Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  She wanted to go and kiss Judith and say sweet things to her, but her feet seemed unable to move. She wanted to congratulate everybody with all her heart if only they would be kind and congratulate her a little, too. For Judith had heard what she said before her father came in, and her mother had heard it, and the room was heavy with the uttered name of Dremmel.

  She looked round at them — her father waiting for her to show at least ordinary decency and feeling, Judith so safe in the family’s approval, so entirely clear from hidden things, her mother lying with closed eyes and expressionless face, and she suddenly felt intolerably alone.

  “Oh, oh—” she cried, holding out her hands, “doesn’t anybody love me?”

  This was worse than her toothache.

  Her family had endured much during those days, but at least there was a reason then for the odder parts of her behaviour. Now they were called upon to endure the distressing spectacle of a hitherto reserved relative letting herself go to unbridledness. Ingeborg was going to make a scene; and a scene was a thing that had never yet, anyhow not during the entire Bullivant period, been made in that house.

  Mrs. Bullivant shut her eyes tighter and tried to think she was not there at all.

  Judith turned red and again became absorbed in the teapot.

  The Bishop, after the first cold shock natural to a person called upon to contemplate nakedness where up to then there had been clothes, put down his cup on the nearest table and, with an exaggerated calm, stared.

  They all felt intensely uncomfortable; as uncomfortable as though she had begun, in the middle of the drawing-room, to remove her garments one by one and cast them from her.

  “This is very sad, Ingeborg,” said the Bishop.

  “Isn’t it — oh, isn’t it—” was her unexpected answer, tears in her eyes. She was so tired, so frightened. She had been travelling hard since the morning of the day before. She had had nothing to eat for a time that seemed infinite. And yet this was the moment, just because she had betrayed herself to her mother and Judith, in which she was going to have to tell her father what she had done.

  “It is the most distressing example,” said the Bishop, “I have ever seen of that basest of sins, envy.”

  “Envy?” said Ingeborg. “Oh, no — that’s not what it is. Oh, if it were only that! And I do congratulate Judith. Judith, I do, I do, my dear. But — father, I’ve been doing it too.”

  It was out now, and she looked at him with miserable eyes, prepared for the worst.

  “Doing what, Ingeborg?”

  “I’m engaged, too.”

  “Engaged? My dear Ingeborg.”

  The Bishop was alarmed for her sanity. She really looked very strange. Had they been giving her too much gas?

  His tone became careful and humouring. “How can you,” he said quietly, “have become engaged in these few days?”

  “Much may happen in a week,” said Ingeborg. It jumped out. She did try not to say it. She was unnerved. And always when she was unnerved she said the first thing that came into her head, and always it was either unfortunate or devastating.

  The Bishop became encased in ice. This was not hysteria, it was something immeasurably worse.

  “Be so good as to explain,” he said sharply, and waves of icy air seemed to issue from where he stood and heave through the room.

  “I’m engaged to — to somebody called Dremmel,” said Ingeborg.

  “I do not know the name. Do you, Marion?”

  “No, oh, no,” breathed Mrs. Bullivant, her eyes shut.

  “Robert Dremmel,” said Ingeborg.

  “Who are the Dremmels, Ingeborg?”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “There aren’t any?”

  “I — never heard of any,” she said, twisting her fingers together. “We usedn’t to talk about — about things like more Dremmels.”

  “What is this man?”

  “A clergyman.”

  “Oh. Where is he living?”

  “In East Prussia.”

  “In where, Ingeborg?”

  “East Prussia. It — it’s a place abroad.”

  “Thank you. I am aware of that. My education reaches as far as and includes East Prussia.”

  Mrs. Bullivant began to cry. Not loud, but tears that stole quietly down her face from beneath her closed eyelids. She did not do anything to them, but lay with her hands clasped on her breast and let them steal. What was the use of being a Christian if one were exposed to these scenes?

  “Pray, why is he in East Prussia?” asked the Bishop.

  “He belongs there.”

  Again the room seemed for an instant to hold its breath.

  “Am I to understand that he is a German?”

  “Please, father.”

  “A German pastor?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Not by any chance attached in some ecclesiastical capacity to the Kaiser?”

  “No, father.”

  There was a pause.

  “Your aunt — what did she say to this?”

  “She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t there.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I haven’t been at my aunt’s.”

  “Judith, my dear, will you kindly leave the room?”

  Judith got up and went. While she was crossing to the door and until she had shut it behind her there was silence.

  “Now,” said the Bishop, Judith being safely out of harm’s way, “you will have the goodness to explain exactly what you have been doing.”

  “I think I wish to go to bed,” murmured Mrs. Bullivant, without changing her attitude or opening her eyes. “Will some one please ring for Richards to come and take me to bed?”

  But neither the Bishop nor Ingeborg heeded her.

  “I didn’t mean to do anything, father-” began Ingeborg. Then she broke off and said, “I — can explain better if I sit down—” and dropped into the chair nearest to her, for her knees felt very odd.

