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Ebook has 1336 lines and 88288 words, and 27 pages

Release date: December 8, 2023

Original publication: NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910

THE CARAVANERS

THE CARAVANERS

NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1910

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

FACING PAGE

I never saw such little shoes 14

Edelgard most inconsiderately leaving me to bear the entire burden of opening and shutting our things 38

The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle 50

It was an unnerving spectacle 80

"Dear Baron," said she, "do you think it is wrong to carry stew-pots?" 100

Thus, as it were, with blacking, did I cement my friendship with Lord Sigismund 102

Edelgard posing--and what a pose; good heavens, what a pose! 114

"But surely not here," murmured Frau von Eckthum 124

The two nondescripts, who were passing, lingered to look 134

"But, lieber Otto, is it then my fault that you have forgotten the paper?" 142

"Do you, Jellaby," I then inquired, "really understand how best to treat a sausage?" 182

"'Ere 'e is" 200

An imposing lady in the pew in front of us sat sideways in her corner and examined us with calm attention 230

The old gentleman was in the act of addressing me in his turn 268

Gentle as my voice was, it yet made her start 294

THE CARAVANERS

In June this year there were a few fine days, and we supposed the summer had really come at last. The effect was to make us feel our flat but a dull place after all, and think with something like longing of the country. It was the year of the fifth anniversary of our wedding, and having decided to mark the occasion by a trip abroad in the proper holiday season of August we could not afford, neither did we desire, to spend money on trips into the country in June. My wife, therefore, suggested that we should devote a few afternoons to a series of short excursions within a radius of, say, from five to ten miles round our town, and visit one after the other those of our acquaintances who live near enough to Storchwerder and farm their own estates. "In this way," said she, "we shall get much fresh air at little cost."

After a time I agreed. Not immediately, of course, for a reasonable man will take care to consider the suggestions made by his wife from every point of view before consenting to follow them or allowing her to follow them. Women do not reason: they have instincts; and instincts would land them in strange places sometimes if it were not that their husbands are there to illuminate the path for them and behave, if one may so express it, as a kind of guiding and very clever glow-worm. As for those who have not succeeded in getting husbands, the flotsam and jetsam, so to speak, of their sex, all I can say is, God help them.

There was nothing, however, to be advanced against Edelgard's idea in this case; on the contrary, there was much to commend it. We should get fresh air; we should be fed ; and we should pay nothing. As Major of the artillery regiment stationed at Storchwerder I am obliged anyhow to keep a couple of horses , and I also in the natural order of things have one of the men of my battalion in my flat as servant and coachman, who costs me little more than his keep and may not give me notice. All, then, that was wanting was a vehicle, and we could, as Edelgard pointed out, easily borrow our Colonel's wagonette for a few afternoons, so there was our equipage complete, and without spending a penny.

The estates round Storchwerder are big and we found on counting up that five calls would cover the entire circle of our country acquaintance. There might have been a sixth, but for reasons with which I entirely concurred my dear wife did not choose to include it. Lines have to be drawn, and I do not think an altogether bad definition of a gentleman or a lady would be one who draws them. Indeed, Edelgard was in some doubt as to whether there should be even five, a member of the five being a person we neither of us can care much about, because he is not only unsound politically, with a decided leaning disgraceful in a man of his birth and which he hardly takes any trouble to hide toward those views the middle classes and Socialist sort of people call enlightened, but he is also either unable or unwilling--Edelgard and I could never make up our minds which--to keep his sister in order. Yet to keep the woman one is responsible for in order whether she be sister, or wife, or mother, or daughter, or even under certain favourable conditions aunt is really quite easy. It is only a question of beginning in time, as you mean to go on in fact, and of being especially firm whenever you feel internally least so. It is so easy that I never could understand the difficulty. It is so easy that when my wife at this point brought me my eleven o'clock bread and ham and butter and interrupted me by looking over my shoulder, I smiled up at her, my thoughts still running on this theme, and taking the hand that put down the plate said, "Is it not, dear wife?"

"Is what not?" she asked--rather stupidly I thought, for she had read what I had written to the end; then without giving me time to reply she said, "Are you not going to write the story of our experiences in England after all, Otto?"

