“Oh yes,” she replied, “he is a good young man, and earns eighteen marks a week. They will be very comfortable.”
“It is a pity,” I said, “that the baby did not make its appearance after Michaelmas instead of before. Don’t you see yourself what a pity it is, and how everything has been spoilt?”
She stared at me for a moment with a puzzled look, and then turned away and carefully covered the cherub again. “They will be very comfortable,” she repeated, seeing that I expected an answer; “he earns eighteen marks a week.”
What was there to be said? If I had told her her daughter was a grievous sinner she might perhaps have felt transiently uncomfortable, but as soon as I had gone would have seen for herself, with those shrewd eyes of hers, that nothing had been changed by my denunciations, that there lay the baby, dimpled and healthy, that her daughter was making a good match, that none of her set saw anything amiss, and that all the young couples in the district had prefaced their marriages in this way.
Our parson is troubled to the depths of his sensitive soul by this custom. He preaches, he expostulates, he denounces, he implores, and they listen with square stolid faces and open mouths, and go back to their daily work among their friends and acquaintances, with no feeling of shame, because everybody does it, and public opinion, the only force that could stop it, is on their side. The parson looks on with unutterable sadness at the futility of his efforts; but the material is altogether too raw for successful manipulation by delicate fingers.
“Poor things,” I said one day, in answer to an outburst of indignation from him, after he had been marrying one of our servants at the eleventh hour, “I am so sorry for them. It is so pitiful that they should always have to be scolded on their wedding day. Such children — so ignorant, so uncontrolled, so frankly animal — what do they know about social laws? They only know and follow nature, and I would from my heart forgive them all.”
“It is sin” he said shortly.
“Then the forgiveness is sure.”
“Not if they do not seek it.”
I was silent, for I wished to reply that I believed they would be forgiven in spite of themselves, that probably they were forgiven whether they sought it or not, and that you cannot limit things divine; but who can argue with a parson? These people do not seek forgiveness because it never enters their heads that they need it. The parson tells them so, it is true, but they regard him as a person bound by his profession to say that sort of thing, and are sharp enough to see that the consequences of their sin, foretold by him with such awful eloquence, never by any chance come off. No girl is left to languish and die forsaken by her betrayer, for the betrayer is a worthy young man who marries her as soon as he possibly can; no finger of scorn is pointed at the fallen one, for all the fingers in the street are attached to women who began life in precisely the same fashion; and as for that problematical Day of Judgment of which they hear so much on Sundays, perhaps they feel that that also may be one of the things which after all do not happen.
The servant who had been married and scolded that morning was a groom, aged twenty, and he had met his little wife, she being then seventeen, in the place he was in before he came to us. She was a housemaid there, and must have been a pretty thing, though there were few enough traces of it, except the beautiful eyes, in the little anxious face that I saw for the first time immediately after the wedding, and just before the weary and harassed parson came in to talk things over. I had never heard of her existence until, about ten days previously, the groom had appeared, bathed in tears, speechlessly holding out a letter from her in which she said she could not bear things any longer and was going to kill herself. The wretched young man was at his wit’s end, for he had not yet saved enough to buy any furniture and set up housekeeping, and she was penniless after so many months out of a situation. He did not know any way out of it, he had no suggestions to offer, no excuses to make, and just stood there helplessly and sobbed.
I went to the Man of Wrath, and we laid our heads together. “We do not want another married servant,” he said.
“No, of course we don’t,” said I.
“And there is not a room empty in the village.”
“No, not one.”
“And how can we give him furniture? It is not fair to the other servants who remain virtuous, and wait till they can buy their own.”
“No, certainly it isn’t fair.”
There was a pause.
“He is a good boy,” I murmured presently.
“A very good boy.”
“And she will be quite ruined unless somebody—”
“I’ll tell you what we can do, Elizabeth,” he interrupted; “we can buy what is needful and let him have it on condition that he buys it back gradually by some small monthly payment.”
“So we can.”
“And I think there is a room over the stables that is empty.”
“So there is.”
“And he can go to town and get what furniture he needs and bring the girl back with him and marry her at once. The sooner the better, poor girl.”
And so within a fortnight they were married, and came hand in hand to me, he proud and happy, holding himself very straight, she in no wise yet recovered from the shock and misery of the last few hopeless months, looking up at me with eyes grown much too big for her face, eyes in which there still lurked the frightened look caught in the town where she had hidden herself, and where fingers of scorn could not have been wanting, and loud derision, and utter shame, besides the burden of sickness, and hunger, and miserable pitiful youth.
