Read Ebook: The caravaners by Von Arnim Elizabeth Litle Arthur Illustrator

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Ebook has 1336 lines and 88288 words, and 27 pages

"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.

Flitz, who knows England well, having spent several years there at our Embassy, said it was the most delightful country in the world. The unpatriotic implication contained in this assertion caused Edelgard and myself to exchange glances, and no doubt she was thinking, as I was, that it would be a sad and bad day for Prussia if many of its gentleman had sisters who made misguided marriages with foreigners, the foreign brother-in-law being so often the thin end of that wedge which at its thick one is a denial of our right to regard ourselves as specially raised by Almighty God to occupy the first place among the nations, and a dislike an actual dislike--I can only call it hideous--of the glorious cement of blood and iron by means of which we intend to stick there.

"But I was chiefly thinking," said Frau von Eckthum, her head well back in the cushions and her eyes fixed pensively on the summer clouds sailing over our heads, "of what you were saying about expense."

"Dear lady," I said, "I have been told by all who have done it that travelling in England is the most expensive holiday you can take. The hotels are ruinous as well as bad, the meals are uneatable as well as dear, the cabs cost you a fortune, and the inhabitants are rude."

I spoke with heat, because I was roused by Flitz's unpatriotic attitude, but it was a tempered heat owing to the undoubted personal attractiveness of our hostess. Why are not all women attractive? What habitual lambs our sex would become if they were.

"Dear Baron," said she in her pretty, gentle voice, "do come over and see for yourself. I would like, I think, to convert you. Look at this"--she picked up some papers lying on the grass by her chair, and spreading out one showed me a picture--"do you not think it nice? And, if you want to be economical, it only costs fourteen pounds for a whole month."

The picture she held out to me was one bearing a strong resemblance to the gipsy carts that are continually being sent somewhere else by our local police; a little less gaudy perhaps, a little squarer and more solid, but undoubtedly a near relation.

"It is a caravan," said Frau von Eckthum, in answer to the question contained in my eyebrows; and turning the sheet she showed me another picture representing the same vehicle's inside.

Edelgard got up and looked over my shoulder.

What we saw was certainly very nice. Edelgard said so at once. There were flowered curtains, and a shelf with books, and a comfortable chair with a cushion near a big window, and at the end two pretty beds placed one above the other as in a ship.

"A thing like this," said Frau von Eckthum, "does away at once with hotels, waiters, and expense. It costs fourteen pounds for two persons for a whole month, and all your days are spent in the sun."

She then explained her plan, which was to hire one of these vehicles for the month of August and lead a completely free and bohemian existence during that time, wandering through the English lanes, which she described as flowery, and drawing up for the night in a secluded spot near some little streamlet, to the music of whose gentle rippling, as Edelgard always easily inclined to sentiment suggested, she would probably be lulled to sleep.

"Come too," said she, smiling up at us as we looked over her shoulder.

"Two hundred and eighty marks is fourteen pounds," said I, making mental calculations.

"For two people," said Edelgard, obviously doing the same.

"No hotels," said our hostess.

"No hotels," echoed Edelgard.

"Only lovely green fields," said our hostess.

"And no waiters," said Edelgard.

"Yes, no horrid waiters," said our hostess.

"Waiters are so expensive," said Edelgard.

"You wouldn't see one," said our hostess. "Only a nice child in a clean apron from a farm bringing eggs and cream. And you move about the whole time, and see the country in a way you never would going from place to place by train."

"But," said I shrewdly, "if we move about something must either pull or push us, and that something must also be paid for."

"Oh, yes, there has to be a horse. But think of all the railway tickets you won't buy and all the porters you won't tip," said Frau von Eckthum.

"And think of the nightingales!" cried Edelgard, suddenly recollecting those poetic birds.

"In August they're like Germans in Italy," said Flitz, to whom I had mentioned our reason for giving up the idea of travelling in that country.

"How so?" said Edelgard, turning to him with the slight instinctive stiffening of every really virtuous German lady when speaking to an unrelated man.

"They're not there," said Flitz.

Well, of course the moment we were able to look in our Encyclopaedia at home we knew as well as he did that they do not sing in August, but I do not see how townsfolk are to keep these odds and ends of information lying loose about in their heads. We do not have the bird in Storchwerder and are therefore unable to study its habits at first hand as Flitz can, but I know that all the pieces of poetry I have come across mention nightingales before they have done, and the consequent perfectly natural impression left on my mind was that they were always more or less about. But I do not like Flitz's tone, and never shall. It is true I have not actually seen him do it, but one feels instinctively that he is laughing at one; and there are different ways of laughing, and not all of them appear on the face. As for politics, if I were not as an officer debarred from alluding to them and were led to discuss them with him, I have no doubt that each discussion would end in a duel. That is, if he would fight. The appalling suspicion has just crossed my mind that he would not. He is one of those dreadful persons who cloak their cowardice behind the garb of philosophy. Well, well, I see I am growing angry with a man ten miles away, whom I have not seen for months--I, a man of the world sitting in the calm of my own flat, surrounded by quiet domestic objects such as my wife, my shirt, and my little meal of bread and ham. Is this reasonable? Certainly not. Let me change the subject.

