Chapter 8

“THE children of England——” I remarked, when they had gone their way, their arms linked together, to Lord Sigismund who was hurrying past to the river with a bucket—but he interrupted me by shouting over his shoulder:

“Will you stay and light the fire, or come with us and forage for food?”

Light the fire? Why, what are women for? Even Hermann, my servant, would rebel if he instead of Clothilde had to light fires. But, on the other hand, forage? Go back across that immense field and walk from shop to shop on feet that had for some time past been unable to walk at all? And then return weighed down with the results?

“Do you understand fires, Baron?” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, appearing suddenly behind me.

“As much, I suppose, as intelligence unaided by experience does,” said I unwillingly.

“Oh, but of course you do,” said she, putting a box of matches—one of those enormous English boxes that never failed to arouse my amused contempt, for they did not light a single fire or candle more than their handy little continental brethren—into my right hand, and the red handkerchiefful of sticks bought that morning into my left, “of course you do. You must have got quite used to them in the wars.”

“What wars?” I asked sharply. “You surely do not imagine that I——”

“Oh, were you too young for Sedan and all that?” she asked, as she crossed over the very long and very green grass toward a distant ditch and I found that I was expected to cross with her.

“I was so young,” I said, more nettled than my hearers will perhaps understand, but then I was tired out and no longer able to bear much, “so young that I had not even reached the stage of being born.”

“Not really?” said she.

“Yes,” said I. “I was still spending my birthdays among the angels.”

This, of course, was not strictly true, but one likes to take off a few years in the presence of a woman who has left her Gotha Almanach at home, and it was, I felt, a picturesque notion—I mean about the birthdays and the angels.

“Not really?” said she again.

And what, I thought, as we walked on together, is all this talk about young and not young? If a man is not young in the forties when will he be? I have never concealed my age, which is about five or six and forty, with perhaps a year or two added on, but as I take little notice of birthdays it is just as likely the year or two ought to be added off, and the forties are universally acknowledged by all persons who are in them to be the very flower and prime of life, or rather the beginning of the very flower and prime, the beginning of the final unfolding of the last crumple in the last petal.

I should have thought this state of things was visible enough in me, plain enough to any ordinary onlooker. I have neither a gray hair nor a wrinkle. My moustache is as uninterruptedly blond as ever. My face is perfectly smooth. And when my hat is on there is no difference whatever between me and a person of thirty. Of course I am not a narrow man, weedy in the way in which Jellaby is weedy, and unable as he is unable to fill out my clothes; but it is laughable that just breadth should have made those two fledglings place me in the same category as an exceedingly venerable and obviously crippled old gentleman.

I expect the truth is that in England children are ill-trained and educated, and their perceptions are allowed to remain rudimentary. It must be so, for so few of them wear spectacles. Clearly education is not carried on with anything like our systematic rigor, for except on Lord Sigismund I had up to then nowhere seen these artificial aids to eyesight, and in Germany at least two-thirds of our young people, as a result of their application, wear either spectacles or pince-nez. They may well be proud of them. They are the visible proof of a youth spent entirely at its books, the hoisted standard of an ordered and studious life.

“The children of England——” I began vigorously to Mrs. Menzies-Legh, desirous of expressing a few of my objections to them to a lady who could not be supposed to mind, she being one of my own countrywomen—but she too interrupted me.

“This is the most sheltered place,” she said, pointing to the dry ditch. “You’ll find more sticks in that little wood. You will want heaps more.”

And she left me.

Well, I had never made a fire in my life. I stood there for a moment in great hesitation as to how to begin. They should not say I was unwilling, those ant-like groups over by the caravans so feverishly hurrying hither and thither, but to do a thing one must begin it, and as there are no doubt several ways of lighting a fire, even as there are several ways of doing anything else in life, I stood uncertain while I asked myself which of these several ways (all of them, I must concede, unknown to me) I ought to choose.

The ditch had a hedge on its farther side, and through a gap in it I saw the wood, cleared in places and overgrown between the remaining stumps by bracken and brambles, wherein I was, as Mrs. Menzies-Legh said, to find more sticks. The first thing to be done, then, was to find the sticks, for the handkerchief contained the merest handful; and this was a hard task among brambles at the end of a dinnerless day, and likely, besides, to prove ruinous to my stockings.

The groups at the caravans were peeling the potatoes and other vegetables we had bought at the farm near Grip’s Common that morning, and were doing it with an expedition that showed how hunger was triumphing over fatigue. Jellaby hurried to and fro to a small spring among the bracken fetching water. Menzies-Legh and Lord Sigismund had disappeared in the distance that led to the shops. Old James was feeding the horses. I could see the two fledglings sitting on the grass with bowed heads and flushed cheeks absorbed in the shredding of cabbages. Mrs. Menzies-Legh had begun, with immense energy, to peel potatoes. Her gentle sister—I deplored it—was engaged on an onion. Nowhere, look as I might (for I needed her assistance) could I see my wife.