“Invariably, my treasure,” said Herr Dremmel with patience, “do people have mothers.”
“Yes,” she said, reaching down his hat for him and putting it carefully on his head, “but then they say so.”
“Perhaps. Sooner or later. I well remember, however, informing you that my father was dead. From that it was possible to reason that my mother was not. She is a simple woman. No longer young. We will visit her on our way through the town.”
Outside the station a high vehicle drawn by two long-tailed horses, one of which reached a head and neck further than the other, so that when you looked at them sideways and could not see that they both began at the same place it seemed to be perpetually winning a race, was in readiness to take them to Kökensee.
“This,” said Herr Dremmel, introducing it with a wave of the hand, “is my carriage. And this,” he continued, similarly introducing the driver, “is my faithful servant Johann. He has been with me now nearly a year.”
Ingeborg shook Johann’s hand, when he had carefully clambered down over the sacks of kainit that filled the front part of the carriage, very politely. “Do they all stay as long as that?” she murmured to Herr Dremmel.
“All? There is but my widow, and she is adjusting her feathers for flight. She will wing her way to some other bachelor nest as soon as my Little One has been inducted.”
“But does she like that?” asked Ingeborg. For she had acquired a habit, due to much repetition of the Litany, of regarding widowers as brittle, needing special care. There was an instant’s vision before her eyes of this one flapping blackly athwart the fields of East Prussia, turned out, desolate and oppressed, and with perhaps some cackling trail of curses stridulously marking her course.
“No doubt she will feel it. She, too, has been very faithful. She has been with me now nearly eight months. But if it were less she would still feel it. Widows,” he continued abstractedly, peering among the sacks of kainit in search of some Chilisaltpetre that was not there, “are in a constant condition of feeling.”
Johann explained — he was a shabby man, grown grey and frayed, Ingeborg supposed, in service — that the previous stuff did not seem to have caught its train, and Herr Dremmel went off to make anxious inquiries of the stationmaster while Ingeborg stood smiling with an excessive friendliness at Johann to make up for her want of words, and wondering how her luggage would get on to a carriage already so much occupied by sacks.
In the end most of it did not and was left at the station till some future time, and clutching her dressing-bag with one hand and the iron rail of the carriage with the other she was rattled away over the enormous cobbles of Meuk with a great cracking of Johann’s whip and barking of dogs and kickings of the horses, whose tails were long and kept on getting over the reins. The planks of the carriage’s bottom heaved and yawned beneath her feet. The horses shied in and out of the gutters. Her hat wanted to blow off, and she did not dare let either of her hands go free to hold it. She bent her head to try to keep it on. Her skin pricked and tingled from the shaking. She had an impression of red houses flush with the street, railless dwellings giving straight on to it; of a small shop or two; of people stopping to stare; of straw and paper and dust dancing together in the wind.
Herr Dremmel chose these flustered moments to expand conversationally, and raising his voice above the tumult explained in shouts that the three sacks in front were not so much sacks as mysterious stomachs filled with the future. She strained to catch what he said, but only heard a word now and then when she bumped against him— “divine maws — richly furnished banquet — potential energy—” She found it difficult to answer with any sort of connected intelligence, more especially because he kept on breaking off to lean forward and hit the horse-flies that alighted on the back of Johann’s neck. When he did this Johann started and the horses kicked.
“Faithful servant” — he shouted in her ear— “nearly a year — must not be stung—”
It was a disorganized and breathless Ingeborg trying to rub things out of her eyes who found herself finally in the passage of the elder Frau Dremmel’s house.
The door stood ajar, and her husband pushed it open and called loudly on his mother to appear. “She lurks, she lurks,” he said, impatiently looking at his watch; and redoubled his cries.
“Does she expect us?” asked Ingeborg at last, who was trying to pin up her loosened hair.
“She is a simple woman,” he said, “consequently she never expects anything.” And he pulled open a door out of which came nothing but darkness and a great cold smell.