The long, then, and the short of our visit to Graf Flitz and his sister in June last was that we returned home determined to join Frau von Eckthum's party, and not a little full of pleasurable anticipations. When she does talk she has a persuasive tongue. She talked more at this time than she ever did afterward, but of course there were reasons for that which I may or may not disclose. Edelgard listened with something like rapt interest to her really picturesque descriptions, or rather prophecies, for she had not herself done it before, of the pleasures of camp life; and I wish it to be clearly understood that Edelgard, who has since taken the line of telling people it was I, was the one who was swept off her usually cautious feet and who took it upon herself without waiting for me to speak to ask Frau von Eckthum to write and hire another of the carts for us.

Frau von Eckthum laughed, and said she was sure we would like it. Flitz himself smoked in silence. And Edelgard developed a sudden eloquence in regard to natural phenomena such as moons and poppies that would have done credit to a young and sentimental girl. "Think of sitting in the shade of some mighty beech tree," she said, for instance , "with the beams of the sinking sun slanting through its branches, and doing one's needlework."

And she said other things of the same sort, things that made me, who knew she was going to be thirty next birthday, gaze upon her with a deep surprise.

It gave me a great shock to hear her talk like that. Bosh is not a German expression at all. It is purest English. And it amazes me with what rapidity she picked it and similar portions of the language up, adding them in quantities to the knowledge she already possessed of the tongue, a fairly complete knowledge , but altogether excluding words of that sort. Of course I am aware it was all Jellaby's fault--but more of him in his proper place; I will not now dwell on later incidents while my narrative is still only at the point where everything was eager anticipation and preparation.

Our caravan had been hired; I had sent, at Frau von Eckthum's direction, the money to the owner, the price having to be paid beforehand; and August the first, the very day of my wedding with poor Marie-Luise, was to see us start. Naturally there was much to do and arrange, but it was pleasurable work such as getting a suit of civilian clothes adapted to the uses it would be put to, searching for stockings to match the knickerbockers, and for a hat that would be useful in both wet weather and sunshine.

"It will be all sunshine," said Frau von Eckthum with her really unusually pretty smile when I expressed fears as to the effect of rain on the Panama that I finally bought and which, not being a real one, made me anxious.

We saw her several times because of our need for hints as to luggage, meeting place, etc., and I found her each time more charming. When she was on her feet, too, her dress hid the shoes; and she was really helpful, and was apparently looking forward greatly to showing us the beauties of her sister's more or less native land.

As soon as my costume was ready I put it on and drove out to see her. The stockings had been a difficulty because I could not bear, accustomed as I am to cotton socks, their woollen feet. This was at last surmounted by cutting off their feet and sewing my ordinary sock feet on to the woollen legs. It answered splendidly, and Edelgard assured me that with care no portion of the sock would protrude. She herself had sent to Berlin to Wertheim for one of the tailor-made dresses in his catalogue, which turned out to be of really astonishing value for the money, and in which she looked very nice. With a tartan silk blouse and a little Tyrolese hat and a pheasant's feather stuck in it she was so much transformed that I declared I could not believe it was our silver wedding journey, and I felt exactly as I did twenty-five years before.

"But it is not our silver wedding journey," she said with some sharpness.

She made a sudden gesture with her shoulders that was almost like impatience; but I, knowing what victims the best of women are to incomprehensible moods, went out and bought her a pretty little bag with a leather strap to wear over one shoulder and complete her attire, thus proving to her that a reasonable man is not a child and knows when and how to be indulgent.

Frau von Eckthum, who was going to stay with her sister for a fortnight before they both joined us , left in the middle of July. Flitz, at that time incomprehensibly to me, made excuses for not taking part in the caravan tour, but since then light has been thrown on his behaviour: he said, I remember, that he could not leave his pigs.

"Much better not leave his sister," said Edelgard who, I fancy, was just then a little envious of Frau von Eckthum.

