This surprised me. Not that Jellaby should be leathery, for if he were not neither would he be a Socialist; but that the son of so noble a house as the house of Hereford should have anything but the thinnest, most sensitive of skins, really was astonishing. No doubt, however, Lord Sigismund combined, like the racehorse of purest breed, a skin thin as a woman’s with a mettle and spirit nothing could daunt. Nothing was daunting him that morning, that was very clear, for he sat at the end of the table shedding such contented beams through his spectacles on the company and on the food that it was as if, unconsciously true to his future calling, he was saying a continual grace.
I think they must all have been up very early, for except the cups and plates actually in use everything was already stowed away. Even the tent and its furniture was neatly rolled up preparatory to being distributed among the three caravans. Such activity, after the previous day, was surprising; and still more so was the circumstance that I had heard nothing of the attendant inevitable bustle.
“How do you feel this morning?” I asked solicitously of Frau von Eckthum on meeting her a moment alone behind her larder; I hoped she, at least, had not been working too hard.
“Oh, very well,” said she.
“Not too weary?”
“Ah—youth, youth,” said I, shaking my head playfully, for indeed she looked singularly attractive that morning.
She smiled, and mounting the steps into her caravan began to do things with a duster and to sing.
For a moment I wondered whether she too had been made brisk by early contact with the Medway (of course in some remoter pool or bay), so unusual in her was this flow of language; but the idea of such delicacy being enveloped and perhaps buffeted by that rude volume of muddy water was, I felt, an impossible one. Still, why should she feel brisk? Had she not walked the day before the entire distance in the dust? Was it possible that she too, in spite of her poetic exterior, was really inwardly leathery? I have my ideals about women, and believe there is much of the poet concealed somewhere about me; and there is a moonlight intangibleness about this lady, an etherealism amounting at times almost to indistinctness, that made the application to her of such an adjective as leathery one from which I shrank. Yet if she were not, how could she—but I put these thoughts resolutely aside, and began to prepare for our departure, moving about mechanically as one in a bleak and chilly dream.
That is a hideous bridge, that one the English have built themselves across the Medway. A great gray-painted iron structure, with the dusty highroad running over it and the dirty river running under it. I hope never to see it again, unless officially at the head of my battalion. On the other side was a place called Paddock Wood, also, it seemed to me, a dreary thing as I walked through it that morning at my horse’s side. The sun came out just there, and the wind with its consequent dust increased. What an August, thought I; what a climate; what a place. An August and a climate and a place only to be found in the British Isles. In Storchwerder at that moment a proper harvest mellowness prevailed. No doubt also in Switzerland, whither we so nearly went, and certainly in Italy. Was this a reasonable way of celebrating one’s silver wedding, plodding through Paddock Wood with no one taking any notice of me, not even she who was the lawful partner of the celebration? The only answer I got as I put the question to myself was a mouthful of dust.