Chapter 10

LET me earnestly urge any of my hearers who may be fired by my example to follow it, never to go to Dundale. It is a desolate place, and a hungry place; and a place, moreover, greatly subject to becoming enveloped in a sort of universal gray cloud, emitting a steady though fine drizzle and accounted for—which made it none the less wet—by persons who knew everything, like Jellaby, as being a sea-mist.

I am no doubt very stupid, and therefore was unable to understand why there should be a sea-mist when there was no sea.

“Well, we’re in Sussex now you know,” said Jellaby, on my saying something of the sort to him.

“Indeed,” said I politely, as though that explained it; but of course it did not.

Up to this point we had at least, since the first night, been dry. Now the rain began, and caravaning in rain is an experience that must be met with one’s entire stock of fortitude and philosophy. This stock, however large originally, has a tendency to give out after drops have trickled down inside one’s collar for some hours. At the other end, too, the wet ascends higher and higher, for is not one wading about in long and soaking grass, trying to perform one’s (so to speak) household duties? And if, when the ascending wet and the descending wet meet, and the whole man is a mere and very unhappy sponge, he can still use such words as healthy and jolly, then I say that that man is either a philosopher indeed, worthy of and ripe for an immediate tub, or he is a liar and a hypocrite. I heard both those adjectives often that day, and silently divided their users into the proper categories. For myself I preferred to say nothing, thus producing private flowers of stoicism in response to the action of the rain.

For the first time I was glad to walk, glad to move on, glad of anything that was not helping dripping ladies to pack up dripping breakfast things beneath the dripping umbrella that with studious gallantry I endeavoured to hold the while over my and their dripping heads. However healthy and jolly the wet might be it undoubtedly made the company more silent than the dry, and our resumed march was almost entirely without conversation. We moved on in a southwesterly direction, the diseased fledgling still in bed and still, I was credibly informed, scratching, through pine woods full of wet bracken and deep gloom and drizzle, till at a place called Frant we turned off due south in response to some unaccountable impulse of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s, whose unaccountable impulses were the capricious rudder which swayed us hither and thither during the entire tour.

She used to study maps, and walk with one under her arm out of which she read aloud the names of the places we were supposed to be at; and just as we had settled down to believe it we would come to some flatly contradictory signpost which talked of quite different places, places we had been told were remote and in an altogether different direction.

“It doesn’t matter,” she would say, with a smile in which I, at least, never joined, for I have my own opinions of petticoat government—”the great thing is to go on.”

So we went on; and it was she who made us suddenly turn off southward after Frant, leaving a fairly comfortable highroad for the vicissitudes of narrow and hilly lanes.

“Lanes,” said she, “are infinitely prettier.”

I dare say. They are also generally hillier, and so narrow that once a caravan is in one on it has to go whatever happens, trusting to luck not to meet anything else on wheels till it reaches, after many anxieties, the haven of another highroad. This lane ran deep between towering hedges and did not leave off again for five miles, and none of you would believe how long it took us to do those five miles because none of you know—how should you?—what the getting of caravans up hills by means of tracing is. We had, thanks to Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s desire for the pretty (unsatisfied I am glad to say on that occasion, because the so-called sea-mist clung close round us like a wet gray cloak)—we had got into an almost mountainous lane. We were tracing the whole time, dragging each caravan up each hill in turn, leaving it solitary at the top and returning with all three horses for the next one left meanwhile at the bottom. I never saw such an endless succession of hills. If tracing does not teach a man patience what, I would like to know, will?

At first, on finding my horse removed and harnessed on to the Ailsa, I thought I would get inside the Elsa and stretch myself on the yellow box and wait there quietly smoking till the horse came back again; but I found Edelgard inside, blocking it up and preparing to mend her stockings.

This was unpleasant, for I had hardly spoken to her, and then only with the chilliest politeness, since her behaviour on the evening by the Medway; yet, determined to be master in my own (so to speak) house, I would have carried out my intention if Menzies-Legh’s voice, which I thought had gone up the hill, had not been heard quite close outside asking where I was.

I warned my wife by means of a hasty enjoining finger to keep silence.

Will it be believed that she looked at me, said “Why should you not help?” opened the window, and called out that I was there?

“Come and give us a hand, Baron,” said Menzies-Legh from outside. “It’s a very stiff pull—we’ll have to push behind as well, and want what help we’ve got.”

“Certainly,” said I, all apparent ready bustle; but I shot a very expressive brief glance at Edelgard as I went out.

She, however, pretended to be absorbed in her sewing.

“You Socialists,” said I to Jellaby, next to whom I found I was expected to push, “do not believe in marriage, do you?”

“We—don’t—believe—in—tyrants,” he panted, so short of breath that I stared at him, I myself having quite a quantity of it; besides, what an answer!

I shrugged the shoulder nearest him and continued up in silence. At the top of the hill he was so warm and breathless that he could not speak, and so were the others, while I was perfectly cool and chatty.