Chapter 11

THAT night the rain changed its character, threw off the pretence of being only a mist, and poured in loud cracking drops on to the roof of the caravan. It made such a noise that it actually woke me, and lighting a match I discovered that it was three o’clock and that why I had had an unpleasant dream—I thought I was having a bath—was that the wet was coming through the boarding and descending in slow and regular splashings on my head.

This was melancholy. At three o’clock a man has little initiative, and I was unable to think of putting my pillow at the bottom of the bed where there was no wet, though in the morning, when I found Edelgard had done so, it instantly occurred to me. But after all if I had thought of it one of my ends was bound in any case to get wet, and though my head would have been dry my feet (if doctors are to be believed far more sensitive organs) would have got the splashings. Besides, I was not altogether helpless in the face of this new calamity: after shouting to Edelgard to tell her I was awake and, although presumably indoors, yet somehow in the rain—for indeed it surprised me—and receiving no answer, either because she did not hear, owing to the terrific noise on the roof, or because she would not hear, or because she was asleep, I rose and fetched my sponge bag (a new and roomy one), emptied it of its contents, and placed my head inside it in their stead.

I submit this was resourcefulness. A sponge bag is but a little thing, and to remember it is also but a little thing, but it is little things such as these that have won the decisive battles of the world and are the finger-posts to the qualities in a man that would win more decisive battles if only he were given a chance. Many a great general, many a great victory, have been lost to our Empire owing to its inability to see the promise contained in some of its majors and its consequent dilatoriness in properly promoting them.

How the rain rattled. Even through the muffling sponge bag I could hear it. The thought of Jellaby in his watery tent on such a night, gradually, as the hours went on, ceasing to lie and beginning to float, would have amused me if it had not been that poor Lord Sigismund, nolens volens, must needs float too.

From this thought I somehow got back to my previous ones, and the longer I lay wakeful the more pronouncedly stern did they become. I am as loyal and loving a son of the Fatherland as it will ever in all human probability beget, but what son after a proper period of probation does not like the ring on the finger, the finer raiment, the paternal embrace, and the invitation to dinner? In other words (and quitting parable), what son after having served his time among such husks as majors does not like promotion to the fatted calves of colonels? For some time past I have been expecting it every day, and if it is not soon granted it is possible that my patience may be so changed to anger that I shall refuse to remain at my post and shall send in my resignation; though I must say I should like a hit at the English first.

Once embarked on these reflections I could not again close my eyes, and lay awake for the remaining hours of the night with as great a din going on as ever I heard in my life. I have described this—the effect of heavy rain when you are in a caravan—in that portion of the narrative dealing with the night on Grip’s Common, so need only repeat that it resembles nothing so much as a sharp pelting with unusually hard stones. Edelgard, if she did indeed sleep, must be of an almost terrifying toughness, for the roof on which this pelting was going on was but a few inches from her head.

As the cold dawn crept in between the folds of our window-curtains and the noise had in no way abated, I began very seriously to wonder how I could possibly get up and go out and eat breakfast under such conditions. There was my mackintosh, and I also had galoshes, but I could not appear before Frau von Eckthum in the sponge bag, and yet that was the only sensible covering for my head. But what after all could galoshes avail in such a flood? The stubble field, I felt, could be nothing by then but a lake; no fire could live in it; no stove but would be swamped. Were it not better, if such was to be the weather, to return to London, take rooms in some water-tight boarding-house, and frequent the dryness of museums? Of course it would be better. Better? Must not anything in the world be better than that which is the worst?

But, alas, I had been made to pay beforehand for the Elsa, and had taken the entire responsibility for her and her horse’s safe return and even if I could bring myself to throw away such a sum as I had disbursed one cannot leave a caravan lying about as though it were what our neighbours across the Vosges call a mere bagatelle. It is not a bagatelle. On the contrary, it is a huge and complicated mechanism that must go with you like the shell on the poor snail’s back wherever you go. There is no escape from it, once you have started, day or night. Where was Panthers by now, Panthers with its kind and helpful little lady? Heaven alone knew, after all our zigzagging. Find it by myself I certainly could not, for not only had we zigzagged in obedience to the caprices of Mrs. Menzies-Legh, but I had walked most of the time as a man in a dream, heeding nothing particularly except my growing desire to sit down.

I wondered grimly as six o’clock drew near, the hour at which the rest of the company usually burst into activity, whether there would be many exclamations of healthy and jolly that day. There is a point, I should say, at which a thing or a condition becomes so excessively healthy and jolly that it ceases to be either. I drew the curtain of my bunk together—for a great upheaval over my head warned me that my wife was going to descend and dress—and feigned slumber. Sleep seemed to me such a safe thing. You cannot make a man rise and do what you consider his duty if he will not wake up. The only free man, I reflected with my eyes tightly shut, is the man who is asleep. Pushing my reflection a little further I saw with a slight start that real freedom and independence are only, then, to be found in the unconscious—a race (or sect; call it what you will) of persons untouched by and above the law. And one step further and I saw with another slight start that perfect freedom, perfect liberty, perfect deliverance from trammels, are only to be found in a person who is not merely unconscious but also dead.