Chapter 20

LIFE is a strange thing, and full of surprises. The day before, you think you know what will happen on the morrow, and on the morrow you find you did not. Light as you may the candle of your common sense, and peer as you may by its shining into the future, if you see anything at all it turns out to have been, after all, something else. We are surrounded by tricks, by illusions, by fluidities. Even when the natural world behaves pretty much as experience has led us to expect, the unnatural world, by which I mean (and I say it is a fair description) human beings, does nothing of the sort. My ripe conclusion, carefully weighed and unattackably mellow, is that all one’s study, all one’s thought, all one’s experience, all one’s philosophy, lead to this: that you cannot account for anything. Do you, my friends, interrupt me here with a query? My answer to it is: Wait.

The morning after the occurrences just described I overslept myself, and on emerging about ten o’clock in search of what I hoped would still be breakfast I found the table tidily set out, the stove alight, and keeping coffee warm, ham in slices on a dish, three eggs waiting to be transferred to an expectant saucepan, and not a single caravaner in sight except Menzies-Legh.

Him, of course, I now pitied. For to have a treacherous friend, and a sister-in law of whom you are fond but who in her heart cannot endure you, to be under the delusion that the one is sincere and the other loving, is to become a fit object for pity; and since no one can at the same time both pity and hate, I was not nearly so much annoyed as I otherwise would have been at finding my glum-faced friend was to keep me company. Annoyed, did I say? Why, I was not annoyed at all. For though I might pity I was also secretly amused, and further, the feeling that I now had a little private understanding with Frau von Eckthum exhilarated me into more than my usual share of good humour.

He was sitting smoking; and when I appeared, fresh, and rested, and cheery, round the corner of the Elsa, he not only immediately said good morning, but added an inquiry as to whether I did not think it a beautiful day; then he got up, went across to the stove, put the eggs in the saucepan, and fetched the coffee-pot.

This was very surprising. I tell you, my friends, the moods of persons who caravan are as many and as incalculable as the grains of sand on the seashore. If you doubt it, go and do it. But you cannot reasonably doubt it after listening to the narrative. Have I not told you in the course of it how the party’s spirits were up in the skies one hour, and down on the ground the next; how their gaiety some days at breakfast was childish in its folly, and their silence on others depressing; how they quoted poetry and played at Blind Man’s Buff in the morning, and in the afternoon dragged their feet without speaking through the mud; how they talked far too much sometimes, and then, when I wished to, would not talk at all; how they were suddenly polite and attentive, and then as suddenly forgot I could possibly want anything; how the wet did not damp their hilarity one day, and no amount of sunshine coax it forth the next? But of all their moods this of Menzies-Legh’s in the field above Canterbury was the one that surprised me most.

You see, he was naturally so very glum. True at the beginning there had been gleams of light but they soon became extinguished. True, also, at Frogs’ Hole Farm, when demonstrating truths by means of tea in glasses, he had been for a short while pleasant—only, however, to plunge immediately and all the deeper into gloom and ill-temper. Gloom and ill-temper was his normal state; and to see him attending to my wants, doing it with unmistakable assiduity, actively courteous, was astonishing. I was astonished. But my breeding enabled me to behave as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and I accepted sugar from him and allowed him to cut my bread with the blank expression on my face of him who sees nothing unusual or interesting anywhere, which is, I take it, the expression of the perfect gentleman. When at length my plate was surrounded by specimens of all the comforts available, and I had begun to eat, he sat down again, and leaning his elbow on the table and fixing his eyes on the city already sweltering in heat and vapour below, resumed his pipe.

A train puffed out of the station along the line at the bottom of our field, jerking up slow masses of white steam into the hot, motionless air.

“There goes Jellaby’s train,” said Menzies-Legh.

“Jellaby’s what?” said I, cracking an egg.

“Train,” said he.

“Why, what has he got to do with trains?” I asked, supposing with the vagueness of want of interest, that Jellaby, as well as being a Socialist, was a railway director and kept a particular train as another person would keep a pet.

“He’s in it,” said Menzies-Legh.

I looked up from my egg at Menzies-Legh’s profile.

“What?” said I.

“In it,” said he. “Obliged to go.”

“What—Jellaby gone? First Lord Sidge, and now Jellaby?”

Naturally I was surprised, for I had heard and noticed nothing of this. Also the way one after the other left without saying good-bye seemed to me inconsiderate—at least that: probably more.

“Yes,” said Menzies-Legh. “We are—we are very sorry.”