The caravaners

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

While they were gone we waited, a melancholy string of vehicles and people in a world made up of mist and mud. Frau von Eckthum, who might have cheered me, had been invisible nearly the whole day, ministering (no doubt angelically) to the afflicted fledgling. Edelgard and the child Jane got into the Elsa during the pause and began to teach each other languages. I leaned against the gate, staring before me. Old James, a figure of dripping patience, remained at his horse’s head. And Lord Sigismund and Jellaby, as though they had not had enough exercise, walked up and down the road talking.

Except the sound of their receding and advancing footsteps the stillness was broken by nothing at all. It was a noiseless rain. It did not patter. And yet, fine though it was, it streamed down the flanks of the horses, the sides of the caravans, and actually penetrated, as I later on discovered, through the green arras lining of the Elsa, making a long black streak from roof to floor.

I wonder what my friends at home would have said could they have seen me then. No shelter; no refuge; no rest. These three negatives, I take it, sum up fairly accurately a holiday in a caravan. You cannot get in, for if you do either you find it full already of your wife, or, if it is moving, Jellaby immediately springs up from nowhere and inquires at the window whether you have noticed how your horse is sweating. At every camp there is nothing but work—and oh, my friends, such work! Work undreamed of in your ordered lives, and nothing, nothing but it, for must you not eat? And without it there is no eating. And then when you have eaten, without the least pause, the least interval for the meditation so good after meals, there begins that frightful and accursed form of activity, most frightful and accursed of all known forms, the washing up. How it came about that it was not from the first left to the women I cannot understand; they are fitted by nature for such labour, and do not feel it; but I, being in a minority, was powerless to interfere. Nor did I always succeed in evading it. If we camped early, the daylight exposed my movements; and by the time it was done bed seemed the only place to go to. Now an intelligent man does not desire to go to bed at eight; yet in that cold weather—we were, they said, unusually unfortunate in the weather—even if it was dry, what pleasure was there in sitting out-of-doors? I had had enough during the day of out-of-doors; by the time evening came, out-of-doors and fresh air were things abhorrent to me. And there were only three comfortable chairs, low and easy, in which a man might stretch himself and smoke, and these, without so much as a preliminary offering of them to anybody else, were sat in by the ladies. It did seem a turning of good old customs upside down when I saw Edelgard get into one as a matter of course, so indifferent to what I might be thinking that she did not even look my way. How vividly on such occasions did I remember my easy chair at Storchwerder and how sacred it was, and how she never dared, if I were in the house, approach it, nor I firmly believe ever dared, so good was her training and so great her respect, approach it when I was out.

Well, our proverb—descriptive of a German gentleman about to start on his (no doubt) well-deserved holiday travels—“He who loves his wife leaves her at home,” is as wise now as the day it was written, and about this time I began to see that by having made my bed in a manner that disregarded it I was going to have to lie on it.

The Menzies-Leghs returned wreathed in smiles—I beg you to note the reason, and all of wretchedness that it implies—because the owner of the field’s wife had not been rude, and had together with the desired permission sold them two pounds of sausages, the cold potatoes left from her dinner, a jug of milk, a piece of butter, and some firewood. Also they had met a baker’s cart and had bought loaves.

This, of course, as far as it went, was satisfactory, especially the potatoes that neither wanted peeling nor patience while they grew soft, but I submit that it was only a further proof of our extreme lowness in the scale of well-cared-for humanity. Here in my own home, with these events in what Menzies-Legh and Jellaby would have called the blue distance, how strange it seems that just sausages and cold potatoes should ever have been able to move me to exultation.

We at once got into the field, hugging the hedge, and in the shelter of the Ilsa (which entered last) made our fire. I was deputed (owing to the unfortunate circumstance of my being the only person who had brought one) to hold my umbrella over the frying pan while Jellaby fried the sausages on one of the stoves. It was not what I would have chosen, for while protecting the sausages I was also, in spite of every effort to the contrary, protecting Jellaby; and what an anomalous position for a gentleman of birth and breeding and filled with the aristocratic opinions, and perhaps (for I am a fair man) prejudices, incident to being born and bred—well born of course I mean, not recognizing any other form of birth—what a position, to stand there keeping the back of a British Socialist dry!

But there is no escaping these anomalies if you caravan; they crop up continually; and however much you try to dam them out, the waters of awkwardly familiar situations constantly break through and set all your finer feelings on edge. Fain would I have let the rain work its will on Jellaby’s back, but what about the sausages? As they turned and twisted in the pan, obedient to his guiding fork, I could not find it in me to let a drop of rain mar that melodious fizzling. So I stood there doing my best, glad at least I was spared being compromised owing to the absence of my friends, while the two other gentlemen warmed up the potatoes over the fire preparatory to converting them into purée, and the ladies in the caravans were employed, judging by the fragrance, in making coffee.

In spite of the rain a small crowd had collected and was leaning on the gate. Their faces were divided between wonder and pity; but this was an expression we had now got used to, for except on fine days every face we met at once assumed it, unless the face belonged to a little boy, when it was covered instead with what seemed to be glee and was certainly animation, the animation being apparently not infrequently inspired by a train of thought which led up to, after we had passed, a calling out and a throwing of stones.

“You’ll see these turn brown soon,” said Jellaby, crouching over his sausages and pursuing them untiringly round and round the pan with a fork.