The caravaners

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

So I hied me (poetry being the fashion) to my bed, and lay awake in it for some time being sorry for Menzies-Legh, for really no man can possibly like having a creepy wife.

But (luckily) autres temps autres mœurs, as our unbalanced but sometimes felicitous neighbours across the Vosges say, and next morning the poetry of the party was, thank heaven, clogged by porridge.

It always was at breakfast. They were strangely hilarious then, but never poetic. Poetry developed later in the day as the sun and their spirits sank together, and flourished at its full growth when there were stars or a moon. That morning, our first Sunday, a fresh breeze blew up from the Weald below and a cloudless sun dazzled us as it fell on the white cloth of the table set out in the middle of the field by somebody—I expect it was Mrs. Menzies-Legh—who wanted to make the most of the sun, and we had to hold on our hats with one hand and shade our eyes with the other while we ate.

Uncomfortable? Of course it was uncomfortable. Let no one who loves to be comfortable ever caravan. Neither let any one who loves order and decency do so. They may take it from me that there is never any order, and even less frequently is there any decency. I can give you an example from that Sunday morning. I was sitting at the table with the ladies, on a seat (as usual) too low for me, and that (also as usual) slanted on the uneven ground, with my feet slightly too cold in the damp grass and my head slightly too hot in the bright sun, and the general feeling of subtle discomfort and ruffledness that is one of the principal characteristics of this form of pleasure-taking, when I saw (and so did the ladies) Jellaby emerge from his tent—in his shirt sleeves if you please—and fastening up a mirror on the roof of his canvas lair proceed then and there in the middle of the field to lather his face and then to shave it.

Edelgard, of course, true to her early training, at once cast down her eyes and was careful to keep them averted during the remainder of the meal, but nobody else seemed to mind; indeed, Mrs. Menzies-Legh got out her camera and focussing him with deliberate care snap-shotted him.

Were these people getting blunted as the days passed to the refinements and necessary precautions of social intercourse? I had been stirred to much silent indignation by the habit of the gentlemen of walking in their shirt sleeves, and had not yet got used to that, but to see Jellaby dressing in an open field was a little more than I could endure in silence. For if, I asked myself rapidly, Jellaby dresses (shaving being a part of dressing) out-of-doors in the morning, what is to prevent his doing the opposite in the evening? Where is the line? Where is the logical limit? We had now been three days out, and we had already got to this. Where, I thought, should we have got to in another six? Where should we be by, say, the following Sunday?

I cannot think a promiscuous domesticity desirable, and am one of those who strongly disapprove of that worst example of it, the mixed bathing or Familienbad which blots with practically unclothed Jews of either sex our otherwise decent coasts. Never have I allowed Edelgard to indulge in it, nor have I done so myself. It is a deplorable spectacle. We used to sit and watch it for hours, in a condition of ever-increasing horror and disgust—it was quite difficult to find seats sometimes, so many of our friends were there being disgusted too.

But these denizens of the deep at the points where the deep was a Familienbad were, as I have said, chiefly Jews and their Jewesses, and what can you expect? Jellaby, however, in spite of his other infirmities, was not yet a Jew; he was everything else I think, but that crowning infamy had up to then been denied him.

But not to be one and yet to behave with the laxness of one within view of the rest of the party was very inexcusable. “Are there no hedges to this field?” I cried in indignant sarcasm, looking pointedly at each of its four hedges in turn and raising my voice so that he could hear.

“Oh, Baron dear, it’s Sunday,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, no longer a rather nice-looking if irreverent cameo in a velvet case, but full of morning militancy. “Don’t be cross till to-morrow. Save it up, or what will you do on Monday?”