FullReads

It was nine o’clock one night when they reached Salzburg; and when their baggage had been visited and their passports examined, they had still half an hour to wait before the train went on. They profited by the delay to consider what hotel they should stop at in Vienna, and they advised with their Bradshaw on the point. This railway guide gave in its laconic fashion several hotels, and specified the Kaiserin Elisabeth as one at which there was a table d’hote, briefly explaining that at most hotels in Vienna there was none.

“That settles it,” said Mrs. Kenton. “We will go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, of course. I’m sure I never want the bother of ordering dinner in English, let alone German, which never was meant for human beings to speak.”

“It’s a language you can’t tell the truth in,” said the colonel thoughtfully. “You can’t call an open country an open country; you have to call it a Black Forest.” Mrs. Kenton sighed patiently. “But I don’t know about this Kaiserin Elisabeth business. How do we know that’s the real name of the hotel? How can we be sure that it isn’t an alias, an assumed name, trumped up for the occasion? I tell you, Bessie, we can’t be too cautious as long as we’re in this fatherland of lies. What guide-book is this? Baedeker? Oh! Bradshaw. Well, that’s some comfort. Bradshaw’s an Englishman, at least. If it had been Baedeker”–

“Oh, Edward, Edward!” Mrs. Kenton burst out. “Will you never give that up? Here you’ve been harping on it for the last four days, and worrying my life out with it. I think it’s unkind. It’s perfectly bewildering me. I don’t know where or what I am, any more.” Some tears of vexation started to her eyes, at which Colonel Kenton put the shaggy arm of his overcoat round her, and gave her an honest hug.

“Well,” he said, “I give it up, from this out. Though I shall always say that it was a joke that wore well. And I can tell you, Bessie, that it’s no small sacrifice to give up a joke that you’ve just got into prime working order, so that you can use it on almost anything that comes up. But that’s a thing that you can never understand. Let it all pass. We’ll go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and submit to any sort of imposition they’ve a mind to practise upon us. I shall not breathe freely, I suppose, till we get into Italy, where people mean what they say. Haw, haw, haw!” laughed the colonel, “honest Iago’s the man I’m after.”

The doors of the waiting-room were thrown open, and cries of “Erste Klasse! Zweite Klasse! Dritte Klasse!” summoned the variously assorted passengers to carriages of their several degrees. The colonel lifted his little wife into a non-smoking first-class carriage, and established her against the cushioned barrier dividing the two seats, so that her feet could just reach the hot-water bottle, as he called it, and tucked her in and built her up so with wraps that she was a prodigy of comfort; and then folding about him the long fur-lined coat which she had bought him at Munich (in spite of his many protests that the fur was artificial), he sat down on the seat opposite, and proudly enjoyed the perfect content that beamed from Mrs. Kenton’s face, looking so small from her heap of luxurious coverings.

“Well, Bessie, this would be very pleasant–if you could believe in it,” he said, as the train smoothly rolled out of the station. “But of course it can’t be genuine. There must be some dodge about it. I’ve no doubt you’ll begin to feel perfectly horrid, the first thing you know.”

Mrs. Kenton let him go on, as he did at some length, and began to drowse, while he amused himself with a gross parody of things she had said during the past four days. In those years while their wedded bliss was yet practically new, Colonel Kenton found his wife an inexhaustible source of mental refreshment. He prized beyond measure the feminine inadequacy and excess of her sayings; he had stored away such a variety of these that he was able to talk her personal parlance for an hour together; indeed, he had learned the trick of inventing phrases so much in her manner that Mrs. Kenton never felt quite safe in disowning any monstrous thing attributed to her. Her drowse now became a little nap, and presently a delicious doze, in which she drifted far away from actual circumstance into a realm where she seemed to exist as a mere airy thought of her physical self; suddenly she lost this thought, and slept through all stops at stations and all changes of the hot-water cylinder, to renew which the guard, faithful to Colonel Kenton’s bribe, alone opened the door.