Chapter 1

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 (which is really a very nice, well-planned one on the second floor at the corner overlooking the cemetery, and not at all stuffy) 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 (well fed, and, if we chose, to excess, but of course we know how to be reasonable); and we should pay nothing. As Major of the artillery regiment stationed at Storchwerder I am obliged anyhow to keep a couple of horses (they are fed at the cost of the regiment), 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 (not in this case actually the land-owner but the brother of the widowed lady owning it, who lives with her and looks after her interests) 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 (God save the mark!) 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 (a difficult race sometimes, as may be seen by the case of Edelgard’s Aunt Bockhügel, of whom perhaps more later) 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?”

“Certainly,” said I.

“To lend round among our relations next winter?”

“Certainly,” said I.

“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 shall revise all this, of course, and no doubt will strike out portions) 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 (which explains why I wonder at all what Edelgard may or may not mean, beginners doing well, I suppose, to be humble) 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:

“Dear wife, our English experiences did begin with our visits to the neighbours. If it had not been for those visits we would probably not last summer have seen Frau von Eckthum at all, and if we had not come within reach of her persuasive tongue we would have gone on our silver wedding journey to Italy or Switzerland, as we had so often planned, and left that accursed island across the Channel alone.”

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 (and infinitely superior) 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 (practically) 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.