“Taught by draughts and blankets?”
“Taught by going away.”
“Oh?” said Ingeborg. Had Providence then only led her to that poster in order that she should learn content? Were Dent’s Tours really run, educationally, by Providence?
“But—” she began, and then slopped.
“It is necessary to go away in order to come back,” said the German gentleman, again with patience.
“Yes. Of course. But—”
“The chief use of a holiday is to make one hungry to have finished with it.”
“Oh no,” she protested, the joy of holiday in her voice.
“Ah. You are at the beginning.”
“The very beginning.”
“Yet at the end you, too, will return home reconciled.”
She looked at him and shook her head.
“I don’t think reconciled is quite the—” She paused, thinking. “To what?” she went on. “To puniness, too?”
The two ladies faltered in their conversation, and glanced at Ingeborg, and then at each other.
“Perhaps not to puniness. You are not a pastor.”
There was a distinct holding of the breath of the two ladies. The German gentleman’s slow speech fell very clearly on their sudden silence.
“No,” said Ingeborg. “But what has that—”
“I am. And it is a puny life.”
Ingeborg felt a slight curdling. She thought of her father — also, if you come to that, a pastor. She was sure there was nothing in anything he ever did that would strike him as puny. His life was magnificent and important, filled to bursting point with a splendid usefulness and with a tendency to fill the lives of every one who came within his reach to their several bursting points, too. But he, of course, was a prince of the Church. Still, he had gone through the Church’s stages, beginning humbly; yet she doubted whether at any moment of his career he had looked at it and thought it puny. And was it not indeed the highest career of all? However breathless and hurried it made one’s female relations in its upper reaches, and drudging in its lower, the very highest?
But though she was curdled she was interested.
“It might not be amiss,” continued the pastor, looking out of the window at some well-farmed land they were passing, “if it were not for the Sundays.”
Again she was curdled.
“But—”
“They spoil it.”
She was silent; and the silence of the two ladies appeared to acquire a frost.
“It is the fatal habit of Sundays,” he went on, following the disappearing land with his eyes, “to recur.”
He paused, as if waiting for her to agree.
She had to, because it was a truth one could not get away from. “Yes,” she said, reluctantly. “Of course. It’s their nature.” Then a wave of memories suddenly broke over her, and she added warmly “Oh don’t they!”
The frost of the ladies seemed to settle down. It grew heavy.
“They interrupt one’s work,” he said.
“But they are your work,” she said, puzzled.
“No.”
She stared. “But,” she began, “a pastor—”
“A pastor is also a man.”
“Yes,” said Ingeborg, “but—”
“You have no doubt observed that he is, invariably, also a man.”
“Yes,” said Ingeborg, “but—”
“And a man of intelligence — I am a man of intelligence — cannot fill up his life with the meagre materials offered by the practice of the tenets of the Lutheran Church.”
“Oh — the Lutheran Church,” said Ingeborg, catching at a straw.
“Any church.”
She was silent. She felt how immensely her father would not have liked it. She felt it was wicked to sit there and listen. She also felt, strange and dreadful to observe, refreshed.
“Then,” she began, knitting her brows, for really this at its best was bad taste, and bad taste, she had always been taught, was the very worst — oh, but how nice it was, a little bit of it, after the swamps of good taste one waded about in in cathedral cities! She knitted her brows, aghast at her thoughts. “Then what,” she asked, “do you fill your life up with?”
“Manure,” said the German gentleman.
The ladies leapt in their places.
“Ma—” began Ingeborg; then stopped.
“I am engaged in endeavouring to teach the peasants of my parish how best to farm their poor pieces of land.”
“Oh, really,” said Ingeborg, politely.
“I do it by example. They do not attend to words. I have bought a few acres and experiment before their eyes. Our soil is the worst in Germany. It is inconceivably thankless. And the peasants resemble it.”
“Oh, really,” said Ingeborg.
“The result of the combination is poverty.”
“So then, I suppose,” said Ingeborg, with memories of the Bishop’s methods, “you preach patience.”
“Patience! I preach manure.”
Again at the dreadful word the ladies leapt.
“It is,” he said solemnly, his eyes glistening with enthusiasm, “the foundation of a nation’s greatness.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” said Ingeborg, seeing that he waited.
“But on what then does a State depend in the last resort?”
She was afraid to say, for there seemed to be so many possible answers.
“Naturally on its agriculture,” said the pastor, with the slight irritation of one obliged to linger over the obvious.
“Of course,” said the pliable Ingeborg, trained in acquiescence.
“And on what does agriculture depend in the last resort?”
Brilliantly she hazarded “Manure.”
For the third time the ladies leapt, and the one next to her drew away her dress.
He showed his appreciation of her intelligence by nodding slowly.
“A nation must be fed,” he said, “and empty fields will feed no one.”
“Of course not,” said Ingeborg.
“So that it is the chief element in all progress; for the root of progress flourishes only in a filled stomach.”
The ladies began to fan themselves violently, nervously, one with The Daily Mirror the other with Answers.
“Of course,” said Ingeborg.
