There was to be tea out in the garden the first thing, because tea lubricates the charities, and then, with the aid of a dictionary, conversation. Ingeborg had had time to think out her mother-in-law, and was firm in her resolve that no artificial barrier such as language should stand in the way of the building up of affection. If necessary she might even weave the German for giants, umbrellas, keys, and spectacles into a sentence as a conversational opening, and try her mother-in-law with that; and if Frau Dremmel showed the least responsiveness to either of these subjects she might go on to wax, fingers, thunder, and beards, and end with princes, boats, and shoulders. That would be three sentences. She could not help thinking they would be pregnant with conversational possibilities. There would be three replies; and Frau Dremmel, being in her own language, would of course enlarge. Then Ingeborg would open her dictionary and look up the words salient in the enlargement, and when she had found them smile back, brightly comprehending and appreciative.
This, including having tea, would take, she supposed, about fifty minutes.
Then they would walk a little up and down in the shade, pointing out the rye-field to each other, and that would be another ten minutes perhaps.
Then at five, she supposed, Frau Dremmel would ask for and obtain the carriage and go away again. Ingeborg made up her mind to kiss her at the end when the visit had reached the doorstep stage. It would not be difficult, she thought. The doorstep, she well knew, was a place of enthusiasms.
She and Ilse were immensely active the whole morning preparing, both of them imbued with much the same spirit with which as children they prepared parties for their dolls. But this was a live doll who was coming, and they were making real cakes which she would actually eat. The cakes were of a variety of shapes, or rather contortions, the coffee was of a festival potency, sandwiches meant to be delicate and slender were cut, but under the very knife grew bulky — it must be the strong German air, Ingeborg thought watching them, perplexed by this conduct — and there were the first gooseberries.
When the table was set out under the lime-trees and finished off with a jug of roses she gazed at her work in admiration. And the further she got away from it the more delightful it looked. Nearer it was still attractive but more with the delusive attractiveness of tables at a school treat. Perhaps there was too much food, she thought; perhaps it was the immense girth of the sandwiches. But down from the end of the path it looked so charming that she wished she could paint it in watercolours — the great trees, the tempered sunlight, the glimpse of the old church at one end, the glimpse of the embosomed lake at the other, and in the middle, set out so neatly, with such a grace of spotlessness, the table of her first tea-party.
Frau Dremmel arrived in a black bonnet with a mauve flower in its front to mark that ten years had been at work upon the mitigation of her grief. Her son came out of his laboratory when he heard the crashes of the carriage among the stones and holes of the village street, and he was ready at the door to help her down. He was altogether silent, for he had been torn from the middle of counting and weighing the grains in samples of differently treated rye, and would have to begin the last saucerful all over again. Beside this brevity Ingeborg, in a white frock and wearing the buckled shoes of youth, with the sun shining on her freckled fairness and bare neck and her mouth framed into welcoming smiles, looked like a child. She certainly did not look like anybody’s wife; and the last thing in the world that she at all resembled was the wife of a German pastor.
Again Frau Dremmel, as she had done that day at Meuk, turned her eyes slowly all over her while she was receiving her son’s abstracted kiss; but she said nothing except, to her son, Guten Tag, and passively submitted to Ingeborg’s shaking both her hands, which were clothed in the black cotton of decent widowhood.
“Do say something, Robert,” murmured Ingeborg. “Say how glad I am. Say all the things I’d say if I could say things.”
Herr Dremmel gazed at his wife a moment collecting his thoughts.
“Why should one say anything?” he said. “She is a simple woman. No longer young. My wife,” he said to his mother, “desires me to welcome you on her behalf.”
“Ach,” said Frau Dremmel.
Ingeborg began to usher her along the passage towards the back door and the garden. Frau Dremmel, however, turned aside half-way down it into the living-room.
“Oh, not in there!” cried Ingeborg. “We’re going to have tea in the garden. Robert, please tell her—”
But looking round for help she found Robert had gone, and there was the sound of a key being turned in a lock.
Frau Dremmel continued to enter the living-room. Before she could be stopped she had arranged herself firmly on its sofa.
“But tea,” said Ingeborg, following her and gesticulating, “tea, you know. Out there — in the garden—”
She pointed to the door, and she pointed to the window. Frau Dremmel slowly took off her gloves and rolled them together, and undid her bonnet strings and looked at the door and at the window and back again at her daughter-in-law, but did not move. Then Ingeborg, making a great effort at gay cordiality and determined that when words failed affectionate actions should fill up the gaps, bent over the figure on the sofa and took its arm. “Won’t you come?” she said, adding a sentence she had taken special pains to get by heart, “liebe Schwiegermutter?” And smilingly, but yet, when it came to touching her, rather gingerly, and certainly with her heart in her mouth, she gently pulled at her sleeve.
