The caravaners

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

began and during it whenever the sitting portions of the ritual were reached. She was, we afterward discovered, the lady of the manor or chief lady in the place, and it was in one of her fields we were camping. We heard that afternoon from the farmer that she had privately visited our camp the evening before with her bailiff and his dogs and observed us, also with the aid of her eye-glass, over the hedge as we sat absorbed round our supper, doubtful whether we were not a circus and ought not instantly to be moved on. I fancy the result of her scrutiny in church was very satisfactory. She could not fail to see that here she had to do with a gentleman of noble birth, and the ladies of the party, in pews concealing their short skirts but displaying their earrings, were seen to every advantage. I caught her eye so repeatedly that at last, quite involuntarily, and yielding to a natural instinct, I bowed—a little, not deeply, out of considerations of time and place. She did not return my bow, nor did she after that look again, but attended during the rest of the service to her somewhat neglected devotions.

My hearers will be as much surprised as I was, though not half so tired, when I tell them that during the greater part of the service I was expected to remain on my knees. We Germans are not accustomed to our knees. I had certainly never used mine for praying purposes before; and inquiry later on elicited the information that the singular nation kneels every night by its beds before getting into them, and says prayers there too.

But it was not only the kneeling that shocked me (for if you ache and stiffen how can you properly pray! As Satan no doubt very well knew when he first put it into their heads to do it)—it was the extraordinary speed at which the service was run through. We began at eleven, and by a quarter to twelve we were, so to speak, ejected shriven. No flock can fatten on such a diet. How differently are the flocks of the Fatherland fed! There they grow fat indeed on the ample extemporizations of their pastor, or have every opportunity of doing so if they want to. Does he not address them for the best part of an hour? Which is not a moment too long for a meal that is to last seven days.

The English pastor, arrayed in white with two meaningless red ribbons down his back, preached for seven minutes, providing as I rapidly calculated exactly one minute’s edification for each day of the week until the following Sunday. Alas, for the sheep of England! That is to say, alas from the mere generally humane point of view, but not otherwise alas, for their disadvantage must always be our gain, and a British sheep starved into socialism and civil war is almost more valuable to us than a German sheep which shall be fat with faith.

The pastor, evidently a militant man, preached against the sin of bigotry, which would have been all very well as far as it went and listened to by me with the tolerance I am accustomed to bring to bear on pulpit utterances if he had not in the same breath—there was hardly time for more than one—called down heaven’s wrath on all who attend the meetings or services of forms of faith other than the Anglican. These other forms include, as I need not point out, the Lutheran. Really I found it difficult to suppress a smile at the poor man’s folly. I longed for Luther (a thing I cannot remember ever to have done before) to rise up and scatter the blinded gentleman out of his pulpit. But hardly had I got as far as this in my thoughts than a hurried benediction, a hasty hymn, a rapid passing round of the English equivalent for what we call God’s box, ended the service. Genuinely shocked at this breathlessness—and you, my hearers, who know no other worship than that leisurely one in Storchwerder and throughout our beloved Prussian land (I do not allude to Roman Catholics beyond saying, in a spirit of tolerant humanity, poor things), that worship which fills the entire morning, that composed and comfortable worship during which you sit almost the whole time so that no fatigue of the feet or knees shall distract your thoughts from the matter in hand, you who join sitting in our chorales, slow and dignified settings of ancient sentiments with ample spaces between the verses for the thinking of appropriate thoughts in which you are assisted by the meditative organ, and stand, as men should who are not slaves, to pray, you will, I am sure, be shocked too—I decided that here no doubt was one of the keys to the manifest decadence of the British character. Reverence and speed can never go together. Irreverence in the treatment of its creeds is an inevitable sign that a nation is well on that downward plane which jerks it at last into the jaws of (say) Germany. Well, so be it. Though irreverence is undoubtedly an evil, and I am the first to deplore it, I cannot deplore it as much as I would if it were not going to be the cause of that ultimate jerking. And what a green and fruitful land it is! Es wird gut schmecken, as we men of healthy appetite say.

We walked home—an expression that used to strike me as strangely ironical when home was only grass and hedges—discussing these things. That is, I discussed and Frau von Eckthum said Oh? But the sympathy of the voice, the implied agreement with my views, the appreciation of the way I put them, the perfect mutual understanding expressed, all this I cannot describe even if I would to you prejudiced critics.

Edelgard went on ahead with the two young girls. She and I did not at this point see much of each other, but quite enough. Being human I got tired sometimes of being patient, and yet it was impossible to be anything else inside a caravan with walls so thin that the whole camp would have to hear. Nor can you be impatient in the middle of a field: to be so comfortably you must be on the other side of at least a hedge; so that on the whole it was best we should seldom be together.

With Frau von Eckthum, on the other hand, I never had the least desire to be anything but the mildest of men, and we walked home as harmoniously as usual to find when we arrived that, though we had in no way lingered, the active pastor was there before us.

With what haste he must have stripped off his ribbons and by what short cuts across ditches he had reached the camp so quickly I cannot say, but there he was, ensconced in one of the low chairs talking to the Menzies-Leghs as though he had known them all his life.

This want of ceremony, this immediate familiarity prevailing in British circles, was a thing I never got used to. With us, first of all, the pastor would not have come at all, and secondly, once come, he would still have been in the stage of ceremonious preface when we arrived, and only emerged from his preliminary apologies to enter into the series of prayers for forgiveness which would round off his visit. Thus there would be no time so much as to reach the ice, far less to break it, and I am conservative enough and aristocratic enough to like ice: it is such an excellent preservative.