“First,” said the German gentleman, “you fill your stomach—”
The lady next to Ingeborg made a sudden lunge across her at the strap.
“Excuse me, but do you mind putting that window down?” she said in a sort of burst.
The German gentleman, stemmed in his speech, used the interval while Ingeborg opened the window in buttoning up his overcoat again with care and patience and readjusting his muffler.
When he had attended to these things he resumed his enthusiasm; he seemed to switch it on again.
“The infinite combinations of it!” he exclaimed. “Its infinite varieties! Kali, Kainit, Chilisaltpetre, Superphosphates” — he rolled out the words as though they were the verse of a psalm. “When I shut the door on myself in the little laboratory I have constructed I shut in with me all life, all science, every possibility. I analyse, I synthesize, I separate, reduce, combine. I touch the stars. I stir the depths. The daily world is forgotten. I forget, indeed, everything, except my research. And invariably at the most profound, the most exalted moments some one knocks and tells me it is Sunday again, and will I come out and preach.”
He looked at her indignantly, demanding sympathy. “Preach!” he repeated.
“Then why,” she asked, with the courage of curiosity, “are you a pastor?”
“Because my father made me one.”
“But why are you still one?”
“Because a man must live.”
“He oughtn’t to want to,” said Ingeborg with a faint flush, for she had been carefully trained to shyness when it came to pronouncing opinions — the Bishop called it being womanly— “he oughtn’
t to want to at the cost of his convictions.”
“Nevertheless,” said the pastor, “he does.”
“Yes,” said Ingeborg, obliged to admit it; even at Redchester cases were not unknown. “He does,” she said, nodding. “Of course he does.” And unable not to be at least as honest as the pastor she added: “And so does a woman.”
“Naturally,” said the pastor.
She looked at him a moment, and then said impulsively, pulling herself a little forward towards him by the window strap —
“This woman does. She’s doing it now.”
The two ladies exchanged glances and fluttered their fans faster.
“Which woman?” inquired the pastor, whose mastery of English, though ripe, was not nimble.
“This one,” said Ingeborg, pointing at herself. “Me. I’m living at this very moment — I’m whirling along in this train — I’m running away for this holiday entirely at the cost of my convictions.”
CHAPTER III
After this it was not to be expected that Dent’s Tour should look favourably on either Ingeborg or the German gentleman. Running away? And something happened at Dover that clinched it in its coldness.
The train had slowed down, and the excursionists had become busy and were all standing up expectant and swaying with their bags and umbrellas ready in their hands, except Ingeborg and the pastor. The train stopped, and still the two at the door did not move. They were so much interested in what they were saying that they went on sitting there, barbarously corking up the congested queue inside the carriage while streams of properly liberated passengers poured past the window on their way to the best places on the boat.
The queue heaved and waited, holding on to its good manners till the last possible moment, quite anxious, with the exception of the two ladies who were driven to the very verge of naturalness by the things they had had to listen to, lest it should be forced to show what it was feeling (for what one is feeling, Dent’s excursionists had surprisingly discovered, is always somehow something rude), and seconds passed and still it was kept there heaving.
Then the pastor, gazing with a large unhurried interest at the people pushing by the window, people disfigured by haste and the greed for the best places on the boat, said in a voice of mild but penetrating complaint — it almost seemed as if in that congested moment he saw only leisure for musing aloud— “But why does the good God make so many ugly old women?”
It was when he said this that the mountainous lady at the head of the queue flung behaviour to the winds and let herself go uncontrolledly. “Will you allow me to pass?” she cried. Nor did she give him another instant’s grace, but pressed between his and Ingeborg’s knees, followed torrentially by the released remainder.
“To keep us all waiting there just while he blasphemed!” she panted on the platform to her friend.
And during the rest of the time the party was together it retired, led by these two ladies, into an icy exclusiveness, outside which and left together all day long Ingeborg and the pastor could not but make friends.
They did. They talked and they walked, they climbed and they sight-saw. They did everything Dent had arranged, going with him but not of him, always, as it were, bringing up his rear. Equally careful, being equally poor, they avoided the extras which seemed to lurk beckoning at every corner of the day. Their frugality was flagrant, and shocked the other excursionists even more than the dreadful things they said. “Such bad taste.” the Tour declared when, on the third day, after having provoked criticism by their negative attitude towards afternoon tea and the purchase of picture postcards, they would not lighten its several burdens by taking their share of an unincluded outing in flys along the lake. Even Mr. Ascough, Dent’s distracted representative, thought them undesirable, and especially could make nothing of Ingeborg, except that somehow she was not Dent’s sort. And the German gentleman, though in appearance a more familiar type, became whenever he opened his mouth grossly unfamiliar. “Foul-mouthed” was the expression the largest lady had used, bearing down on Mr. Ascough at Dover to complain, adding that as she had done all her travelling for years with and through Dent’s she felt justified in demanding that this man’s mouth should be immediately cleansed.
“I’m not a toothbrush, Mrs. Bawn,” replied the distracted Mr. Ascough, engaged at that moment in struggling for air and light in the middle of his clinging flock.
