The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ or a person who looked at them. Conceive how nearly this poor heart must have jumped right out of his mouth, leaving him dead, when a policeman who had been watching them strode suddenly into the middle of the street, put up his hand, and said, "Halt."

      Fritzing, unstrung man, received a shock so awful that he obeyed by falling off. Priscilla, wholly unused to being told to halt and absorbed by the difficulties of the way, did not grasp that the order was meant for her and rode painfully on. Seeing this, the policeman very gallantly removed her from her bicycle by putting his arms round her and lifting her off. He set her quite gently on her feet, and was altogether a charming policeman, as unlike those grim and ghastly eyes of the law that glare up and down the streets of, say, Berlin, as it is possible to imagine.

      But Priscilla was perfectly molten with rage, insulted as she had never been in her life. "How dare you—how dare you," she stammered, suffocating; and forgetting everything but an overwhelming desire to box the giant's ears she had actually raised her hand to do it, which would of course have been the ruin of her plan and the end of my tale, when Fritzing, recovering his presence of mind, cried out in tones of unmistakable agony, "Niece, be calm."

      She calmed at once to a calm of frozen horror.

      "Now, sir," said Fritzing, assuming an air of brisk bravery and guiltlessness, "what can we do for you?"

      "Light your lamps," said the policeman, laconically.

      They did; or rather Fritzing did, while Priscilla stood passive.

      "I too have a niece," said the policeman, watching Fritzing at work; "but I light no lamps for her. One should not wait on one's niece. One's niece should wait on one."

      Fritzing did not answer. He finished lighting the lamps, and then held Priscilla's bicycle and started her.

      "I never did that for my niece," said the policeman.

      "Confound your niece, sir," was on the tip of Fritzing's tongue; but he gulped it down, and remarking instead as pleasantly as he could that being an uncle did not necessarily prevent your being a gentleman, picked up his bicycle and followed Priscilla.

      The policeman shook his head as they disappeared round the corner. "One does not light lamps for one's niece," he repeated to himself. "It's against nature. Consequently, though the peppery Fräulein may well be somebody's niece she is not his."

      "Oh," murmured Priscilla, after they had ridden some way without speaking, "I'm deteriorating already. For the first time in my life I've wanted to box people's ears."

      "The provocation was great, ma'am," said Fritzing, himself shattered by the spectacle of his Princess being lifted about by a policeman.

      "Do you think—" Priscilla hesitated, and looked at him. Her bicycle immediately hesitated too, and swerving across the road taught her it would have nothing looked at except its handles. "Do you think," she went on, after she had got herself straight again, "that the way I'm going to live now will make me want to do it often?"

      "Heaven forbid, ma'am. You are now going to live a most noble life—the only fitting life for the thoughtful and the earnest. It will be, once you are settled, far more sheltered from contact with that which stirs ignoble impulses than anything your Grand Ducal Highness has hitherto known."

      "If you mean policemen by things that stir ignoble impulses," said Priscilla, "I was sheltered enough from them before. Why, I never spoke to one. Much less"—she shuddered—"much less ever touched one."

      "Ma'am, you do not repent?"

      "Heavens, no," said Priscilla, pressing onward.

      Outside Rühl, about a hundred yards before its houses begin, there is a pond by the wayside. Into this, after waiting a moment peering up and down the dark road to see whether anybody was looking, Fritzing hurled the bicycles. He knew the pond was deep, for he had studied it the day he bought Priscilla's outfit; and the two bicycles one after the other were hurled remorsely into the middle of it, disappearing each in its turn with a tremendous splash and gurgle. Then they walked on quickly towards the railway station, infinitely relieved to be on their own feet again, and between them, all unsuspected, walked the radiant One with the smiling eyes, she who was half-minded to see this game through, giving the players just so many frights as would keep her amused, the fickle, laughing goddess Good Luck.

      They caught the train neatly at Rühl. They only had to wait about the station for ten minutes before it came in. Hardly any one was there, and nobody took the least notice of them. Fritzing, after a careful look round to see if it contained people he knew, put the Princess into a second-class carriage labelled Frauen, and then respectfully withdrew to another part of the train. He had decided that second-class was safest. People in that country nearly always travel second-class, especially women,—at all times in such matters more economical than men; and a woman by herself in a first-class carriage would have been an object of surmise and curiosity at every station. Therefore Priscilla was put into the carriage labelled Frauen, and found herself for the first time in her life alone with what she had hitherto only heard alluded to vaguely as the public.

      She sat down in a corner with an odd feeling of surprise at being included in the category Frauen, and giving a swift timid glance through her veil at the public confronting her was relieved to find it consisted only of a comfortable mother and her child.

      I know not why the adjective comfortable should so invariably be descriptive of mothers in Germany. In England and France though you may be a mother, you yet, I believe, may be so without being comfortable. In Germany, somehow, you can't. Perhaps it is the climate; perhaps it is the food; perhaps it is simply want of soul, or that your soul does not burn with a fire sufficiently consuming. Anyhow it is so. This mother had all the good-nature that goes with amplitude. Being engaged in feeding her child with belegte Brödchen—that immensely satisfying form of sandwich—she at once offered Priscilla one.

      "No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking into her corner.

      "Do take one, Fräulein," said the mother, persuasively.

      "No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking.

      "On a journey it passes the time. Even if one is not hungry, thank God one can always eat. Do take one."

      "No thank you," said Priscilla.

      "Why does she wear that black thing over her face?" inquired the child. "Is she a witch?"

      "Silence, silence, little worthless one," cried the mother, delightedly stroking his face with half a Brödchen. "You see he is clever, Fräulein. He resembles his dear father as one egg does another."

      "Does he?" said Priscilla, immediately conceiving a prejudice against the father.

      "Why don't she take that black thing off?" said the child.

      "Hush, hush, small impudence. The Fräulein will take it off in a minute. The Fräulein has only just got in."

      "Mutti, is she a witch? Mutti, Mutti, is she a witch, Mutti?"

      The child, his eyes fixed anxiously on Priscilla's swathed head, began to whimper.

      "That child should be in bed," said Priscilla, with a severity born of her anxiety lest, to calm him, humanity should force her to put up her veil. "Persons who are as intelligent as that should never be in trains at night. Their brains cannot bear it. Would he not be happier if he lay down and went to sleep?"

      "Yes, yes; that is what I have been telling him ever since we left Kunitz"—Priscilla СКАЧАТЬ