Chapter 12

WE supped that night beneath the stars with the field dropping downward from our feet into the misty purple of the Sussex Weald. What we had for supper was chicken and rice and onions, and very excellent it was. The wind had gone, and it was cold. It was like a night in North Germany, where the wind sighs all day long and at sunset it suddenly grows coldly and clearly calm.

These are quotations from a conversation I overheard between Frau von Eckthum (oddly loquacious that night) and Jellaby, who both sat near where I was eating my supper, supposed to be eating theirs but really letting it spoil while they looked down at the Sussex Weald (I wish I knew what a Weald is: Kent had one too) and she described the extremely flat and notoriously dull country round Storchwerder.

Indeed I would not have recognized it from her description, and yet I know it every bit as well as she can. Blue air, blue sky, blue water, and the flash of white wings—that was how she described it, and poor Jellaby was completely taken in and murmured “Beautiful, beautiful” in his foolish slow voice, and forgot to eat his chicken and rice while it was hot, and little guessed that she had laughed at him with me a few hours before.

I listened, amused but tolerant. We must not keep a pretty lady too exactly to the truth. The first part of this chapter is a quotation from what I heard her say (excepting one sentence), but my hearers must take my word for it that it did not sound anything like as silly as one might suppose. Everything depends on the utterer. Frau von Eckthum’s quasi-poetical way of describing the conduct of our climate had an odd attractiveness about it that I did not find, for instance, in my dear wife’s utterances when she too, which she at this time began to do with increasing frequency, indulged in the quasi-poetic. Quasi-poetic I and other plain men take to be the violent tearing of such a word as rolling from its natural place and applying it to the plains and fields round Storchwerder. A ship rolls, but fields, I am glad to say, do not. You may also with perfect propriety talk about a rolling-pin in connection with the kitchen, or of a rolling stone in connection with moss. Of course I know that we all on suitable occasions make use of exclamations of an appreciative nature, such as colossal and grossartig, but that is brief and business-like, it is what is expected of us, and it is a duty quickly performed and almost perfunctory, with one eye on the waiter and the restaurant behind; but slow raptures, prolonged ones, raptures beaten out thin, are not in my way and had not till then been in Edelgard’s way either. The English are flimsier than we are, thinner blooded, more feminine, more finnicking. There are no restaurants or Bierhalle wherever there is a good view to drown their admiration in wholesome floods of beer, and not being provided with this natural stopper it fizzles on to interminableness. Why, Jellaby I could see not only let his supper get stone cold but forgot to eat it at all in his endeavour to outdo Frau von Eckthum’s style in his replies, and then Edelgard must needs join in too, and say (I heard her) that life in Storchwerder was a dusty, narrow life, where you could not see the liebe Gott because of other people’s chimney-pots.

Greatly shocked (for I am a religious man) I saved her from further excesses by a loud call for more supper, and she got up mechanically to attend to my wants.

Jellaby, however, whose idea seemed to be that a woman is never to do anything (I wonder who is to do anything, then?) forestalled her with the sudden nimbleness he displayed on such occasions, so surprising in combination with his clothes and general slackness, and procured me a fresh helping.

I thanked him politely, but could not repress some irony in my bow as I apologized for disturbing him.

“Shall I hold your plate while you eat?” he said.

“Why, Jellaby?” I asked, mildly astonished.

“Wouldn’t it be even more comfortable if I did?” he asked; and then I perceived that he was irritated, no doubt because I had got most of the cushions, and he, Quixotic as he is, had given up his to my wife, on whom it was entirely thrown away for she has always assured me she actually prefers hard seats.

Well, of course there were few things in the world quite so unimportant as Jellaby’s irritation, so I just looked pleasant and at the food he had brought me; but I did not get another evening with Frau von Eckthum. She sat immovable on the edge of the slope with my wife and Jellaby, talking in tones that became more and more subdued as dusk deepened into night and stars grew hard and shiny.

They all seemed subdued. They even washed up in whispers. And afterward the very nondescripts lay stretched out quite quietly by the glowing embers of Lord Sigismund’s splendid fire listening to Menzies-Legh’s and Lord Sidge’s talk, in which I did not join for it was on the subject they were so fond of, the amelioration of the condition of those dull and undeserving persons, the poor.

I put my plate where somebody would see it and wash it, and retired to the shelter of a hedge and the comfort of a cigar. The three figures on the edge of the hill became gradually almost mute. Not a leaf in my hedge stirred. It was so still that people talking at the distant farm where we had procured our chickens could almost be understood, and a dog barking somewhere far away down in the Weald seemed quite threateningly near. It was really extraordinarily still; and the stillest thing of all was that strange example of the Englishwoman grafted on what was originally such excellent German stock, Mrs. Menzies-Legh, sitting a yard or two away from me, her hands clasped round her knees, her face turned up as though she were studying astronomy.

I do not suppose she moved for half an hour. Her profile seemed to shine white in the dusk with lines that reminded me somehow of a cameo there is in a red velvet case lying on the table in our comfortable drawing-room at Storchwerder, and the remembrance brought a slight twinge of home-sickness with it. I shook this off, and fell to watching her, and for the amusement of an idle hour lazily reconstructed from the remnants before me what her appearance must have been ten years before in her prime, when there were at least undulations, at least suggestions that here was a woman and not a kind of elongated boy.

The line of her face is certainly quite passable; and that night in the half darkness it was quite as passable as any I have seen on a statue—objects in which I have never been able to take much interest. It is probable she used to be beautiful. Used to be beautiful? What is the value of that? Just a snap of the fingers, and nothing more. If women would but realize that once past their first youth their only chance of pleasing is to be gentle and rare of speech, tactful, deft—in one word, apologetic, they would be more likely to make a good impression on reasonable men such as myself. I did not wish to quarrel with Mrs. Menzies-Legh and yet her tongue and the way she used it put my back up (as the British say) to a height it never attains in the placid pools of feminine intercourse in Storchwerder.