Frau Dremmel stared up at her without moving.
“Liebe Schwiegermutter — tea — garden — better,” said Ingeborg, still smiling but now quite hot. She could not remember a single German word except liebe Schwiegermutter.
Frau Dremmel, urged and encouraged, was finally got out of the house and into the garden and along between the gooseberry bushes to where the tea-table stood and an armchair for her with a cushion on it. She went with plain reluctance. She did not cease to stare at her daughter-in-law. Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware of this, Ingeborg tried to hide them, but you cannot hide feet that are being walked on, and when she sat down to pour out the coffee she found her short skirt was incapable of hiding anything lower than above her ankles.
She grew nervous. She spilt the milk and dropped a spoon. Beside the rigid figure in the armchair she seemed and felt terribly fluid and uncontrolled. The cheek that was turned to her mother-in-law flushed hotly. She acutely knew her mother-in-law was observing this, and that made it hotter. If only, thought Ingeborg, she would look at something else or say something. Over the rim of her cup, however, Frau Dremmel’s eyes moved up and down and round and through the strange creature her son had married. The rest of her was almost wholly motionless. Ingeborg had nervously swallowed three cups of the black stuff before Frau Dremmel was half through one. At last a German word flashed into her mind and she flung herself on it. “Schön — wunderschön!” she cried, waving her hands comprehensively over all the scenery.
For an instant Frau Dremmel removed her eyes from her daughter-in-law’s warm and quivering body to follow her gesture, but seeing nothing soon got them back again. She made no comment on the scenery. Her face remained wholly impassive; and Ingeborg realized that the rye-field would be no use as a means of entertainment.
She could not again say schön, and the meal went on in silence. Frau Dremmel’s method of eating it was to begin a piece of each of the cakes and immediately leave it off. This afflicted Ingeborg, who had supposed them to be very lovely cakes. Frau Dremmel’s place at the table — she had pulled her chair close up to it — was asterisked with begun and abandoned cakes. On the other hand she ate many of the sandwiches, and they drew forth the only word she said to Ingeborg during the whole of tea. “Fleisch,” said Frau Dremmel, removing her eyes for one moment from Ingeborg to the sandwiches that were being offered her, and with a dingy, investigating forefinger lifting up that portion of each sandwich which may be described as its lid.
It was, however, the only one. After it silence, complete and impenetrable, settled down on Frau Dremmel. She did not even speak to her son when half an hour later he came out in search of the coffee he had failed to find on his doormat. Her manners prevented her, in his house on this first visit after his marriage, from uttering the unmanageable truths that come so naturally from the mouths of neglected mothers; and except for those she had nothing to say to him. Herr Dremmel expected nothing. His deeply engaged thoughts left no room in him for anything but a primitive simplicity. He was hungry, and he ate; thirsty, and he drank. The silent figure at the table, of whose presence every nerve in Ingeborg’s body was conscious, produced no impression on him whatever.
“Robert — do tell your mother how I really do want to talk to her if only I could,” said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together in her lap and tying and untying her handkerchief into knots. There were little beads on her upper lip. The rings of hair on her temples were quite damp.
He glanced at his mother, drawn up and taut in her chair, and immediately she turned her eyes on to him and stared back at him steadily.
“Little One,” he said, “I have told you she is a simple woman, not used to or capable of wielding the weapons of social arts. Be simple, too, and all will be well.”
“But I am being simple,” protested Ingeborg. “I’m dumb; I’m blank; what can I be simpler than that?”
“Then all is well. Give me coffee.”
He ate and drank in silence, and got up to go away again.
Frau Dremmel looked at him and said something.
“Is it the carriage?” asked Ingeborg.
“She wants to go indoors,” said Herr Dremmel.
“Indoors?”
“She says she does not like mosquitoes.”
He went away into the house. There was nothing for it but to follow. As they reached the back door the church clock struck five, but Ingeborg, glancing at her mother-in-law’s impassive face, saw this sound meant nothing to her. She followed her into the living-room and watched her helplessly as she arranged herself once more on the sofa.
When the clock struck half-past five she was still on it. She seemed to be waiting. For what was she waiting? Ingeborg asked herself, whose handkerchief was now rubbed into a hard ball between her nervous hands. Impossible either to move her or communicate with her. Rigidly she sat, her eyes examining the room and each object in it but yet not for an instant missing the least of her daughter-in-law’s movements. Ingeborg seized her dictionary and grammar and made a final effort to build a bridge out of them across which their souls might even now go out to meet each other, but Frau Dremmel did not seem to understand the nature of her efforts, and only stared with a deepened blankness when Ingeborg read her out a sentence from the grammar that dealt with weather they were not that day having.
