Jellaby’s mouth remained open.
I waited a moment, then seeing that it would not shut and that I had really apparently shattered their nerves beyond readjustment by so suddenly popping round on them in that ghostly place, I thought it best to change the subject, promising myself to return to it another time.
So I picked up my hat and stick from the chair I had vacated—Jellaby peered round the pillar at this piece of furniture with his unshut mouth still denoting unaccountable shock—bowed, and offered my arm to Frau von Eckthum.
“It is late,” said I with tender courtliness, “and I observe an official approaching us with keys. If we do not return to the camp we shall have your sister setting out, probably on angelic wings”—she started—“in search of you. Let me, dear lady, conduct you back to her. Nay, nay, you need have no fears—I really can keep a secret.”
With her eyes fixed on mine, and that strange look of perfect fright in them, she got up slowly and put her hand on my proffered arm.
I led her away with careful tenderness.
Jellaby, I believe, followed in the distance.
CHAPTER XX
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.