Frau von Treumann was still firmly fixed in the house, without the least intention apparently of leaving it, and she spent her time lying in wait for Anna, watching for an opportunity of beginning again about Karlchen. Anna had avoided the inevitable day when she would be caught, but it came at last, and she was caught in the garden, whither she had retired to consider how best to approach the baroness, hitherto quite unapproachable, on the burning question of Lolli.
Frau von Treumann appeared suddenly, coming softly across the grass, so that there was no time to run away. “Anna,” she called out reproachfully, seeing Anna make a movement as though she wanted to run, which was exactly what she did want to do, “Anna, have I the plague?”
“I hope not,” said Anna.
“You treat me as if I had it.”
Anna said nothing. “Why does she stay here? How can she stay here, after what has happened?” she had wondered often. Perhaps she had come now to announce her departure. She prepared herself therefore to listen with a willing ear.
She was sitting in the shade of a copper beech facing the oily sea and the coast of Rügen quivering opposite in the heat-haze. She was not doing anything; she never did seem to do anything, as these ladies of the busy fingers often noticed.
“Blue and white,” said Anna, looking up at the gulls and the sky to give Frau von Treumann time, “the Pomeranian colours. I see now where they come from.”
But Frau von Treumann had not come out to talk about the Pomeranian colours. “My Karlchen has been ill,” she said, her eyes on Anna’s face.
Anna watched the gulls overhead in the deep blue. “So has Else,” she remarked.
“Dear me,” thought Frau von Treumann, “what rancour.”
She laid her hand on Anna’s knee, and it was taken no notice of. “You cannot forgive him?” she said gently. “You cannot pardon a momentary indiscretion?”
“I have nothing to forgive,” said Anna, watching the gulls; one dropped down suddenly, and rose again with a fish in its beak, the sun for an instant catching the silver of the scales. “It is no affair of mine. It is for Else to forgive him.”
Frau von Treumann began to weep; this way of looking at it was so hopelessly unreasonable. She pulled out her handkerchief. “What a heap she must use,” thought Anna; never had she met people who cried so much and so easily as the Chosen; she was quite used now to red eyes; one or other of her sisters had them almost daily, for the farther their old bodily discomforts and real anxieties lay behind them the more tender and easily lacerated did their feelings become.
“He could not bear to see you being imposed upon,” said Frau von Treumann. “As soon as he knew about this terrible sister he felt he must hasten down to save you. ‘Mother,’ he said to me when first he suspected it, ‘if it is true, she must not be contaminated.’”
“Who mustn’t?”
“Oh, Anna, you know he thinks only of you!”
“Well, you see,” said Anna, “I don’t mind being contaminated.”
“Oh, dear child, a young pretty girl ought to mind very much.”
“Well, I don’t. But what about yourself? Are you not afraid of — of contamination?” She was frightened by her own daring when she had said it, and would not have looked at Frau von Treumann for worlds.
“No, dear child,” replied that lady in tones of tearful sweetness, “I am too old to suffer in any way from associating with queer people.”
“But I thought a Treumann — —” murmured Anna, more and more frightened at herself, but impelled to go on.
“Dear Anna, a Treumann has never yet flinched before duty.”
Anna was silenced. After that she could only continue to watch the gulls.
“You are going to keep the baroness?”
“If she cares to stay, yes.”
“I thought you would. It is for you to decide who you will have in your house. But what would you do if this — this Lolli came down to see her sister?”
“I really cannot tell.”
“Well, be sure of one thing,” burst out Frau von Treumann enthusiastically, “I will not forsake you, dear Anna. Your position now is exceedingly delicate, and I will not forsake you.”
So she was not going. Anna got up with a faint sigh. “It is frightfully hot here,” she said; “I think I will go to Else.”
“Ah — and I wanted to tell you about my poor Karlchen — and you avoid me — you do not want to hear. If I am in the house, the house is too hot. If I come into the garden, the garden is too hot. You no longer like being with me.”
Anna did not contradict her. She was wondering painfully what she ought to do. Ought she meekly to allow Frau von Treumann to stay on at Kleinwalde, to the exclusion, perhaps, of someone really deserving? Or ought she to brace herself to the terrible task of asking her to go? She thought, “I will ask Axel” — and then remembered that there was no Axel to ask. He never came near her. He had dropped out of her life as completely as though he had left Lohm. Since that unhappy day, she had neither seen him nor heard of him. Many times did she say to herself, “I will ask Axel,” and always the remembrance that she could not came with a shock of loneliness; and then she would drop into the train of thought that ended with “if I had a mother,” and her eyes growing wistful.
“Perhaps it is the hot weather,” she said suddenly, an evening or two later, after a long silence, to the princess. They had been speaking of servants before that.
“You think it is the hot weather that makes Johanna break the cups?”
“That makes me think so much of mothers.”
The princess turned her head quickly, and examined Anna’s face. It was Sunday evening, and the others were at church. The baroness, whose recovery was slow, was up in her room.
“What mothers?” naturally inquired the princess.