“That is not my mother,” he said, shutting it again.
“Does she know we’re coming home to-day?” asked Ingeborg, a doubt beginning to take hold of her.
“She is a simple woman. Consequently she never knows anything. Mother! Mother!”
“Does she know you’re married?” asked Ingeborg, the doubt growing bigger.
“She is a simple woman. Consequently—” He broke off and stared down at her, reflecting. “Is it possible that I forgot to tell her?” he said.
It evidently was possible, for at that moment Frau Dremmel came slowly up some steps at the end of the passage from a lower region, and perceiving her son and a strange young woman stood still and said nothing whatever.
“Mother, this is my wife,” said Herr Dremmel, taking Ingeborg’s hand and leading her to the motionless figure.
“Ach,” said Frau Dremmel, without moving.
“Kiss her, Little One,” directed Herr Dremmel.
“Yes, yes,” said Ingeborg, blushing a vivid red and going a convulsive step nearer.
Frau Dremmel was regarding her with sombre, unblinking eyes, eyes that had the blankness of pebbles. From her waist downwards she wore a big dark-blue apron. She was entirely undecorated. Her black dress ended at the neck abruptly in its own binding and a hook and eye. Her hair was drawn back into the smallest of knobs. Ingeborg felt suddenly that she herself was a thing of fal-lals — a showy thing, bedizened with a white collar and a hat she had till then considered neat, but that she now knew for a monstrous piece of frippery crushed on to insufficiently pinned-up hair.
“You are married to her?” asked the elder Frau Dremmel, turning her pebble eyes slowly from one to the other.
“Undoubtedly,” said Herr Dremmel; and to Ingeborg, in English, “Kiss her, Little One, and we will go on home.”
He himself put his arm round his mother’s shoulder and gave her a hasty kiss.
“My wife is English,” he said. “She does not yet either speak or understand our tongue. Kiss her, mother, and we will go on home.”
But it did not seem possible to get the two women to kiss. Ingeborg went another shy step nearer. Frau Dremmel remained immobile.
“This,” said Frau Dremmel, moving her slow eyes over Ingeborg and then fixing them on her son, “is a pastor’s wife?”
“Undoubtedly. I regret I omitted to tell you, mother, but one does occasionally omit.” And, in English to Ingeborg, “She is a simple woman. Consequently—”
“But I heard,” said Frau Dremmel. “Through your housekeeper. And others. Thus I heard. Of my only son’s marriage. I a widow.”
Ingeborg, not understanding, stood smiling nervously. She thought on such an occasion somebody ought to smile, but she did not like doing it. The immobility of Frau Dremmel, who moved nothing but her eyes, the dank bare passage, the rush of cold smell that had escaped out of the one door in it, the bleak air of poverty about her mother-in-law — poverty in some strange way regarding itself as virtuous for no reason except that it was poor — did not make her smiling easy. But she was a bride; just coming home; just being introduced to her husband’s people. Somebody, she felt, on such an occasion must smile, and, trained as she had been by her father to do the things no one else wanted to do, she provided all the smiling for the home-coming entirely herself.
“Please, Robert, tell your mother how sorry I am I can’t talk,” she said. “Do tell her
I wish I weren’t so dumb.”
“How much has she?” Frau Dremmel was asking across this speech.
“Enough, enough,” said her son, putting on his hat and making movements of departure.
“Ah. I am not to know. More secrets. It is all to go in further unchristian tampering with God’s harvests.”
Herr Dremmel bestowed a second abstracted kiss somewhere on his mother’s head. He had not listened to anything she said for a quarter of a century.
“Nothing for the mother,” she went on. “No, no. The mother is only a widow. She is of no account. Yet your sainted father—”
“Farewell, and God be with you,” said Herr Dremmel, departing down the passage and forgetting in his hurry to get his bride home as quickly as possible to take her with him.
For a moment she was left alone confronting her new relation. She made a great plunge into filialness and, swiftly blushing, picked up her mother-in-law’s passive hand.
