The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen Part 16

Dear, dear me. What was all this? Sweet children? Little mother? I could only sit on my cus.h.i.+ons and stare.

'This,' she explained, noticing I suppose that I looked astonished, and thinking it was because Brosy was spreading out cups and lighting the spirit-lamp so very close to the deceased Finn, 'is not desecration. It is not as though we were having tea in a churchyard, which of course we never would have. This is unconsecrated ground. One cannot desecrate that which has never been consecrated. Desecration can only begin after consecration has taken place.'

I bowed my head and then, cheered into speech by the sight of an approaching rusk, I added, 'I know a family with a mausoleum, and on fine days they go and have coffee at it.'

'Germans, of course,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne, smiling, but with an effort. 'One can hardly imagine English----'

'Oh yes, Germans. When any one goes to see them, if it is fine they say, "Let us drink coffee at the mausoleum." And then they do.'

'Is it a special treat?' asked Brosy.

'The view there is very lovely.'

'Oh I see,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne, relieved. 'They only sit outside. I was afraid for a moment that they actually----'

'Oh no,' I said, eating what seemed to be the most perfect rusk ever produced by German baker, 'not actually.'

'What a sweet spot this is to be buried in,' remarked Mrs.

Harvey-Browne, while Brosy, with the skill of one used to doing it, made the tea; and then according to the wont of good women when they speak of being buried, she sighed. 'I wonder,' she went on, 'how he came to be put here.'

'That is what I have been wondering ever since I found him,' I said.

'He was wounded in some battle and was trying to get home,' said Brosy.

'You know Finland was Swedish in those days, and so was Rugen.'

As I did not know I said nothing, but looked exceedingly bright.

'He had been fighting for Sweden against the French. I met a forester yesterday, and he told me there used to be a forester's house where those fruit trees are, and the people in it took him in and nursed him till he died. Then they buried him here.'

'But why was he not buried in a churchyard?' asked his mother.

'I don't know. Poor chap, I don't suppose he would have cared. The great point I should say under such circ.u.mstances would be the being dead.'

'My dear Brosy,' murmured his mother; which was what she always murmured when he said things that she disapproved without quite knowing why.

'Or a still greater point,' I remarked, moved again to cheerful speech by the excellent tea Brosy had made, and his mother, justly suspicious of the tea of Teutons, had smuggled through the customs, as she afterwards told me with pride,--'a still greater point if those are the circ.u.mstances that lie in wait for one, would be the never being born.'

'Oh but that is pessimism!' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne, shaking a finger at me. 'What have you, of all people in the world, to do with pessimism?'

'Oh I don't know--I suppose I have my days, like everybody else,' I said, slightly puzzled again by this remark. 'Once I was told of two aged Germans,' I continued, for by this time I had had three rusks and was feeling very pleasant,--'of two aged Germans whose digestive machinery was fragile.'

'Oh, poor things,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne sympathetically.

'And in spite of that they drank beer all their lives persistently and excessively.'

'How very injudicious,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.

'They drank such a fearful lot and for so long that at last they became philosophers.'

'My dear Frau X.,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne incredulously, 'what an unexpected result.'

'Oh but indeed there is hardly anything you may not at last become,' I insisted, 'if besides being German your diet is indiscreet enough.'

'Yes, I quite think _that_,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne.

'Well, and what happened?' asked Brosy with smiling eyes.

'Well, they were naturally profoundly pessimistic, both of them. You are, you know, if your diet----'

'Oh yes, yes indeed,' agreed Mrs. Harvey-Browne, with the conviction of one who has been through it.

'They were absolutely sick of things. They loathed everything anybody said or did. And they were disciples of Nietzsche.'

'Was that the cause or the effect of the excessive beer-drinking?' asked Brosy.

'Oh, I can't _endure_ Nietzsche,' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne. 'Don't ever read him, Brosy. I saw some things he says about women--he is too dreadful.'

'And one said to the other over their despairing potations: "Only those can be considered truly happy who are destined never to be born."'

'There!' cried Mrs. Harvey-Browne. 'That is Nietzsche all over--_rank_ pessimism.'

'I never heard ranker,' said Brosy smiling.

'And the other thought it over, and then said drearily: "But to how few falls that happy lot."'

There was a pause. Brosy was laughing behind his teacup. His mother, on the contrary, looked solemn, and gazed at me thoughtfully. 'There is a great want of simple faith about Germans,' she said. 'The bishop thinks it so sad. A story like that would quite upset him. He has been very anxious lest Brosy--our only child, dear Frau X., so you may imagine how precious--should become tainted by it.'

'I dislike beer,' said Brosy.