“I think this everlasting heat is dreadful,” said Anna plaintively. “I have no backbone left. I am all limp, and soft, and silly. In cold weather I believe I wouldn’t want a mother half so badly.”
“So you want a mother?” said the princess, taking Anna’s hand in hers and patting it kindly. She thought she knew why. Everyone in the house saw that something must have been said to Axel Lohm to make him keep away so long. Perhaps Anna was repenting, and wanted a mother’s help to set things right again.
“I always thought it would be so glorious to be independent,” said Anna, “and now somehow it isn’t. It is tiring. I want someone to tell me what I ought to do, and to see that I do it. Besides petting me. I long and long sometimes to be petted.”
The princess looked wise. “My dear,” she said, shaking her head, “it is not a mother that you want. Do you know the couplet: —
Man bedarf der Leitung Und der männlichen Begleitung?
A truly excellent couplet.”
Anna smiled. “That is the German idea of female bliss — always to be led round by the nose by some husband.”
“Not some husband, my dear — one’s own husband. You may call it leading by the nose if you like. I can only say that I enjoyed being led by mine, and have missed it grievously ever since.”
“But you had found the right man.”
“It is not very difficult to find the right man.”
“Yes it is — very difficult indeed.”
“I think not,” said the princess. “He is never far off. Sometimes, even, he is next door.” And she gazed over Anna’s head at the ceiling with elaborate unconsciousness.
“And besides,” said Anna, “why does a woman everlastingly want to be led and propped? Why can’t she go about the business of life on her own feet? Why must she always lean on someone?”
“You said just now it is because it is hot.”
“The fact is,” said Anna, “that I am not clever enough to see my way through puzzles. And that depresses me.”
“I well know that you must be puzzled.”
“Yes, it is puzzling, isn’t it? I can talk to you about it, for of course you see it all. It see
ms so absurd that the only result of my trying to make people happy is to make everyone, including myself, wretched. That is waste, isn’t it. Waste, I mean, of happiness. For I, at least, was happy before.”
“And, my dear, you will be happy again.”
Anna knit her brows in painful thought. “If by being wretched I had managed to make the others happy it wouldn’t have been so bad. At least it wouldn’t have been so completely silly. The only thing I can think of is that I must have hit upon the wrong people.”
“I Gott bewahre!” cried the princess with energy. “They are all alike. Send these away, you get them back in a different shape. Faces and names would be different, never the women. They would all be Treumanns and Elmreichs, and not a single one worth anything in the whole heap.”
“Well, I shall not desert them — Else and Emilie, I mean. They need help, both of them. And after all, it is simple selfishness for ever wanting to be happy oneself. I have begun to see that the chief thing in life is not to be as happy as one can, but to be very brave.”
The princess sighed. “Poor Axel,” she said.
Anna started, and blushed violently. “Pray what has my being brave to do with Herr von Lohm?” she inquired severely.
“Why, you are going to be brave at his expense, poor man. You must not expect anything from me, my dear, but common sense. You give up all hope of being happy because you think it your duty to go on sacrificing him and yourself to a set of thankless, worthless women, and you call it being brave. I call it being unnatural and silly.”
“It has never been a question of Herr von Lohm,” said Anna coldly, indeed freezingly. “What claims has he on me? My plans were all made before I knew that he existed.”
“Oh, my dear, your plans are very irritating things. The only plan a sensible young woman ought to make is to get as good a husband as possible as quickly as she can.”
“Why,” said Anna, rising in her indignation, and preparing to leave a princess suddenly become objectionable, “why, you are as bad as Susie!”
“Susie?” said the princess, who had not heard of her by that name. “Was Susie also one who told you the truth?”
But Anna walked out of the room without answering, in a very dignified manner; went into the loneliest part of the garden; sat down behind some bushes; and cried.
She looked back on those childish tears afterwards, and on all that had gone before, as the last part of a long sleep; a sleep disturbed by troubling and foolish dreams, but still only a sleep and only dreams. She woke up the very next day, and remained wide awake after that for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER XXX
Anna drove into Stralsund the next morning to her banker, accompanied by Miss Leech. When they passed Axel’s house she saw that his gate-posts were festooned with wreaths, and that garlands of flowers were strung across the gateway, swaying to and fro softly in the light breeze. “Why, how festive it looks,” she exclaimed, wondering.
“Yesterday was Herr von Lohm’s birthday,” said Miss Leech. “I heard Princess Ludwig say so.”
“Oh,” said Anna. Her tone was piqued. She turned her head away, and looked at the hay-fields on the opposite side of the road. Axel must have birthdays, of course, and why should he not put things round his gate-posts if he wanted to? Yet she would not look again, and was silent the rest of the way; nor was it of any use for Miss Leech to attempt to while away the long drive with pleasant conversation. Anna would not talk; she said it was too hot to talk. What she was thinking was that men were exceedingly horrid, all of them, and that life was a snare.