“Then I shall write to Mr. Dent himself,” said Mrs. Bawn indignantly.
And Mr. Ascough, intimidated, fought himself free and followed her down the platform, inquiring dreadfully — really he seemed to be a person of little refinement — whether, then, the German gentleman’s conversation had been obscene.
“I can get rid of him if it’s been obscene, you know,” said Mr. Ascough. “Was it?”
So that Mrs. Bawn, incensed and baffled, was obliged for the dignity of her womanhood to say she was glad to have to inform him she did not know what that word meant.
But the pastor — his name was Dremmel, he told Ingeborg: Robert Dremmel — took everything that happened with simplicity. They might shut him out, and he would never notice it; they might turn their backs, and he would never know. Nothing that Dent’s Tour could do in the way of ostracizing would have been able to pierce through to his consciousness. Having decided that the women of it were plain and the men uninteresting he thought of them no more. With his customary single-mindedness he concentrated his attention at first only on Switzerland, which was what he was paying to see, and he found it pleasant that the young lady in grey should so naturally join him in this concentration. Just for a few hours at the very beginning he had thought her naturalness, her ready friendliness, a little unwomanly. She was, he thought, a little too productive of an impression that she was a kind of boy. She had no self-consciousness, which he had been taught by his mother to confound with modesty, and no desire whatever apparently to please the opposite sex. She went to sleep, for instance, towards the end of the long journey right in front of him, letting her mouth open if it wanted to, and not bothering at all that he should probably be looking at it.
Herr Dremmel, who besides his agricultural researches prided himself on a liberal if intermittent interest in womanly charm, regretted these shortcomings, but only for a few hours at the very beginning. By the end of the first day in Lucerne he was finding it pleasant to pair off with her, womanly or unwomanly. He liked to talk to her. He discovered he could talk to her as he had been unable to talk to the few East Prussian young ladies he had met, in spite of the stiff intensity of their desire to please him. He searched about for a reason, and concluded that it was because she was interested. Whatever subject he discoursed upon she came, so it seemed, running to meet him. She listened intelligently, and with a pliability — he did not then know about the Bishop’s training — rarely to be found in combination with intelligence. Intelligent persons are very apt, he remembered, to argue and object. This young lady was intelligent without argument, a most comfortable compound, and before a definite opinion had a graceful knack of doubling up. And if her doublings up were at all, as they sometimes were, delayed while she put in “But—” he only needed repeat with patience to bring out an admirable submissive sunniness. He could not of course know of her severe training in sunniness.
By the end of the second day he had told her more about his life and his home and his work and his ambitions than he had ever told anybody, and she had told him, only he was unable to find that so interesting, about her life and her home and her work. She had no ambitions, she explained, which he said was well in a woman. He was hardly aware of the Bishop, so lightly did she skim over him.
By the end of the third day he had observed what had, curiously, escaped him before, that she was pretty. Not of course in the abundant East Prussian way, the way of generous curves and of what he now began to think were after all superfluities, but with delicacy and restraint. He no longer considered she would be better fattened up. And he was noticing her clothes, a
nd after a painstaking comparing of them with those of the other ladies applying to them the adjective elegant.
By the end of the fourth he admitted to himself that, very probably, he was soon going to be in love.
By the end of the fifth he knew without a doubt that the thing had happened; the, to him incontrovertible, proof being that on this day Switzerland sank into being just her background.
Even the Rigi, he observed with interest, was nothing to him. He walked up it, he who never walked up anything, because she wanted to. He toiled up panting, and forgot how warmly he was dissolving inside his black clothes in the pleasure of watching her on ahead glancing in and out of the sunshine that fell clear and white on her as she fluttered above him among the pine trunks. And when he got to the top, instead of looking at the view he sat down in the nearest seat and became absorbed in the way the burning afternoon light seemed to get caught in her hair as she stood on the edge of the plateau, and made it look the colour of flames.
This was very interesting. He had never yet within his recollection preferred hair to views. A curious result, he reflected, of his harmless holiday enterprise.
He had not intended to marry. He was thirty-five, and dedicated to his work. He felt it was a noble work, this patient proving to ignorance and prejudice of what could be done with barrenness if only you mixed it with brains. He was fairly comfortable in his housekeeping, having found a woman who was a widow and had therefore learned the great lesson that only widows ever really know, that a man must be let alone. He was poor, and what he could spare by rigid economies went into the few acres of sand that were to be the Light he had to offer to lighten the Gentiles. Every man, he thought, should offer some light to the abounding Gentiles before he died, some light which, however small, might be kept so clear that they could not choose but see it. A wife, he had felt when considering the question from time to time, which was each year in the early spring, would come between him and his light. She would be a shadow; and a voluminous, all-enveloping shadow. His church and the business of preaching in it were already sufficiently interrupting, but they were weekly. A wife would be every day. He could lock her out of the laboratory, he would reflect, and perhaps also out of the sitting-room.... When he became aware that he was earnestly considering what other rooms he could lock her out of, and discovered that he would want to lock her out of nearly all, he, as a wise and honest man, decided he had best leave the much-curved virgins of the neighbourhood alone.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 137
