and looks at you and you are comfortable. I was not exactly comfortable, for the ground round the grave was mossless and hard; and when the wind caught it the bracken cross tickled my ear and jerked my mind dismally on to earwigs. Also some spiders with frail long legs which they seemed to leave lying about at the least and gentlest attempt to persuade them to go away, walked about on me and would not walk anywhere else. But presently I left off feeling them or caring and sank away deliciously into dreams, the last thing I heard being the rustling of leaves, and the last thing I felt the cool wind lifting my hair.

  And now the truly literary, if he did not here digress into a description of what he dreamed, which is a form of digression skipped by the truly judicious, would certainly write ‘How long I had slept I know not,’ and would then tell the reader that, waking with a start, he immediately proceeded to shiver. I cannot do better than imitate him, leaving out the start and the shiver, since I did neither, and altering his method to suit my greater homeliness, remark that I don’t know how long I had been asleep because I had not looked at a watch when I began, but opening my eyes in due season I found that they stared straight into the eyes of Mrs. Harvey-Browne, and that she and Brosy were standing side by side looking down at me.

  Being a woman, my first thought was a fervent hope that I had not been sleeping with my mouth wide open. Being a human creature torn by ungovernable passions, my second was to cry out inwardly and historically, ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome prelatess?’ Then I sat up and feverishly patted my hair.

  ‘I am not in the guide-book,’ I said with some asperity.

  ‘We came to look at the grave,’ smilingly answered Mrs. Harvey-Browne.

  ‘May I help you up?’ asked Ambrose.

  ‘Thanks, no.’

  ‘Brosy, fetch me my camp-stool out of the fly — I will sit here a few minutes with Frau X. You were having a little post-prandial nap?’ she added, turning to me still smiling.

  ‘Ante-prandial.’

  ‘What, you have been in the woods ever since we parted this morning at the Jagdschloss? Brosy,’ she called after him, ‘bring the tea-basket out as well. My dear Frau X., you must be absolutely faint. Do you not think it injudicious to go so many hours without nourishment? We will make tea now instead of a
little later, and I insist on your eating something.’

  Really this was very obliging. What had happened to the bishop’s wife? Her urbanity was so marked that I thought it could only be a beautiful dream, and I rubbed my eyes before answering. But it was undoubtedly Mrs. Harvey-Browne. She had been home since I saw her last, rested, lunched, put on fresh garments, perhaps bathed; but all these things, soothing as they are, could not by themselves account for the change. Also she spoke to me in English for the first time. ‘You are very kind,’ I murmured, staring.

  ‘Just imagine,’ she said to Ambrose, who approached across the crackling leaves with the camp-stool, tea-basket, and cushions from the seats of the fly waiting in the forest road a few yards away, ‘this little lady has had nothing to eat all day.’

  ‘Oh I say!’ said Brosy sympathetically.

  ‘Little lady?’ I repeated to myself, more and more puzzled.

  ‘If you must lean against a hard grave,’ said Brosy; ‘at least, let me put this cushion behind your back. And I can make you much more comfortable if you will stand up a moment.’

  ‘Oh I am so stiff,’ I exclaimed as he helped me up; ‘I must have been here hours. What time is it?’

  ‘Past four,’ said Brosy.

  ‘Most injudicious,’ said his mother. ‘Dear Frau X., you must promise me never to do such a thing again. What would happen to those sweet children of yours if their little mother were to be laid up?’

  Dear, dear me. What was all this? Sweet children? Little mother? I could only sit on my cushions and stare.

  ‘This,’ she explained, noticing I suppose that I looked astonished, and thinking it was because Brosy was spreading out cups and lighting the spirit-lamp so very close to the deceased Finn, ’is not desecration. It is not as though we were having tea in a churchyard, which of course we never would have. This is unconsecrated ground. One cannot desecrate that which has never been consecrated. Desecration can only begin after consecration has taken place.’

  I bowed my head and then, cheered into speech by the sight of an approaching rusk, I added, ‘I know a family with a mausoleum, and on fine days they go and have coffee at it.’

  ‘Germans, of course,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne, smiling, but with an effort. ‘One can hardly imagine English — —’

  ‘Oh yes, Germans. When any one goes to see them, if it is fine they say, “Let us drink coffee at the mausoleum.” And then they do.’

  ‘Is it a special treat?’ asked Brosy.

  ‘The view there is very lovely.’

  ‘Oh I see,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne, relieved. ‘They only sit outside. I was afraid for a moment that they actually — —’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, eating what seemed to be the most perfect rusk ever produced by German baker, ‘not actually.’

  ‘What a sweet spot this is to be buried in,’ remarked Mrs. Harvey-Browne, while Brosy, with the skill of one used to doing it, made the tea; and then according to the wont of good women when they speak of being buried, she sighed. ‘I wonder,’ she went on, ‘how he came to be put here.’

  ‘That is what I have been wondering ever since I found him,’ I said.

  ‘He was wounded in some battle and was trying to get home,’ said Brosy. ‘You know Finland was Swedish in those days, and so was Rügen.’

  As I did not know I said nothing, but looked exceedingly bright.

  ‘He had been fighting for Sweden against the French. I met a forester yesterday, and he told me there used to be a forester’s house where those fruit trees are, and the people in it took him in and nursed him till he died. Then they buried him here.’

  ‘But why was he not buried in a churchyard?’ asked his mother.