"To lend round among our relations next winter?"

"Then had you not better begin?"

"Dear wife," said I, "it is what I am doing."

"Then," said she, "do not waste time going off the rails."

And sitting down in the window she resumed her work of enlarging the armholes of my shirts.

This, I may remark, was tartness. Before she went to England she was never tart. However, let me continue.

I wonder what she means by rails. I wonder if she means I ought to begin with my name and address. It seems unnecessary, for I am naturally as well known to persons in Storchwerder as the postman. On the other hand this is my first attempt at what poetic and literary and other persons of bad form call, I believe, wooing the Muse. What an expression! And I wonder what Muse. I would like to ask Edelgard whether she--but no, it would almost seem as if I were seeking her advice, which is a reversing of the proper relative positions of husband and wife. So at this point, instead of adopting a course so easily disastrous, I turned my head and said quietly:

I paused; and as Edelgard said nothing, which is what she says when she is unconvinced, I continued with the patience I always show her up to the point at which it would become weakness, to explain the difference between the exact and thorough methods of men, their liking for going to the root of a matter and beginning at the real beginning, and the jumping tendencies of women, who jump to things such as conclusions without paying the least heed to all the important places they have passed over while they were, so to speak, in the air.

"But we get there first," said Edelgard.

I frowned a little. A few months ago--before, that is, our time on British soil--she would not have made such a retort. She used never to retort, and the harmony of our wedded life was consequently unclouded. I think she saw me frown but she took no notice--another novelty in her behaviour; so, after waiting a moment, I determined to continue the narrative.

But before I go straight on with it I should like to explain why we, an officer and his wife who naturally do not like spending money, should have contemplated so costly a holiday as a trip abroad. The fact is, for a long time past we had made up our minds to do so in the fifth year of our marriage, and for the following reason: Before I married Edelgard I had been a widower for one year, and before being a widower I was married for no fewer than nineteen years. This sounds as though I must be old, but I need not tell my readers who see me constantly that I am not. The best of all witnesses are the eyes; also, I began my marrying unusually young. My first wife was one of the Mecklenburg Lunewitzes, the elder branch. If she had lived, I would last year have been celebrating our silver wedding on August 1st, and there would have been much feasting and merry-making arranged for us, and many acceptable gifts in silver from our relations, friends, and acquaintances. The regiment would have been obliged to recognize it, and perhaps our two servants would have clubbed together and expressed their devotion in a metal form. All this I feel I have missed, and through no fault of my own. I fail to see why I should be deprived of every benefit of such a celebration, for have I not, with an interruption of twelve months forced upon me, been actually married twenty-five years? And why, because my poor Marie-Luise was unable to go on living, should I have to attain to the very high number of five and twenty years' matrimony without the least notice being taken of it? I had been explaining this to Edelgard for a long time, and the nearer the date drew on which in the natural order of things I would have been reaping a silver harvest and have been put in a position to gauge the esteem in which I was held, the more emphatic did I become. Edelgard seemed at first unable to understand, but she was very teachable, and gradually found my logic irresistible. Indeed, once she grasped the point she was even more strongly of opinion than I was that something ought to be done to mark the occasion, and quite saw that if Marie-Luise failed me it was not my fault, and that I at least had done my part and gone on steadily being married ever since. From recognizing this to being indignant that our friends would probably take no notice of the anniversary was but, for her, a step; and many were the talks we had together on the subject, and many the suggestions we both of us made for bringing our friends round to our point of view. We finally decided that, however much they might ignore it, we ourselves would do what was right, and accordingly we planned a silver-honeymoon trip to the land proper to romance, Italy, beginning it on the first of August, which was the date of my marriage twenty-five years before with Marie-Luise.

I have gone into this matter at some length because I wished to explain clearly to those of our relations who will have this lent to them why we undertook a journey so, in the ordinary course of things, extravagant; and having, I hope, done this satisfactorily, will now proceed with the narrative.

We borrowed the Colonel's wagonette; I wrote five letters announcing our visit and asking if it would be agreeable; the answers arrived assuring us in every tone of well-bred enthusiasm that it would; I donned my parade uniform; Edelgard put on her new summer finery; we gave careful instructions to Clothilde, our cook, helping her to carry them out by locking everything up; and off we started in holiday spirits, driven by my orderly, Hermann, and watched by the whole street.

