The caravaners

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

I could hardly believe it when I thought how at that hour of the day before I was lying beneath the hop-poles of Frogs’ Hole Farm with the greater part, as I supposed, of the tour before me; I could hardly believe that here we were again, Edelgard and I, tête-à-tête in a railway carriage and with a future of, if I may coin a word, tête-à-têteness stretching uninterruptedly ahead as far as imagination could be induced to look. And not only just ordinary tête-à-têteness, but with the complication of one of the têtes, so to speak, being rankly rebellious and unwifely. How long would it take, I wondered, glancing at her as she sat in the corner opposite me, to bring her back to the reason in which she used before we came to England to take delight?

I glanced at her, and I found she was looking at me; and immediately on catching my eye she leaned forward and said:

“Otto, what was it you did?”

They were the first words she had spoken to me that day, and very naturally failing to see any point in them I requested her not to be subtle, which is courteous for senseless.

“Why,” said she, not heeding this warning, “did the party break up? What was it you did?”

Were there ever such questions? But I recollected she could not dream how things really were, and therefore was not as much put out as I would otherwise have been at the characteristically wifely fashion of at once when anything seemed to be going wrong attributing it to her husband.

I therefore good-humouredly applied the Aunt Bockhügel remedy to her, and was willing to leave it at that if she had let me. She, however, preferred to quarrel. Without the least attempt to change the Bockhügel face she said, “My dear Otto—poor Aunt Bockhügel. Won’t we leave her in peace? But tell me what it was you did.”

Then I became vexed, for really the assumption of superiority, of the right to criticize and blame, went further than a reasonable man can permit. What I said as we journeyed up to London I will not here repeat; it has been said before and will be said often enough again so long as husbands have to have wives: but how about the responsibility resting on the wives? I remembered the cheerful mood I had been in on getting up, and felt no small degree of resentment at the manner in which my wife was trying to wipe it out. Give me a chance, and I am the kindest of men; take away my chance, and what can I do?

And so, my friends, as it were with a wrangle ended our sojourn on British soil. I lay down my pen, and become lost in many reflections as I think of all these things. Long ago have we settled down again to our ordinary Storchwerder life, with an Emilie instead of a Clothilde in the kitchen. Long ago we paid our calls announcing to our large circle that we were back. We have taken up the threads of duty, we have resumed regulated existence; and gradually as the weeks melt into months and the influence of Storchwerder presses more heavily upon her, I have observed that my wife shows an increasing tendency once more to find her level. I need not have worried; I need not have wondered how I could bring her to reason. Storchwerder is doing it. Its atmosphere and associations are very potent. They are being, I am thankful to say, too strong for Edelgard. After a few preliminary convulsions she began to cook my meals and look after my welfare as dutifully as before, and other effects no doubt will follow. At present she is more silent than before the tour, and does not laugh as readily as she used when I chance to be in a jesting mood; also at times a British microbe that has escaped the vigilance of those beneficent little creatures Science tells us are in our blood on the alert to devour intrusive foreigners crops up and causes her to comment on my sayings and doings rather à la Mrs. Menzies-Legh, but I frown her down or apply the Aunt Bockhügel, and in another few months I trust all will be exactly as it used to be. I myself am exactly as I used to be—a plain, outspoken, patriotic, Christian gentleman, going steadily along the path of duty, neither looking to the right nor to the left (if I did I should not see Frau von Eckthum for she is still in England), and using my humble abilities to do what I can for the glory of my country and my Emperor.

And now having finished the narrative there is nothing more to do but to buy a red pencil and put marks on it. Many, I fear, will be those marks. Unfortunate is the fact that you cannot be sincere without at the same time being indiscreet. But I trust that what remains will be treated by my hearers with the indulgence due to a man who has only been desirous of telling the whole truth, or in other words (and which amount, I take it, to precisely the same thing) of concealing nothing.