Far from being festive, however, Axel’s latest birthday was quite the most solitary he had yet spent. The cheerful garlands had been put up by an officious gardener on his own initiative. No one, except Axel’s own dependents, had passed beneath them to wish him luck. Trudi had telegraphed her blessings, administering them thus in their easiest form. His Stralsund friends had apparently forgotten him; in other years they had been glad of the excuse the birthday gave for driving out into the country in June, but this year the astonished Mamsell saw her birthday cake remain untouched and her baked meats waiting vainly for somebody to come and eat them.
Axel neither noticed nor cared. The haymaking season had just begun, and besides his own affairs he was preoccupied by Anna’s. If she had not been shut up so long in the baroness’s sick-room she would have met him often enough. She thought he never intended to come near her again, and all the time, whenever he could spare a moment and often when he could not, he was on her property, watching Dellwig’s farming operations. She should not suffer, he told himself, because he loved her; she should not be punished because she was not able to love him. He would go on doing what he could for her, and was certainly, at his age, not going to sulk and leave her to face her difficulties alone.
The first time he met Dellwig on these incursions into Anna’s domain, he expected to be received with a scowl; but Dellwig did not scowl at all; was on the contrary quite affable, even volunteering information about the work he had in hand. Nor had he been after all offensively zealous in searching for the person who had set the stables on fire; and luckily the Stralsund police had not been very zealous either. Klutz was looked for for a little while after Axel had denounced him as the probable culprit, but the matter had been dropped, apparently, and for the last ten days nothing more had been said or done. Axel was beginning to hope that the whole thing had blown over, that there was to be no unpleasantness after all for Anna. Hearing that the baroness was nearly well, he decided to go and call at Kleinwalde as though nothing had happened. Some time or other he must meet Anna. They could not live on adjoining estates and never see each other. The day after his birthday he arranged to go round in the afternoon and take up the threads of ordinary intercourse again, however much it made him suffer.
Meanwhile Anna did her business in Stralsund, discovered on interviewing her banker that she had already spent more than two-thirds of a whole year’s income, lunched pensively after that on ices with Miss Leech, walked down to the quay and watched the unloading of the fishing-smacks while Fritz and the horses had their dinner, was very much stared at by the inhabitants, who seldom saw anything so pretty, and finally, about two o’clock, started again for home.
As they drew near Axel’s gate, and she was preparing to turn her face away from its ostentatious gaiety, a closed Droschke came through it towards them, followed at a short distance by a second.
Miss Leech said nothing, strange though this spectacle was on that quiet road, for she felt that these were the departing guests, and, like Anna, she wondered how a man who loved in vain could have the heart to give parties. Anna said nothing either, but watched the approaching Droschkes curiously. Axel was sitting in the first one, on the side near her. He wore his ordinary farming clothes, the Norfolk jacket, and the soft green hat. There were three men with him, seedy-looking individuals in black coats. She bowed instinctively, for he was looking out of the window full at her, but he took no notice. She turned very white.
The second Droschke contained four more queer-looking persons in black clothes. When they had passed, Fritz pulled up his horses of his own accord, and twisting himself round stared after the receding cloud of dust.
Anna had been cut by Axel; but it was not that that made her turn so white — it was something in his face. He had looked straight at her, and he had not seen her.
“Who are those people?” she asked Fritz in a voice that faltered, she did not know why.
Fritz did not answer. He stared down the road after the Droschkes, shook his head, began to scratch it, jerked himself round again to his horses, drove on a few yards, pulled them up a second time, looked back, shook his head, and was silent.
“Fritz, do you know them?” Anna asked more authoritatively.
But Fritz only mumbled something soothing and drove on.
Anna had not failed to notice the old man’s face as he watched the departing Droschkes; it wore an oddly amazed and
scared expression. Her heart seemed to sink within her like a stone, yet she could give herself no reason for it. She tried to order him to turn up the avenue to Axel’s house, but her lips were dry, and the words would not come; and while she was struggling to speak the gate was passed. Then she was relieved that it was passed, for how could she, only because she had a presentiment of trouble, go to Axel’s house? What did she think of doing there? Miss Leech glanced at her, and asked if anything was the matter.
“No,” said Anna in a whisper, looking straight before her. Nor was there anything the matter; only that blind look on Axel’s face, and the strange feeling in her heart.
A knot of people stood outside the post office talking eagerly. They all stopped talking to stare at Anna when the carriage came round the corner. Fritz whipped up his horses and drove past them at a gallop.
“Wait — I want to get out,” cried Anna as they came to the parsonage. “Do you mind waiting?” she asked Miss Leech. “I want to speak to Herr Pastor. I will not be a moment.”
She went up the little trim path to the porch. The maid-of-all-work was clearing away the coffee from the table. Frau Manske came bustling out when she heard Anna’s voice asking for her husband. She looked extraordinarily excited. “He has not come back yet,” she cried before Anna could speak, “he is still at the Schloss. Gott Du Allmächtiger, did one ever hear of anything so terrible?”
Anna looked at her, her face as white as her dress. “Tell me,” she tried to say; but no sound passed her lips. She made a great effort, and the words came in a whisper: “Tell me,” she said.
“What, the gracious Miss has not heard? Herr von Lohm has been arrested.”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 57
