The caravaners

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

bending over the sticks began to arrange them quickly on some stones she picked up.

I did not like to sit down and smoke, which is what I would have done at home (supposing such a situation as the Ottringels lighting a fire out-of-doors in Storchwerder were conceivable), because Mrs. Menzies-Legh would probably have immediately left off peeling her potatoes to exclaim, and Jellaby would, I dare say, have put down his buckets and come over to inquire if I were enjoying myself. Not that I care ten pfennings for their opinions, and I also passionately disapprove of the whole English attitude toward women; but I am a fair-minded man, and believe in going as far as is reasonable with the well-known maxim of behaving in Rome as the Romans behave.

I therefore just stood with my back to the caravans and watched Edelgard. In less time than I take to write it she had piled up the sticks, stuffed a bit of newspaper she drew from her apron underneath them, lit them by means (as I noted) of a single match, and behold the fire, crackling and blazing and leaping upward or outward as the wind drove it.

No proof, if anything further in that way were needed, could be more convincing as to the position women are intended by nature to fill. Their instincts are all of the fire-lighting order, the order that serves and tends; while to man, the noble dreamer, is reserved the place in life where there is room, dignity, and uninterruption. Else how can he dream? And without his dreams there would be no subsequent crystallization of dreams; and all that we see of good and great and wealth-bringing was once some undisturbed man’s dream.

But this is philosophy; and you, my friends, who breathe the very air handed down to you by our Hegels and our Kants, who are born into it and absorb it whether you want to or not through each one of your infancy’s pores, you do not need to hear the Ottringel echo of your own familiar thoughts. We in Storchwerder speak seldom on these subjects for we take them for granted; and I will not in this place describe too minutely all that passed through my mind as I watched, in that grassy solitude, at the hour when the sun in setting lights up everything with extra splendour, my wife piling sticks on the fire.

Indeed, what did pass through it was of a mixed nature. It seemed so strange to be there; so strange that that meadow, in all its dampness, its high hedge round three sides of it, its row of willows brooding over the sulky river, its wood on the one hand, its barren expanse of mole-ridden field on the other, and for all view another meadow of exact similarity behind another row of exactly similar willows across the Medway, it seemed so strange that all this had been lying there silent and empty for heaven knows how many years, the exact spot on which Edelgard and I were standing waiting, as it were, for its prey throughout the entire period of our married life in Storchwerder and of my other married life previous to that, while we, all unconscious, went through the series of actions and thoughts that had at length landed us on it. Strange fruition of years. Stranger the elaborate leading up to it. Strangest the inability of man to escape such a destiny. Regarded as the fruition of years it was certainly paltry, it was certainly a disproportionate destiny. I had been led from Pomerania, a most remote place if measured by its distance from the Medway, in order to stand at evening with damp feet on this exact spot. A believer, you will cry, in predestination? Perhaps. Anyhow, filled with these reflections (and others of the same character) and watching my wife doing in silence that for which she is fitted and intended, my feeling toward her became softer; I began to excuse; to relent; to forgive. Indeed I have tried to do my duty. I am not hard, unless she forces me to be. I feel that no one can guide and help a wife except a husband. And I am older than she is; and am I not experienced in wives, who have had two, and one of them for the enormous (sometimes it used to seem endless) period of twenty years?

I said nothing to her at the moment of a softer nature, being well aware of the advantage of allowing time, before proceeding to forgiveness, for the firmer attitude to sink in; and Jellaby bringing the iron stew-pot Mrs. Menzies-Legh had bought that morning—or rather dragging it, for he is, as I have said, a weedy creature—across to us, spilling much of the water it contained on the way, I was obliged to help him get it on to the fire, fetching at his direction stones to support it and then considerably scorching my hands in the efforts to settle the thing safely on the stones.

“Please don’t bother, Baroness,” said Jellaby to Edelgard when she began to replenish the fire with more sticks. “We’ll do that. You’ll get the smoke in your eyes.”

But would we not get the smoke in our eyes too? And would not eyes unused to kitchen work smart far more than eyes that did the kind of thing at home every day? For I suppose the fires in the kitchen of Storchwerder smoke sometimes, and Edelgard must have been perfectly inured to it.