Germans -- Travel -- England -- Kent -- Fiction; Humorous stories
That these people should have a vote is the one mistake that great and
peculiarly typical German, the ever-to-be-lamented Bismarck, made. To
reflect that power is in the hands of such persons, any power, even the
smallest shred of it, alarms me so seriously that if I think of it on a
Sunday morning, when perhaps I had decided to omit going to church for
once and rest at home while my wife went, I hastily seize my parade
helmet and hurry off in a fever of anxiety to help uphold the pillars of
society.
Indeed it is of paramount necessity that we should cling to the Church
and its teaching; that we should see that our wives cling; that we
should insist on the clinging of our servants; and these Sunday morning
reflections occurring to me as I look back through the months to that
first Sunday out of our Fatherland, I seem to feel as I write (though it
is now December and sleeting) the summer breeze blowing over the grass
on to my cheek, to hear the small birds (I do not know their names)
twittering, and to see Frau von Eckthum coming across the field in the
sun and standing before me with her pretty smile and telling me she is
going to church and asking whether I will go too. Of course I went too.
She really was (and is, in spite of Storchwerder) a most attractive
lady.
We went, then, together, Jellaby safely away at the veterinary
surgeon’s, Edelgard following behind with the two fledglings, who had
achieved an unusually clean appearance and had more of the budding
maiden about them than I had yet observed, and Lord Sigismund and Mrs.
Menzies-Legh remaining with our patient, who had recovered enough to sit
in a low chair in the shade and be read aloud to. Let us hope the book
was virile. But I greatly doubt it, for his wife’s voice in the peculiar
sing-song that seems to afflict the voice of him who reads verses,
zigzagged behind us some way across the field.
After our vagrant life of the last few days it seemed odd to be walking
respectably along with no horse to lead, presently joining other
respectable persons bent on the same errand. They seemed to know we were
the dusty caravaners who had trudged past the afternoon before, and we
were well stared at. In the church, too, an imposing lady in the pew in
front of us sat sideways in her corner and examined us with calm
attention through her eye-glass both before the service
[Illustration: _An imposing lady in the pew in front of us sat sideways
in her corner and examined us with calm attention_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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