The Caravaners
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 3
SHE became, however, more normal as the morning wore on, and by about eleven o’clock was taking an intelligent interest in hop-kilns.
These objects, recurring at frequent intervals as one travels through the county of Kent, are striking and picturesque additions to the landscape, and as our guide-book described them very fully I was able to talk a good deal about them. Kent pleased me very well. It looked as if there were money in it. Many thriving villages, many comfortable farmhouses, and many hoary churches peeping slyly at us through surrounding groups of timber so ancient that its not yet having been cut down and sold is in itself a testimony to the prevailing prosperity. It did not need much imagination to picture the comfortable clergyman lurking in the recesses of his snug parsonage and rubbing his well-nourished hands at life. Well, let him rub. Some day perhaps—and who knows how soon?—we shall have a decent Lutheran pastor in his black gown preaching the amended faith in every one of those churches.
Shortly, then, Kent is obviously flowing with milk and honey and well-to-do inhabitants; and when on referring to our guide-book I found it described as the Garden of England I was not in the least surprised, and neither was Edelgard. In this county, as we knew, part at any rate of our gipsying was to take place, for the caravans were stationed at a village about three miles from Wrotham, and we were very well satisfied that we were going to examine it more closely, because though no one could call the scenery majestic it yet looked full of promise of a comfortable nature. I observed for instance that the roads seemed firm and good, which was clearly important; also that the villages were so plentiful that there would be no fear of our ever getting beyond the reach of provisions. Unfortunately, the weather was not true August weather, which I take it is properly described by the word bland. This is not bland. The remains of the violent wind that had blown us across from Flushing still hurried hither and thither, and gleams of sunshine only too frequently gave place to heavy squalls of rain and hail. It was more like a blustering October day than one in what is supposed to be the very height and ripeness of summer, and we could only both hope, as the carriage windows banged and rattled, that our caravan would be heavy enough to withstand the temptation to go on by itself during the night, urged on from behind by the relentless forces of nature. Still, each time the sun got the better of the inky clouds and the Garden of England laughed at us from out of its bravery of graceful hop-fields and ripening corn, we could not resist a feeling of holiday hopefulness. Edelgard’s spirits rose with every mile, and I, having readily forgiven her on her asking me to and acknowledging she had been selfish, was quite like a boy; and when we got out of the train at Wrotham beneath a blue sky and a hot sun with the hail-clouds retreating over the hills and found we would have to pack ourselves and our many packages into a fly so small that, as I jocularly remarked in English, it was not a fly at all but an insect, Edelgard was so much entertained that for several minutes she was perfectly convulsed with laughter.
By means of the address neatly written in Latin characters on an envelope, we had no difficulty in getting the driver to start off as though he knew where he was going, but after we had been on the way for about half an hour he grew restless, and began to twist round on his box and ask me unintelligible questions. I suppose he talked and understood only patois, for I could not in the least make out what he meant, and when I requested him to be more clear I could see by his foolish face that he was constitutionally unable to be it. A second exhibition of the addressed envelope, however, soothed him for a time, and we continued to advance up and down chalky roads, over the hedges on each side of which leapt the wind and tried to blow our hats off. The sun was in our eyes, the dust was in our eyes, and the wind was in our faces. Wrotham, when we looked behind, had disappeared. In front was a chalky desolation. We could see nothing approaching a village, yet Panthers, the village we were bound for, was only three miles from the station, and not, observe, three full-blooded German miles, but the dwindled and anæmic English kind that are typical, as so much else is, of the soul and temper of the nation. Therefore we began to be uneasy, and to wonder whether the man were trustworthy. It occurred to me that the chalk pits we constantly met would not be bad places to take us into and rob us, and I certainly could not speak English quickly enough to meet a situation demanding rapid dialogue, nor are there any directions in my German-English Conversational Guide as to what you are to say when you are being murdered.
Still jocose, but as my hearers will notice, jocose with a tinge of grimness, I imparted these two linguistic facts to Edelgard, who shuddered and suggested renewed applications of the addressed envelope to the driver. “Also it is past dinner time,” she added anxiously. “I know because mein Magen knurrt.”
By means of repeated calls and my umbrella I drew the driver’s attention to us and informed him that I would stand no further nonsense. I told him this with great distinctness and the deliberation forced upon me by want of practice. He pulled up to hear me out, and then, merely grinning, drove on. “The youngest Storchwerder droschke driver,” I cried indignantly to Edelgard, “would die of shame on his box if he did not know every village, nay, every house within three miles of it with the same exactitude with which he knows the inside of his own pocket.”
Then I called up to the man once more, and recollecting that nothing clears our Hermann’s brain at home quicker than to address him as Esel I said, “Ask, ass.”
He looked down over his shoulder at me with an expression of great surprise.
“What?” said he.
“What?” said I, confounded by this obtuseness. “What? The way, of course.”
He pulled up once more and turned right round on his box.
“Look here——” he said, and paused.
“Look where?” said I, very naturally supposing he had something to show me.
“Who are you talkin’ to?” said he.
The question on the face of it was so foolish that a qualm gripped my heart lest we had to do with a madman. Edelgard felt the same, for she drew closer to me.