'That man this morning, for instance--did you ever hear anything like it? He was just the type of man, quite apart from his insolence, that most grieves the bishop.'

'Really?' I said; and wondered respectfully at the amount of grieving the bishop got through.

'An educated man, I suppose--did he not say he was a schoolmaster? A teacher of the young, without a vestige himself of the simple faith he ought to inculcate. For if he had had a vestige, would it not have prevented his launching into an irreverent conversation with a lady who was not only a stranger, but the wife of a prelate of the Church of England?'

'He couldn't know that, mother,' said Brosy; 'and from what you told me it wasn't a conversation he launched into but a monologue. And I must beg your pardon,' he added, turning to me with a smile, 'for the absurd mistake we made. It was the guide's fault.'

'Oh yes, my dear Frau X., you must forgive me--it was really too silly of me--I might have known--I was completely taken aback, I a.s.sure you, but the guide was so very positive----' And there followed such a number of apologies that again I was bewildered, only retaining the one clear impression that the bishop's wife desired exceedingly to be agreeable.

Well, a woman bent on being agreeable is better than a woman bent on being disagreeable, though, being the soul of caution in my statements, I must add, Not always; for I suppose few of us have walked any distance along the path of life without having had to go at least some part of the way in the company of persons who, filled with the praiseworthy wish to be very pleasant, succeeded only in drenching our spirits with the depressing torrents of effusion. And effusiveness applied to myself has precisely the effect of a finger applied to the horns of a snail who shall be innocently airing himself in the sun: he gets back without more ado into his sh.e.l.l, and so do I.

That is what happened on this occasion. For some reason, which I could only faintly guess, the bishop's wife after disapproving of me in the morning was petting me in the afternoon. She had been lunching, she told me, with Charlotte, and they had had a nice talk, she said, about me.

About me? Instantly I scrambled back into my sh.e.l.l. There is surely nothing in the world so tiresome as being questioned, as I now was, on one's household arrangements and personal habits. I will talk about anything but that. I will talk with the courage of ignorance about all high matters, of which I know nothing. I am ready to discourse on all or any of the great Abstractions with the glibness of the shallow mind. I will listen sympathetically to descriptions of diseases suffered and operations survived, of the brilliance of sons and the beauty of daughters. I will lend an attentive ear to an enumeration of social successes and family difficulties, of woes and triumphs of every sort, including those connected with kitchens; but I will not answer questions about myself. And indeed, what is there to talk about? No one is interested in my soul, and as for my body I long ago got tired of that.

One cannot, however, eat a person's rusks without a.s.suming a certain amount of subsequent blandness; so I did my best to behave nicely. Brosy smoked cigarettes. Whatever it was that had sent me up in his mother's estimation had apparently sent me down in his. He no longer, it seemed, looked upon me as a good specimen of the intelligent German female. I might be as eloquently silent as I liked, and it did not impress him in the least. The few remarks he made showed me that. This was grievous, for Brosy was, in person, a very charming young man, and the good opinion of charming young men is quite a nice thing to possess. Now I began to regret, now that he was merely interjectional, those earnest paragraphs in which he had talked the night before at supper and during the sunset walk on the island of Vilm. Observing him sideways and cautiously I saw that the pretty speeches his mother was making me _apropos_ of everything and nothing were objectionable to him; and I silently agreed with him that pretty speeches are unpleasant things, especially when made by one woman to another. You can forgive a man perhaps, because in your heart in spite of all experience lurks the comfortable belief that he means what he says; but how shall you forgive a woman for mistaking you for a fool?

They persuaded me to drive with them to the place in the woods they were bound for called Kiekower, where the view over the bay was said to be very beautiful; and when I got on to my feet I found I was so stiff that driving seemed the only thing possible. Ambrose was very kind and careful of my bodily comfort, but did not bother about me spiritually.

Whenever there was a hill, and there kept on being hills, he got out and walked, leaving me wholly to his mother. But it did not matter any more, for the forest was so exquisite that way, the afternoon so serene, so mellow with lovely light, that I could not look round me without being happy. Oh blessed state, when mere quiet weather, trees and gra.s.s, sea and clouds, can make you forget that life has anything in it but rapture, can make you drink in heaven with every breath! How long will it last, this joy of living, this splendid ecstasy of the soul? I am more afraid of losing this, of losing even a little of this, of having so much as the edge of its radiance dimmed, than of parting with any other earthly possession. And I think of Wordsworth, its divine singer, who yet lost it so soon and could no longer see the splendour in the gra.s.s, the glory in the flower, and I ask myself with a sinking heart if it faded so quickly for him who saw it and sang it by G.o.d's grace to such perfection, how long, oh how long does the common soul, half blind, half dead, half dumb, keep its little, precious share?