The last of these visits was to Frau von Eckthum and her brother Graf Flitz von Flitzburg, who, as is well known, being himself unmarried, lives with her and looks after the estate left by the deceased Eckthum, thereby stepping into shoes so comfortable that they may more properly be spoken of as slippers. All had gone well up to that, nor was I conscious till much later that that had not gone well too; for only on looking back do we see the distance we have come and the way in which the road, at first so promising, led us before we knew where we were into a wilderness plentiful in stones. During our first four visits we had naturally talked about our plan to take a trip in August in Italy. Our friends, obviously surprised, and with the expression on their faces that has its source in thoughts of legacies, first enthusiastically applauded and then pointed out that it would be hot. August, they said, would be an impossible month in Italy: go where we would we should not meet a single German. This had not struck us before, and after our first disappointment we willingly listened to their advice rather to choose Switzerland, with its excellent hotels and crowds of our countrymen. Several times in the course of these conversations did we try to explain the honeymoon nature of the journey, but were met with so much of what I strongly suspect to have been wilful obtuseness that to our chagrin we began to see there was probably nothing to be done. Edelgard said she wished it would occur to them if, owing to the unusual circumstances, they did not intend to give us actual ash-trays and match-boxes, to join together in defraying the cost of the wedding journey of such respectable silver-honeymooners; but I do not think that at any time they had the least intention of doing anything at all for us--on the contrary, they made us quite uneasy by the sums they declared we would have to disburse; and on our last visit happening to bewail the amount of good German money that was going to be dragged out of us by the rascally Swiss, she said, "Why not come to England?"

At the moment I was so much engaged mentally reprobating the way in which she was lying back in a low garden chair with one foot crossed over the other and both feet encased in such thin stockings that they might just as well not have been stockings at all, that I did not immediately notice the otherwise striking expression, "Come." "Go" would of course have been the usual and expected form; but the substitution, I repeat, escaped me at the moment because of my attention being otherwise engaged. I never

saw such little shoes. Has a woman a right to be conspicuous at the extremities? So conspicuous--Frau von Eckthum's hands also easily become absorbing--that one is unable connectedly to follow the conversation? I doubt it: but she is an attractive lady. There sat Edelgard, straight and seemly, the perfect flower of a stricter type of virtuous German womanhood, her feet properly placed side by side on the grass and clothed, as I knew, in decent wool with the flat-heeled boots of the Christian gentlewoman, and I must say the type--in one's wife, that is--is preferable. I rather wondered whether Flitz noticed the contrast between the two ladies. I glanced at him, but his face was as usual a complete blank. I wondered whether he could or could not make his sister sit up if he had wished to; and for the hundredth time I felt I never could really like the man, for from the point of view of a brother one's sister should certainly sit up. She is, however, an attractive lady: alas that her stockings should be so persistently thin.

"England," I heard Edelgard saying, "is not, I think, a suitable place."

It was then that I consciously noticed that Frau von Eckthum had said "Come."

"Why not?" she asked; and her simple way of asking questions, or answering them with others of her own without waiting to adorn them or round them off with the title of the person addressed, has helped, I know, to make her unpopular in Storchwerder society.

"I have heard," said Edelgard cautiously, no doubt bearing in mind that to hosts whose sister had married an Englishman and was still living with him one would not say all one would like to about it, "I have heard that it is not a place to go to if the object is scenery."

"Oh?" said Frau von Eckthum. Then she added--intelligently, I thought--"But there always is scenery."

"Edelgard means lofty scenery," said I gently, for we were both holding cups of the Eckthum tea in our hands, and I have always held one ought to humour the persons whose hospitality one happens to be enjoying--"Or enduring," said Edelgard cleverly when, on our way home, I mentioned this to her.

"Or enduring," I agreed after a slight pause, forced on reflection to see that it is not true hospitality to oblige your visitors to go without their coffee by employing the unworthy and barbarically simple expedient of not allowing it to appear. But of course that was Flitz. He behaves, I think, much too much as though the place belonged to him.

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