Luckily at that moment I saw a passer-by some way down the road, and springing out of the fly hastened to meet him in spite of Edelgard’s demand that I should not leave her alone. On reaching him I took off my hat and courteously asked him to direct us to Panthers, at the same time expressing my belief that the flyman was not normal. He listened with the earnest and strained attention English people gave to my utterances, an attention caused, I believe, by the slightly unpractised pronunciation combined with the number and variety of words at my command, and then going up (quite fearlessly) to the flyman he pointed in the direction entirely opposed to the one we were following and bade him go there.
“I won’t take him nowhere,” said the flyman with strange passion; “he calls me a ass.”
“It is not your fault,” said I (very handsomely, I thought). “You are what you were made. You cannot help yourself.”
“I won’t take him nowhere,” repeated the flyman, with, if anything, increased passion.
The passer-by looked from one to another with a faint smile.
“The expression,” said he to the flyman, “is, you see, merely a term of recognition in the gentleman’s country. You can’t reasonably object to that, you know. Drive on like a sensible man, and get your fare.”
And lifting his hat to Edelgard he continued his passing by.
Well, we did finally arrive at the appointed place—indeed, my hearers next winter will know all the time that we must have, or why should I be reading this aloud?—after being forced by the flyman to walk the last twenty minutes up a hill which, he declared, his horse would not otherwise be able to ascend. The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle—a hard one to encounter when it is long past dinner-time. I am aware that by English clocks it was not past it, but what was that to me? My watch showed that in Storchwerder, the place our inner natures were used to, it was half-past two, a good hour beyond the time at which they are accustomed daily to be replenished, and no arbitrary theory, anyhow no perilously near approach to one, will convince a man against the evidence of his senses that he is not hungry because a foreign clock says it is not dinner-time when it is.
Panthers, we found on reaching the top of the hill and pausing to regain our composure, is but a house here and a house there scattered over a
bleak, ungenial landscape. It seemed an odd, high up district to use as a terminus for caravans, and I looked down the steep, narrow lane we had just ascended and wondered how a caravan would get up it. Afterward I found that they never do get up it, but arrive home from the exactly opposite direction along a fair road which was the one any but an imbecile driver would have brought us. We reached our destination by, so to speak, its back door; and we were still standing on the top of the hill doing what is known as getting one’s wind, for I am not what would be called an ill-covered man but rather, as I jestingly tell Edelgard, a walking compliment to her good cooking, and she herself was always of a substantial build, not exaggeratedly but agreeably so—we were standing, I say, struggling for breath when some one came out quickly from a neighbouring gate and stopped with a smile of greeting upon seeing us.
It was the gaunt sister.
We were greatly pleased. Here we were, then, safely arrived, and joined to at least a portion of our party. Enthusiastically we grasped both her hands and shook them. She laughed as she returned our greetings, and I was so much pleased to find some one I knew that though Edelgard commented afterward somewhat severely on her dress because it was so short that it nowhere touched the ground, I noticed nothing except that it seemed to be extremely neat, and as for not touching the ground Edelgard’s skirt was followed wherever she went by a cloud of chalky dust which was most unpleasant.
Now why were we so glad to see this lady again? Why, indeed, are people ever glad to see each other again? I mean people who when they last saw each other did not like each other. Given a sufficient lapse of time, and I have observed that even those who parted in an atmosphere thick with sulphur of implied cursings will smile and genially inquire how the other does. I have observed this, I say, but I cannot explain it. There had, it is true, never been any sulphur about our limited intercourse with the lady on the few occasions on which proper feeling prevailed enough to induce her to visit her flesh and blood in Prussia—our attitude toward her had simply been one of well-bred chill, of chill because no thinking German can, to start with, be anything but prejudiced against a person who commits the unpatriotism—not to call it by a harsher name—of selling her inestimable German birthright for the mess of an English marriage. Also she was personally not what Storchwerder could like, for she was entirely wanting in the graces and undulations of form which are the least one has a right to expect of a being professing to be a woman. Also she had a way of talking which disconcerted Storchwerder, and nobody likes being disconcerted. Our reasons for joining issue with her in the matter of caravans were first, that we could not help it, only having discovered she was coming when it was too late; and secondly, that it was a cheap and convenient way of seeing a new country. She with her intimate knowledge of English was to be, we privately told each other, our unpaid courier—I remember Edelgard’s amusement when the consolatory cleverness of this way of looking at it first struck her.
But I am still at a loss to explain how it was that when she unexpectedly appeared at the top of the hill at Panthers we both rushed at her with an effusiveness that could hardly have been exceeded if it had been Edelgard’s grandmother Podhaben who had suddenly stood before us, an old lady of ninety-two of whom we are both extremely fond, and who, as is well known, is going to leave my wife her money when she (which I trust sincerely she will not do for a long time yet) dies. I cannot explain it, I say, but there it is. Rush we did, and effusive we were, and it was reserved for a quieter moment to remember with some natural discomposure that we had showed far more enthusiasm than she had. Not that she was not pleasant, but there is a gap between pleasantness and enthusiasm, and to be the one of two persons who is most pleased is to put yourself in the position of the inferior, of the suppliant, of him who hopes, or is eager to ingratiate himself. Will it be believed that when later on I said something to this effect about some other matter in general conversation, the gaunt sister immediately cried, “Oh, but that’s not generous.”
“What is not generous?” I asked surprised, for it was the first day of the tour and I was not then as much used as I subsequently became to her instant criticism of all I said.
“That way of thinking,” said she.
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