  She saw her father now only through a mist. She was going to have to oppose him for the first time in her life, and her nature was one which acquiesced and did not oppose. In her wretchedness a doubt stole across her mind as to whether Herr Dremmel was worth this; was anything, in fact, worth fighting about? And with one’s father. And against one’s whole bringing-up. Was she going to be strong enough? Was it a thing one ought to be strong about? Would not true strength rather lie in a calm continuation of life at home? What, when one came to think of it, was East Prussia really to her, and those rye-fields and all that water? She wished she had had at least a piece of bread and butter. She thought perhaps bread and butter would have helped her not to doubt. She looked round vaguely so as not to have to meet her father’s eye for a moment and her glance fell on the tea-table.

  “I think,” she said faintly, getting up again, “I’ll have some tea.”

  To the Bishop this seemed outrageous.

  He watched her in a condition of icy indignation such as he had not yet in his life experienced. His daughter. His daughter for whom he had done so much. The daughter he had trained for years, sparing no pains, to be a helpful, efficient, Christian woman. The daughter he had honoured with his trust, letting her share in the most private portions of his daily business. Not a letter had he received that she had not seen and been allowed to answer. Not a step in any direction had he taken without permitting her to make the necessary arrangements. Seldom, he supposed bitterly, had a child received so much of a father’s confidence. His daughter. That crumpled and disreputable — yes, now he knew what was the matter with her appearance — disreputable-looking figure cynically pouring itself out tea while he, her father whom she had been deceiving, was left to wait for her explanations until such time as she should have sated her appetite. Positively she had succeeded, he said to himself, bitterly enraged that he should be forced to be bitterly enraged, in making him feel less like a bishop should feel than he had done since he was a boy.

  “It’s bec
ause I’ve had nothing to eat since Paris,” Ingeborg explained apologetically, holding the teapot in both hands because one by itself shook too much, and feeling, too, that the moment was not exactly one for tea.

  The Bishop started. “Since where?” he said.

  “Paris,” said Ingeborg; adding tremulously, having quite lost her nerve and only desiring to fill up the silence, “it — it’s a place abroad.”

  Mrs. Bullivant murmured a more definitely earnest request that Richards might be rung for to take her to bed.

  “Ingeborg,” said the Bishop in a voice she did not know. “Paris?”

  “Yes, father — last night.”

  “Ingeborg, come here.”

  He was pointing to a chair a yard or two from the hearthrug on which he stood, and his voice was very strange.

  She put down the cup with a shaking hand and went to him. Her heart was in her mouth.

  “What have you been doing?” he said.

  “I told you, father. I’m engaged to Herr—”

  “How did you get to Paris?”

  “By train.”

  “Will you answer me? What were you doing in Paris?”

  “Having dinner.”

  She was terrified. Her father was talking quite loud. She had never in her life seen him like this. She answered his questions quickly, her heart leaping as he rapped them out, but her answers seemed to make him still angrier. If only he would let her explain, hear her out; but he hurled questions at her, giving her no time at all.

  “Father,” she said hurriedly, seeing that after that last answer of hers he did for a moment say nothing, but stood looking at her very extraordinarily, “please let me tell you how it all happened. It won’t take a minute — it won’t really. And then, you see, you’ll know. I didn’t mean to do anything, I really didn’t; but the dentist pulled my tooth out so quickly, that very first day, and so instead of coming home I went to Lucerne—”

  “To—”

  “Yes,” she nodded, in a frenzy of haste to get it all said, “to Lucerne — I couldn’t tell you why, but I did — I seemed pushed there, and after a little while I got engaged, and I didn’t in the least mean to do that, either, really I didn’t — but somehow—” Was there any use trying to tell him about the white and silver cake and the seven witnesses and the undoubting kind Herr Dremmel and all the endless small links in the chain? Would he ever, ever understand?— “somehow I did. You see,” she added helplessly, looking up at him with eyes full of an appeal for comprehension, for mercy, “one thing leads to another.” And as he still said nothing she added, even more helplessly, “Herr Dremmel sat opposite me in the train.”

  “You picked him up casually, like any servant girl, in a train?”

  “He was one of the party. He was there from the beginning. Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you — it was one of Dent’s Tours.”

  “You went on a Dent’s Tour?”

  “Yes, and he was one of it, too, and we all, of course, always went about together, rather like a school, two and two — I suppose because of the pavement,” she said, now saying in her terror anything that came into her head, “and as he was the other one of my two — the half of the couple I was the other one of, you know, father — we — we got engaged.”

  “Do you take me for a fool?” was the Bishop’s comment.

  Ingeborg’s heart stood still. How could her father even think —

  “Oh, father,” was all she could say to that; and she hung her head in the entire hopelessness, the uselessness of trying to tell him anything.

  She knew she had been saying it ridiculously, tumbling out a confusion of what must sound sad nonsense, but could he not see she was panic-stricken? Could he not be patient, and help her to make her clean breast?