They stood hand in hand, she in a decent black dress, and both wearing very tight white kid gloves that refused to hide entirely the whole of the rough red hands, and they looked so ridiculously young, and the whole thing was so wildly improvident, that no words of exhortation would come to my lips as I gazed at them in silence, between laughter and tears. I ought to have told them they were sinners; I ought to have told them they were reckless; I ought to have told them by what a narrow chance they had escaped the just punishment of their iniquity, and instead of that I found myself stretching out hands that were at once seized and kissed, and merely saying with a cheerful smile, “Nun Kinder, liebt Euch, und seid brav.” And so they were dismissed, and then the parson came, in a fever at this latest example of deadly sin, while I, with the want of moral sense so often observable in woman, could only think with pity of their childishness. The baby was born three days later, and the mother very nearly slipped through our fingers; but she was a country girl, and she fought round, and by and by grew young again in the warmth of married respectability; and I met her the other day airing her baby in the sun, and holding her head as high as though she were conscious of a whole row of feather beds at home, every one of which touched the ceiling.
In the next room I went into an old woman lay in bed with her head tied up in bandages. The room had not much in it, or it would have been untidier; it looked neglected and gloomy, and some dirty plates, suggestive of long-past dinners, were piled on the table.
“Oh, such headaches!” groaned the old woman when she saw me, and moved her head from side to side on the pillow. I could see she was not undressed, and had crept under her feather bag as she was. I went to the bedside and felt her pulse — a steady pulse, with nothing of feverishness in it.
“Oh, such draughts!” moaned the old woman, when she saw I had left the door open.
“A little air will make you feel better,” I said; the atmosphere in the shut-up room was so indescribable that my own head had begun to throb.
“Oh, oh!” she moaned, in visible indignation at being forced for a moment to breathe the pure summer air.
“I have something at home that will cure your headache,” I said, “but there is nobody I can send with it to-day. If you feel better later on, come round and fetch it. I always take it when I have a headache” — (“Why, Elizabeth, you know you never have such things!” whispered my conscience, appalled. �
�You just keep quiet,” I whispered back, “I have had enough of you for one day.”)— “and I have some grapes I will give you when you come, so that if you possibly can, do.”
“Oh, I can’t move,” groaned the old woman, “oh, oh, oh!” But I went away laughing, for I knew she would appear punctually to fetch the grapes, and a walk in the air was all she needed to cure her.
How the whole village hates and dreads fresh air! A baby died a few days ago, killed, I honestly believe, by the exceeding love of its mother, which took the form of cherishing it so tenderly that never once during its little life was a breath of air allowed to come anywhere near it. She is the watchman’s wife, a gentle, flabby woman, with two rooms at her disposal, but preferring to live and sleep with her four children in one, never going into the other except for the christenings and funerals which take place in her family with what I cannot but regard as unnecessary frequency. This baby was born last September in a time of golden days and quiet skies, and when it was about three weeks old I suggested that she should take it out every day while the fine weather lasted. She pointed out that it had not yet been christened, and remembering that it is the custom in their class for both mother and child to remain shut up and invisible till after the christening, I said no more. Three weeks later I was its godmother, and it was safely got into the fold of the Church. As I was leaving, I remarked that now she would be able to take it out as much as she liked. The following March, on a day that smelt of violets, I met her near the house. I asked after the baby, and she began to cry. “It does not thrive,” she wept, “and its arms are no thicker than my finger.”
“Keep it out in the sun as much as you can,” I said; “this is the very weather to turn weak babies into strong ones.”
“Oh, I am so afraid it will catch cold if I take it out,” she cried, her face buried in what was once a pocket-handkerchief.
“When was it out last?”
“Oh—” she stopped to blow her nose, very violently, and, as it seemed to me, with superfluous thoroughness. I waited till she had done, and then repeated my question.
“Oh—” a fresh burst of tears, and renewed exhaustive nose-blowing.
I began to suspect that my question, put casually, was of more importance than I had thought, and repeated it once more.
“I — can’t t-take it out,” she sobbed, “I know it — it would die.”
“But has it not been out at all, then?”
She shook her head.
“Not once since it was born? Six months ago?”
She shook her head.
“Poor baby!” I exclaimed; and indeed from my heart I pitied the little thing, perishing in a heap of feathers, in one close room, with four people absorbing what air there was. “I am afraid,” I said, “that if it does not soon get some fresh air it will not live. I wonder what would happen to my children if I kept them in one hot room day and night for six months. You see how they are out all day, and how well they are.”
“They are so strong,” she said, with a doleful sniff, “that they can stand it.”
I was confounded by this way of looking at it, and turned away, after once more begging her to take the child out. She plainly regarded the advice as brutal, and I heard her blowing her nose all down the drive. In June the father told me he would like the doctor; the child grew thinner every day in spite of all the food it took. A doctor was got from the nearest town, and I went across to hear what he ordered. He ordered bottles at regular intervals instead of the unbroken series it had been having, and fresh air. He could find nothing the matter with it, except unusual weakness. He asked if it always perspired as it was doing then, and himself took off the topmost bag of feathers. Early in July it died, and its first outing was to the cemetery in the pine woods three miles off.
“I took such care of it,” moaned the mother, when I went to try and comfort her after the funeral; “it would never have lived so long but for the care I took of it.”