  ‘I don’t know. Poor chap, I don’t suppose he would have cared. The great point I should say under such circumstances would be the being dead.’

  ‘My dear Brosy,’ murmured his mother; which was what she always murmured when he said things that she disapproved without quite knowing why.

  ‘Or a still greater point,’ I remarked, moved again to cheerful speech by the excellent tea Brosy had made, and his mother, justly suspicious of the tea of Teutons, had smuggled through the customs, as she afterwards told me with pride,— ‘a still greater point if those are the circumstances that lie in wait for one, would be the never being born.’

  ‘Oh but that is pessimism!’ cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne, shaking a finger at me. ‘What have you, of all people in the world, to do with pessimism?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know — I suppose I have my days, like everybody else,’ I said, slightly puzzled again by this remark. ‘Once I was told of two aged Germans,’ I continued, for by this time I had had three rusks and was feeling very pleasant,— ‘of two aged Germans whose digestive machinery was fragile.’

  ‘Oh, poor things,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne sympathetically.

  ‘And in spite of that they drank beer all their lives persistently and excessively.’

  ‘How very injudicious,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.

  ‘They drank such a fearful lot and for so long that at last they became philosophers.’

  ‘My dear Frau X.,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne incredulously, ‘what an unexpected result.’

  ‘Oh but indeed there is hardly anything you may not at last become,’ I insisted, ‘if besides being German your diet is indiscreet enough.’

  ‘Yes, I quite think that,’ said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.

  ‘Well, and what happened?’ asked Brosy with smiling eyes.

  ‘Well, they were naturally profoundly pessimistic, both of them. You are, you know, if your diet — —’

  ‘Oh yes, yes indeed,’ agreed Mrs. Harvey-Browne, with the conviction of one who has been through it.

  ‘They were absolutely sick of things. They loathed everything anybody said or did. And they were disciples of Nietzsche.’

  ‘Was that the cause or the effect of the excessive beer-drinking?’ asked Brosy.

  ‘Oh, I can’t endure Nietzsche,’ cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne. ‘Don’t ever read him, Brosy. I saw some things he says about women — he is too dreadful.’

  ‘And one said to the other over their despairing potations: “Only those can be considered truly happy who are destined never to be born.”’

  ‘There!’ cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne. ‘That is Nietzsche all over — rank pessimism.’

  ‘I never heard ranker,’ said Brosy smiling.

  ‘And the other thought it over, and then said drearily: “But to how few falls that happy lot.”’

  There was a pause. Brosy was laughing behind his teacup. His mother, on the contrary, looked solemn, and gazed at me thoughtfully. ‘There is a great want of simple faith about Germans,’ she said. ‘The bishop thinks it so sad. A story like that would quite upset him. He has been very anxious lest Brosy — our only child, dear Frau X., so you may imagine how precious — should become tainted by it.’

  ‘I dislike beer,’ said Brosy.

  ‘That man this morning, for instance — did you ever hear anything like it? He was just the type of man, quite apart from his insolence, that most grieves the bishop.’

  ‘Really?’ I said; and wondered respectfully at the amount of grieving the bishop got through.

  ‘An educated man, I suppose — did he not say he was a schoolmaster? A teacher of the young, without a vestige himself of the simple faith he ought to inculcate. For if he had had a vestige, would it not have prevented his launching into an irreverent conversation with a lady who was not only a stranger, but the wife of a prelate of the Church of England?’

  ‘He couldn’t know that, mother,’ said Brosy; ‘and from what you told me it wasn’t a conversation he launched into but a monologue. And I must beg your pardon,’ he added, turning to me with a smile, ‘for the absurd mistake we made. It was the guide’s fault.’

  ‘Oh yes, my dear Frau X., you must forgive me — it was really too silly of me — I might have known — I was completely taken aback, I assure you, but the guide was
so very positive — —’ And there followed such a number of apologies that again I was bewildered, only retaining the one clear impression that the bishop’s wife desired exceedingly to be agreeable.

  Well, a woman bent on being agreeable is better than a woman bent on being disagreeable, though, being the soul of caution in my statements, I must add, Not always; for I suppose few of us have walked any distance along the path of life without having had to go at least some part of the way in the company of persons who, filled with the praiseworthy wish to be very pleasant, succeeded only in drenching our spirits with the depressing torrents of effusion. And effusiveness applied to myself has precisely the effect of a finger applied to the horns of a snail who shall be innocently airing himself in the sun: he gets back without more ado into his shell, and so do I.

  That is what happened on this occasion. For some reason, which I could only faintly guess, the bishop’s wife after disapproving of me in the morning was petting me in the afternoon. She had been lunching, she told me, with Charlotte, and they had had a nice talk, she said, about me. About me? Instantly I scrambled back into my shell. There is surely nothing in the world so tiresome as being questioned, as I now was, on one’s household arrangements and personal habits. I will talk about anything but that. I will talk with the courage of ignorance about all high matters, of which I know nothing. I am ready to discourse on all or any of the great Abstractions with the glibness of the shallow mind. I will listen sympathetically to descriptions of diseases suffered and operations survived, of the brilliance of sons and the beauty of daughters. I will lend an attentive ear to an enumeration of social successes and family difficulties, of woes and triumphs of every sort, including those connected with kitchens; but I will not answer questions about myself. And indeed, what is there to talk about? No one is interested in my soul, and as for my body I long ago got tired of that.