These are quotations from a conversation I overheard between Frau von Eckthum (oddly loquacious that night) and Jellaby, who both sat near where I was eating my supper, supposed to be eating theirs but really letting it spoil while they looked down at the Sussex Weald (I wish I knew what a Weald is: Kent had one too) and she described the extremely flat and notoriously dull country round Storchwerder.
Indeed I would not have recognized it from her description, and yet I know it every bit as well as she can. Blue air, blue sky, blue water, and the flash of white wings—that was how she described it, and poor Jellaby was completely taken in and murmured “Beautiful, beautiful” in his foolish slow voice, and forgot to eat his chicken and rice while it was hot, and little guessed that she had laughed at him with me a few hours before.
I listened, amused but tolerant. We must not keep a pretty lady too exactly to the truth. The first part of this chapter is a quotation from what I heard her say (excepting one sentence), but my hearers must take my word for it that it did not sound anything like as silly as one might suppose. Everything depends on the utterer. Frau von Eckthum’s quasi-poetical way of describing the conduct of our climate had an odd attractiveness about it that I did not find, for instance, in my dear wife’s utterances when she too, which she at this time began to do with increasing frequency, indulged in the quasi-poetic. Quasi-poetic I and other plain men take to be the violent tearing of such a word as rolling from its natural place and applying it to the plains and fields round Storchwerder. A ship rolls, but fields, I am glad to say, do not. You may also with perfect propriety talk about a rolling-pin in connection with the kitchen, or of a rolling stone in connection with moss. Of course I know that we all on suitable occasions make use of exclamations of an appreciative nature, such as colossal and grossartig, but that is brief and business-like, it is what is expected of us, and it is a duty quickly performed and almost perfunctory, with one eye on the waiter and the restaurant behind; but slow raptures, prolonged ones, raptures beaten out thin, are not in my way and had not till then been in Edelgard’s way either. The English are flimsier than we are, thinner blooded, more feminine, more finnicking. There are no restaurants or Bierhalle wherever there is a good view to drown their admiration in wholesome floods of beer, and not being provided with this natural stopper it fizzles on to interminableness. Why, Jellaby I could see not only let his supper get stone cold but forgot to eat it at all in his endeavour to outdo Frau von Eckthum’s style in his replies, and then Edelgard must needs join in too, and say (I heard her) that life in Storchwerder was a dusty, narrow life, where you could not see the liebe Gott because of other people’s chimney-pots.
Greatly shocked (for I am a religious man) I saved her from further excesses by a loud call for more supper, and she got up mechanically to attend to my wants.
Jellaby, however, whose idea seemed to be that a woman is never to do anything (I wonder who is to do anything, then?) forestalled her with the sudden nimbleness he displayed on such occasions, so surprising in combination with his clothes and general slackness, and procured me a fresh helping.
I thanked him politely, but could not repress some irony in my bow as I apologized for disturbing him.
“Shall I hold your plate while you eat?” he said.
“Why, Jellaby?” I asked, mildly astonished.
“Wouldn’t it be even more comfortable if I did?” he asked; and then I perceived that he was irritated, no doubt because I had got most of the cushions, and he, Quixotic as he is, had given up his to my wife, on whom it was entirely thrown away for she has always assured me she actually prefers hard seats.
Well, of course there were few things in the world quite so unimportant as Jellaby’s irritation, so I just looked pleasant and at the food he had brought me; but I did not get another evening with Frau von Eckthum. She sat immovable on the edge of the slope with my wife and Jellaby, talking in tones that became more and more subdued as dusk deepened into night and stars grew hard and shiny.