He showed him around everywhere, on horseback and on foot, and familiarized him with the neighbourhood and the estate. While doing so he confided to him that he had for a long time wanted to get to know it better himself and learn how to make better use of it.

‘The first thing we ought to do,’ said the Captain, ‘would be for me to make a compass survey of the area. It is a simple and pleasant job, and if it doesn’t ensure absolute accuracy it is always useful and makes a good beginning; moreover, you can do it without much assistance and you know you’ll get through it. Should you later think of making a more exact survey it would always be possible to take advice on that.’

The Captain was very experienced in this sort of surveying. He had brought with him the necessary instruments and he started on it at once. He instructed Eduard and some of the local trappers and peasants who were to assist him. The days went very well. He spent the evenings and early mornings on his map, drawing the contours and hatching the heights. Soon everything was shaded and coloured and Eduard saw his possessions taking shape on the paper like a new creation. It seemed to him that only now was he coming to know them, only now did they really belong to him.

Occasions for discussing the neighbourhood and the grounds can be created much more readily after a review like this than if you are merely trying out individual chance ideas on the spot, he thought.

‘We must make that clear to my wife,’ said Eduard.

‘No, don’t do that!’ replied the Captain, who did not like crossing other people’s convictions with his own. Experience had taught him that human opinion is much too various to be unanimous on so much as a single point even in regard to the most reasonable proposition. ‘Don’t do that!’ he said. ‘She could easily become confused. Like all who engage in such things only for amusement she is more concerned to do something than that something should be done. This sort of person fumbles with nature, prefers this little spot or that, dares not venture to remove this or that obstacle, isn’t bold enough to sacrifice anything, cannot imagine in advance what is supposed to be created, experiments – it may work out, it may not – makes changes and changes perhaps what ought to be left alone; and so in the end it remains nothing but a hotchpotch that may turn out pleasing and stimulating but can never fully satisfy.’

‘Confess it honestly,’ said Eduard; ‘you don’t like the way she has laid out the park, do you?’

‘If the conception, which is very fine, had been realized in the execution, there would be nothing to criticize. But she has laboriously toiled her way through the rocks and now, if I may so put it, everyone she conducts up there also has to toil. Neither side by side nor in file can you walk with any real comfort. You have to break step every other minute; and there are many more objections that might be raised.’

‘Would it have been easy to do it any other way?’ Eduard asked.

‘Quite easy,’ the Captain replied. ‘All she had to do was cut away the angle of cliff which juts out there; the thing is in any case insignificant-looking, since it is composed of small segments; then she would have acquired a fine curving ascent; and at the same time a quantity of superfluous stone for building up the path where it would have been broken and narrow. But let this be in strictest confidence between us or it will confuse and upset her. And what has been done must be left alone. If you want to expend more money and effort, there are still plenty of pleasant things to do above the moss-hut and over the high ground.’

So the two friends kept themselves occupied with present affairs, but they also found plenty of material for lively discussion of the past too, and in this latter pursuit Charlotte usually also took part. They also proposed, as soon as the most immediate tasks were disposed of, to set to work on the travel journals and relive the past through them too.

Moreover, Eduard now had less to talk about with Charlotte alone, especially since he had taken to heart the Captain’s criticism of her park lay-out, which seemed to him quite just. For a long time he said nothing of what the Captain had confided to him; but when eventually he saw his wife again occupied in labouring her way up from the moss-hut to the high ground with little steps and paths he held back no longer, but after some irrelevant preamble told her what he now thought.

Charlotte was confounded. She could see at once the Captain was right, but what she had done contradicted him. It existed, and she had found it right and good. Even what was criticized was dear to her in every part and particular. She resisted conviction, she defended her little creation, she chided the men with flying off into the vast and grandiose, with wanting to turn a pastime into a labour, with failing to think of what a more ambitious plan would cost. She was agitated, hurt, upset. She could not relinquish the old ideas nor entirely reject the new.