It was perfectly natural that Edelgard should be a little envious, and I felt it was and did not therefore in any way check her. I need not remind those relatives who will next winter listen to this that the Flitzes of Flitzburg, of whom Frau von Eckthum was one, are a most ancient and still more penniless family. Frau von Eckthum and her gaunt sister each married a wealthy man by two most extraordinary strokes of luck; for what man nowadays will marry a girl who cannot take, if not the lion's share, at least a very substantial one of the household expenses upon herself? What is the use of a father if he cannot provide his daughter with the money required suitably to support her husband and his children? I myself have never been a father, so that I am qualified to speak with perfect impartiality; that is, strictly, I was one twice, but only for so few minutes each time that they can hardly be said to count. The two von Flitz girls married so young and so well, and have been, without in any way really deserving it, so snugly wrapped in comfort ever since that naturally Edelgard cannot be expected to like it. Edelgard had a portion herself of six thousand marks a year besides an unusual quantity of house linen, which enabled her at last--she was twenty-four when I married her--to find a good husband; and she cannot understand by what wiles the two sisters, without a penny or a table cloth, secured theirs at eighteen. She does not see that they are--"were" is the better word in the case of the gaunt sister--attractive; but then the type is so completely opposed to her own that she would not be likely to. Certainly I agree that a married woman verging, as the sister must be, on thirty should settle down to a smooth head and at least the beginnings of a suitable embonpoint. We do not want wives like lieutenants in a cavalry regiment; and Edelgard is not altogether wrong when she says that both Frau von Eckthum and her sister make her think of those lean and elegant young men. Your lean woman with her restlessness of limb and brain is far indeed removed from the soft amplitudes and slow movements of her who is the ideal wife of every German better-class bosom. Privately, however, I feel I can at least understand that there may have been something to be said at the time for the Englishman's conduct, and I more than understand that of the deceased Eckthum. No one can deny that his widow is undoubtedly--well, well; let me return to the narrative.

The faces of our friends when I happened to be in this jocose vein were a study. "God in heaven," they cried, "what will become of your poor wife?"

But a sense of humour carries a man through anything, and I did not allow myself to be daunted. Indeed it was not likely, I reminded myself sometimes when inclined to be thoughtful at night, that Frau von Eckthum, who so obviously was delicately nurtured, would consent to eat hedgehogs or risk years in which all her attractiveness would evaporate on a sofa of sickness.

I am aware Frau von Eckthum is unpopular in Storchwerder. Perhaps it is because the art of conversation is considerably developed there, and she will not talk. I know she will not go to its balls, refuses its dinners, and turns her back on its coffees. I know she is with difficulty induced to sit on its philanthropic boards, and when she finally has been induced to sit on them does not do so after all but stays at home. I know she is different from the type of woman prevailing in our town, the plain, flat-haired, tightly buttoned up, God-fearing wife and mother, who looks up to her husband and after her children, and is extremely intelligent in the kitchen and not at all intelligent out of it. I know that this is the type that has made our great nation what it is, hoisting it up on ample shoulders to the first place in the world, and I know that we would have to request heaven to help us if we ever changed it. But--she is an attractive lady.

Truly it is an excellent thing to be able to put down one's opinions on paper as they occur to one without risk of irritating interruption--I hope my hearers will not interrupt at the reading aloud--and now that I have at last begun to write a book--for years I have intended doing so--I see clearly the superiority of writing over speaking. It is the same kind of superiority that the pulpit enjoys over the muzzled pews. When, during my stay on British soil, I said anything, however short, of the nature of the above remarks about our German wives and mothers, it was most annoying the way I was interrupted and the sort of questions that were instantly put me by, chiefly, the gaunt sister. But of that more in its place. I am still at the point where she had not yet loomed on my horizon, and all was pleasurable anticipation.

The train did not start till 10:45, but we wanted to be early in order to see who would come to see us off; and it was a very good thing we were in such good time, for hardly a quarter of an hour had elapsed before, to my dismay, I recollected that I had left my Panama at home. It was Edelgard's fault, who had persuaded me to wear a cap for the journey and carry my Panama in my hand, and I had put it down on some table and in the heat of departure forgotten it. I was deeply annoyed, for the whole point of the type of costume I had chosen would be missed without just that kind of hat, and, at my sudden exclamation and subsequent explanation of my exclamation, Edelgard showed that she felt her position by becoming exceedingly red.

Strangely enough, what upset her more than the soldier's being feasted at our expense and more than his wearing my new hat while he feasted, was the fact that I had dismissed Clothilde.

"Where and when am I to get another?" was her question, repeated with a plaintiveness that was at length wearisome. "And what will become of all our things now during our absence?"

"Would you have had me not dismiss her instantly, then?" I cried at last, goaded by this persistence. "Is every shamelessness to be endured? Why, if the woman were a man and of my own station, honour would demand that I should fight a duel with her."

"But you cannot fight a duel with a cook," said Edelgard stupidly.

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