“And what the doctor ordered did no good?” I ventured to ask, as gently as I could.
“Oh, I did not take it out — how could I — it would have killed it at once — at least I have kept it alive till now.” And she flung her arms across the table, and burying her head in them wept bitterly.
There is a great wall of ignorance and prejudice dividing us from the people on our place, and in every effort to help them we knock against it and cannot move it any more than if it were actual stone. Like the parson on the subject of morals, I can talk till I am hoarse on the subject of health, without at any time producing the faintest impression. When things are very bad the doctor is brought, directions are given, medicines made up, and his orders, unless they happen to be approved of, are simply not carried out. Orders to wash a patient and open windows are never obeyed, because the whole village would rise up if, later on, the illness ended in death, and accuse the relatives of murder. I suppose they regard us and our like who live on the other side of the dividing wall as persons of fantastic notions which, when carried into effect among our own children, do no harm because of the vast strength of the children accumulated during years of eating in the quantities only possible to the rich. Their idea of happiness is eating, and they naturally suppose that everybody eats as much as he can possibly afford to buy. Some of them have known hunger, and food and strength are coupled together in their experience — the more food the greater the strength; and people who eat roast meat (oh, bliss ineffable!) every day of their lives can bear an amount of washing and airing that would surely kill such as themselves. But how useless to try and discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I like about them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. I have no real conception of their attitude towards life, and all I can do is to talk to them kindly when they are in trouble, and as often as I can give them nice things to eat. Shocked at the horrors that must surround the poor women at the birth of their babies, I asked the Man of Wrath to try and make some arrangement that would ensure their quiet at those times. He put aside a little cottage at the end of the street as a home for them in their confinements, and I furnished it, and made it clean and bright and pretty. A nurse was permanently engaged, and I thought with delight of the unspeakable blessing and comfort it was going to be. Not a baby has been born in that cottage, for not a woman has allowed herself to be taken there. At the end of a year it had to be let out again to families, and the nurse dismissed.
“Why wouldn’t they go?” I asked the Frau Inspector, completely puzzled. She shrugged her shoulders. “They like their husband and children round them,” she said, “and are afraid something will be done to them away from home — that they will be washed too often, perhaps. The gracious lady will never get them to leave their homes.”
“The gracious lady gives it up,” I muttered.
When I opened the next door I was bewildered by the crowd in the room. A woman stood in the middle at a wash-tub which took up most of the space. Every now and then she put out a dripping hand and jerked a perambulator up and down for a moment, to calm the shrieks of the baby inside. On a wooden bench at the foot of one of the three beds a very old man sat and blinked at nothing. Crouching in a corner were two small boys of pasty complexion, playing with a guinea-pig and coughing violently. The loveliest little girl I have seen for a very long while lay in the bed nearest the door, quite silent, with her eyes closed and her mouth shut tight, as though she were trying hard to bear something. As I pulled the door open the first thing I saw, right up against it, was this set young face framed in tossed chestnut hair. “Why, Frauchen,” I said to the woman at the tub, “so many of you at home to-day? Are you all ill?” There was hardly standing room for an extra person, and the room was full of steam.
“They have all got the cough I had,” she answered, without looking up, “and Lotte there is very bad.”
I took Lotte’s rough little hand — so different from the delicate face — and found she was in a fever.
“We must get the doctor,” I
said.
“Oh, the doctor—” said the mother with a shrug, “he’s no use.”
“You must do what he tells you, or he cannot help you.”
“That last medicine he sent me all but killed me,” she said, washing vigorously. “I’ll never take any more of his, nor shall any child of mine.”
“What medicine was it?”
She wiped her hand on her apron, and reaching across to the cupboard took out a little bottle. “I was in bed two days after it,” she said, handing it to me— “as though I were dead, not knowing what was going on round me.” The bottle had contained opium, and there were explicit directions written on it as to the number of drops to be taken and the length of the intervals between the taking.
“Did you do exactly what is written here?” I asked.
“I took it all at once. There wasn’t much of it, and I was feeling bad.”
“But then of course it nearly killed you. I wonder it didn’t quite. What good is it our taking all the trouble we do to send that long distance for the doctor if you don’t do as he orders?”
“I’ll take no more of his medicine. If it had been any good and able to cure me, the more I took the quicker I ought to have been cured.” And she scrubbed and thumped with astounding energy, while Lotte lay with her little ashen face a shade more set and suffering. The wash-tub, though in the middle of the room, was quite close to Lotte’s bed, because the middle of the room was quite close to every other part of it, and each extra hard maternal thump must have hit the child’s head like a blow from a hammer. She was, you see, only thirteen, and her skin had not had time to turn into leather.
“Has this child eaten anything to-day?”
“She won’t.”
“Is she not thirsty?”
“She won’t drink coffee or milk.”
“I’ll send her something she may like, and I shall send, too, for the doctor.”
“I’ll not give her his stuff.”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 21