She had meant to kiss it, but looking into her eyes she found kissing finally impossible. She shyly murmured an English leave-taking and got herself, infinitely awkwardly, out of the house.
“One has to have them,” was Herr Dremmel’s only comment.
Kökensee lay three miles along the highroad between Meuk and Wiesenhausen, and they could see the spire of its little church over the fields on the left the whole way. The road, made with as few curves as possible, undulated gently up and down between rye-fields. It was carefully planted on each side with mountain ashes, on that day in full flower, and was white and hard as though there had been no rain for a long while. The wind blew gaily over the rye; the sky was flecked with small white clouds. Ingeborg could see for miles. And there were dark lines of forest, and flashes of yellow where the broom grew, and shining bits of water, and larks quivering out joy, and everywhere on the higher places busy windmills, and the whole world seemed to laugh and flutter and sing.
“It’s beautiful — oh, beautiful!” she said.
“Beautiful? I tell you what is beautiful, Little One — the fat red soil of your girlhood’s home. The fat red soil and the steady drip, drip of the heavens.”
And he bent forward and inquired of Johann when it had rained last, and became very gloomy on hearing that it was three weeks ago, and said things to himself in German. They seemed to be unpastoral things, for Ingeborg saw Johann’s ears lifted up by what was evidently, in the front of his face, being a grin.
A weather-beaten sign-post with one bent arm pointed crookedly down a field-track at right angles to the road, and with a lurch and a heave they tilted round the corner. There was an immediate ceasing of sound. She could now hear all sorts of little birds singing besides larks — chaffinches, tits, yellow-hammers, black-caps. The carriage ploughed along slowly through the deep sand between rye that grew more reluctantly every yard. The horses were completely sobered and covered with sweat. Before them on an upward slope was Kökensee, one long straggling street of low cottages lying up against the sunset, its church behind it, and near the church two linden trees which were the trees, she knew for she had often made him tell her, in front of her home.
Ingeborg felt a quick tug at her heart. Here was the place containing all her future. There was nothing left to her to feel, she supposed, that she would not feel here. The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness. Exulting bits out of the Prayer-book, the book she knew altogether best, sang in her ears — Lift up your hearts.... We lift them up unto the Lord our God.... Oh, the beautiful words, the beautiful world, the wonder and the radiance of life!
“When the Devil,” said Herr Dremmel, who had been scanning the crops on either side of the track with deepening depression, “took our Saviour up on to a high place to tempt him with the offer of the kingdoms of the earth, he was careful to hide Kökensee by keeping his tail spread out over it, it was so ugly and so undesirable.”
“Oh — the Devil,” said Ingeborg, shrugging her shoulder in a splendid contempt, her face still shining with what she had been thinking.
She turned to him and laughed. “You can’t expect devils to know what’s what,” she said, slipping her hand through his arm and throwing up her head in a kind of proud glee.
He smiled down at her. “Little treasure,” he said, for a moment becoming conscious that this was a very bright thing he had got and was bringing home with him.
The carriage was hauled up through an opening between two cottages out of the sand on to the stones of the village street by a supreme last effort of the horses, and was dragged in great bumps across various defects through an open gate on the opposite side.
There was a yard with sheds, a plough, a manure heap, some geese, some hens, a pig, the two linden trees, and in between the linden trees behind wire netting a one-storied house like a venerable bungalow, which Herr Dremmel, on their drawing up in front of it, introduced to her.
“My house,” he said, with a wave of the hand.
CHAPTER XIII
There followed a time of surprising happiness for Ingeborg. It was the happiness of the child escaped from its lessons and picnicking gloriously in freedom and unrebukedness. The widow, it is true, slightly smudged the brightness of the beginning by, as it were, dying hard. Her body clung to life — the life she had known, she lamented, for eight long months. She was the last, she explained, of the Herr Pastor’s widows, who reached back in a rusty row to the days when he first came, elastic with youth, to cure the souls of Kökensee, and as she had stayed the longest it was clear she must be the best. She remained at the parsonage, dingily persistent, for several days on the pretext of initiating Ingeborg into the ways of the house; and each time Herr Dremmel, who seemed a little shy of embarking on controversy with her, mentioned trains, she burst in his presence into prayer and implored aloud on his behalf that he might never know what it was to be a widow. She did ultimately, however, become dislodged, and once she was gone there was nothing but contentment.