  “I’m stupid,” she said, looking up at him through tears, and suddenly dropping into a kind of nakedness of speech, a speech entirely simple and entirely true, “stupid with fright.”

  “Do you suggest I terrorize you?” inquired the incensed Bishop.

  “Yes,” she said.

  This was terrible. And it was peculiarly terrible because it made the Bishop actually wish he were not a gentleman. Then, indeed, it would be an easy matter to deal with that small defying creature in the chair. When it comes to women the quickest method is, after all, to be by profession a navvy....

  He shuddered, and hastily drew his thoughts back from this abyss. To what dread depths of naturalness was she not by her conduct dragging him?

  “Father,” said Ingeborg, who had now got down to the very bottom of the very worst, a place where once one has reached it an awful sincerity takes possession of one’s tongue, “do you see this? Look at them.”

  And she held up her hands and showed him, while she herself watched them as though they were somebody else’s, how they were shaking.

  “Isn’t that being afraid? Look at them. It’s fear. It’s fear of you. It’s you making them do that. And think of it — I’m twenty-two. A woman. Oh, I — I’m ashamed—”

  But whether it was a proper shame for what she had done or a shocking shame for her compunctions in sinning, the Bishop was not permitted that afternoon to discover; because when she had got as far as that she was interrupted by being obliged to faint.

  There was a moment’s confusion while she tumbled out of the chair and lay, a creased, strange object, on the floor, owing to Mrs. Bullivant’s having produced an exclamation; and this to the Bishop, after years of not having heard her more than murmur, was almost as disconcerting as if, flinging self-restraint to the winds, she had suddenly produced fresh offspring. He quickly, however, recovered the necessary presence of mind and the bell was rung for Richards; who, when she came, knelt down and undid Ingeborg’s travel-worn blouse, and something on a long chain fell out jingling.

  It was her father’s cross and Herr Dremmel’s ring metallically hitting each other.

  The Bishop left the room without a word.

  CHAPTER IX

  A pall descended on the Palace and enveloped it blackly for four awful days, during which Mrs. Bullivant and her daughters and the chaplain and the secretary and all the servants did not so much live as feel their way about with a careful solicitude for inconspicuousness.

  This pall was the pall of the Bishop’s wrath; and there was so much of it that it actually reached over into the dwellings of the Dean and Chapter and blackened those white spots, and it got into the hitherto calm home of the Mayor, who had the misfortune to have business with the Bishop the very day after Ingeborg’s return, and an edge of it — but quite enough to choke an old man — even invaded the cathedral, where it extinguished the head verger, a sunny octogenarian privileged to have his little joke with the Bishop, and who had it unfortunately as usual, and was instantly muffled in murkiness and never joked again.

  That the Bishop should have allowed his private angers to overflow beyond his garden walls, he who had never been anything in public but a pattern in his personal beauty, his lofty calm, and his biblically flavoured eloquence of what the perfect bishop should be, shows the extreme disturbance of his mind. But it was not that he allowed it: it was that he could not help it. He had, thanks to his daughter, lost his self-control, and for that alone, without anything else she had done, he felt he could never forgive her.

  Self-control gone, and with it self-respect. He ached, he positively ached during those first four black days in which his natural man was uppermost, a creature he had forgotten so long was it since he had heard of him, thoroughly to shake his daughter. And the terribleness of that in a bishop. The terribleness of being aware that his hands were twitching to shake — hands which he acutely knew should be laid on no one except in blessing, consecrated hands, divinely appointed to bless and then dismiss in peace. That small unimportant thing, that small weak thing, the thing he had generously endowed with the great gift of life and along with that gift the chance it would never have had except for him of re-entering eternal blessedness, the thing he had fed
and clothed, that had eaten out of his hand and been all bright tameness — to bring disgrace on him! Disgrace outside before the world, and inside before his abased and humiliated self. And she had brought it not only on a father, but on the best-known bishop on the bench; the best known also and most frequently mentioned, he had sometimes surmised with a kind of high humility, in the — how could one put it with sufficient reverence? — holy gossip of the angels. For in his highest moods he had humbly dared to believe he was not altogether untalked about in heaven. And here at the moment of much thankfulness and legitimate pride when his other daughter was so beautifully betrothed came this one, and with impish sacrilegiousness dragged him, her father, into the dust of base and furious instincts, the awful dust in which those sad animal men sit who wish to and do beat their women-folk.

  He could not bring himself to speak to her. He would not allow her near him. Whatever her repentance might be it could never wipe out the memory of these hours of being forced by her to recognise what, after all the years of careful climbing upwards to goodness, he was still really like inside. Terrible to be stirred not only to unchristianity but to vulgarity. Terrible to be made to wish not only that you were not a Christian but not a gentleman. He, a prince of the Church, was desiring to be a navvy for a space during which he could be unconditionally active. He, a prince of the Church, was rent and distorted by feelings that would have disgraced a curate. He could never forgive her.