Ingeborg was young enough to think the almost servantless housekeeping a thing of charm and humour. Herr Dremmel was of the easiest unconcern as to what or when or if he ate. It was early summer, and there was only delight in getting up at dawn and pottering about the brick-floored kitchen before the daily servant came — a girl known to Kökensee as Müller’s Ilse — and heating water, and making coffee, and preparing a very clean little breakfast-table somewhere in the garden, and decorating it with freshly picked flowers, and putting the butter on young leaves, and arranging the jar of honey so that a shaft of sunlight between the branches shone straight through it turning it into a miracle of golden light. It was the sort of breakfast-table one reads about in story books; and on its fragility Herr Dremmel would presently descend like some great geological catastrophe, and the whole in a few convulsed moments would be just crumbs and coffee stains. Then he would put on leggings and go off with Johann to his experimental fields, and she would give herself up eagerly to the duties of the day.
She could not talk at first to Ilse, a square girl with surprisingly thick legs, because though she went about always with a German grammar in one hand she found that what she had learned was never what she wanted to say. Ilse, whose skirt was short, did not wear stockings, and when Ingeborg by pointing and producing a pair had conveyed to her that it would be well if she did, Ilse raised her voice and said that she had no money to get a husband with but at least, and Gott sei Dank, she had these two fine legs, and if the Frau Pastor demanded that she should by hiding them give up her chances, then the Frau Pastor had best seek some girl on whom they grew c
rooked or lean, and who for those reasons would only be too glad to cover them up. Ingeborg, not understanding a word but apprehending a great objection, smiled benevolently and put the stockings away, and Ilse’s legs went on being bare. They worked together in great harmony, for there could be no argument. Cut off from conversation, they sang; and Ingeborg sang hymns because her memory was packed with them, and Ilse sang long loud ballads, going through them slowly verse by verse in a sort of steady howl. The very geese paused on their way to the pond to listen anxiously.
Dinner, which Ingeborg found convenient to prepare entirely in one pot, simmered placidly on the stove from twelve o’clock onwards. Anybody who was hungry went and ate it. You threw in potatoes and rice and bits of meat and carrots and cabbages and fat and salt, and there you were. What are these mysterious difficulties of housekeeping, she asked herself, that people shake their heads over? Her dinners were wholesome always, delicious if one were hungry, and quite amazingly hot. They stayed hot as persistently as poultices. And once when Ilse had the misfortune to be stung by a wasp on one of her admirable legs, Ingeborg, with immense presence of mind, seized the dinner and emptying it into a fair linen cloth bound it over the swollen place; so that when Herr Dremmel arrived, as it happened hungrily that day, about two o’clock and asked for his dinner, he was told it was on Ilse’s leg and had to eat sandwiches. He could not but admire the resourcefulness of Ingeborg; but it was not until he had eaten several sandwiches that he was able still to say, as he patted her shoulder, “Little treasure.”
It was the busiest, happiest time. Every minute of the day was full. It was life at first hand, not drained dry of its elemental excellences by being squeezed first through the medium of servants. To have a little kitchen all to yourself, to be really mistress of every corner of your house, to watch the career of your food from its very beginning, to run out into the garden and pull up anything you happened to want, to stand at the back door with your skirt full of grain and call your own chickens round you and feed them, to go yourself and look for eggs, to fill the funny little dark rooms with flowers and measure the stone-floored passage for a drugget you would presently order in the only carpet shop you had faith in, which was the one in Redchester — what pleasures did the world contain that could possibly come up to these? Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 146