What was she waiting for? Seven o’clock struck, and still she waited. The clock in the room ticked through the minutes, and every half hour they could hear the church clock striking. Ingeborg brought her a footstool; brought her a cushion; brought her, in extremity, a glass of water; began to sew at a torn duster; left off sewing at it; fluttered nervously among the pages of her grammar; pored in her dictionary; and always Frau Dremmel watched her. She found herself struggling against a tendency to think of her mother-in-law as It. At seven she heard Ilse go home singing — happy Ilse, able to go away. Soon afterwards she finally faltered into immobility, giving up, sitting now quite still herself in her chair, the flush faded from her cheek, pale and crumpled. It was her and Robert’s supper-time. Soon it would be their bedtime. Quite soon it would be to-morrow. And then it would be next week. And then there would be winter coming on.... Was this visit never to end?
At eight it at last became plain to her that what Frau Dremmel was waiting for must be supper. This was terrible, for there was none. At least, there was only that repetition of tea and breakfast that made her and Robert’s lives so wholesome. She had calculated the visit on the basis of tea only, and had prepared only and elaborately for that. For half an hour she sat on and hoped she was mistaken. She did not know that in East Prussia if you are invited to tea you also stay to supper. But at half-past eight she realised that there was nothing for it but to go and fetch it in.
When the ruins of the same meal that had been offered her once already were produced a second time and set out clumsily on the unaccustomed living-room table among the pushed-aside Merediths and Kiplings, the bones of this skeleton being slowly put together under her very eyes, and Ingeborg at last by ceasing to go in and out fetching things and sinking into a chair indicated that that was all, Frau Dremmel, after waiting a little longer, opened her mouth and startled her daughter-in-law by speech.
“Bratkartoffel,” said Frau Dremmel.
Ingeborg sat up quickly. After the hours of silence it was uncanny.
“Bratkartoffel,” said Frau Dremmel again.
“Did you — did you speak?” said Ingeborg, staring at her.
“Bratkartoffel,” said Frau Dremmel a third time.
Ingeborg jumped up and ran across the passage to the laboratory door.
“Robert — Robert,” she cried, twisting the handle, “come — come quickly — your mother — she’s talking, she’s saying things—” There was the same excitement and wonder in her voice as there is in that of a parent whose baby has suddenly and for the first time said Papa.
Herr Dremmel came out at once. From the sound of her he felt something must have happened.
She seized him and pulled him into the living-room. “Now — listen,” she said, holding him there facing the sofa.
Herr Dremmel looked perplexed. “What is it, Little One?” he asked.
“Listen — she’ll say it again soon,” said Ingeborg eagerly.
“What is it, mother?” he asked in German.
Frau Dremmel, without moving her head, ran her eyes over the table.
“Are there not even — not even—” she began, but stopped. She was evidently combating an emotion.
“Thunder of heaven,” said Herr Dremmel, looking from one woman to the other, “what is it?”
But Frau Dremmel was not able, after the hours of waiting for a supper that seemed to her in every detail a studied insult on her daughter-in-law’s part, to bear harshness from her son. Drawing out a handkerchief that had no end and that reached to her eyes while yet remaining in her pocket, she began to cry.
Ingeborg was appalled. She ran to her, and, kneeling down, begged her in English to tell her what was the matter. She called her liebe Schwiegermutter over and over again. She stroked her sleeve, she patted her, she even laid her head on her lap.
But Frau Dremmel for the first time did not notice her. She was saying detached things into her handkerchief, and they were all for her son.
“A widow,” wept Frau Dremmel. “A widow for ten years. When I think of your dear father. How much he thought of me. My first visit. My visit on your marriage. Treated as though I were anybody. Forced to drink coffee out of doors. Like a homeless animal. No sofa. No real table. Flocks of mosquitoes. No supper. No supper at all. Nothing prepared for me. For the mother. For your sainted father’s wife. His cherished wife long before you were thought of. If it had not been for me you would not have been here at all. Nor she. And I am to go home unfed. Uncared for. Not even the least one has a right to expect given one. Not even what the poorest peasant has each night. Not even” — again she said the magic word— “Bratkartoffel—”
“There, there,” said Ingeborg soothingly, stroking her anxiously— “there, there. Robert, what is Bratkartoffel?”
“But never mind. Never mind,” said Frau Dremmel, wiping her eyes only to weep afresh— “soon I shall be with him. With him again. With your dear father. And this — this is nothing, all nothing. It is only the will of God.”
“There, there,” said Ingeborg, anxiously stroking her
.
CHAPTER XV
It was not until some days later that she discovered the reason for her mother-in-law’s tears.
She could get no information from Herr Dremmel. His thoughts were not to be pinned a minute to such a subject. He swept her questionings away with the wave of the arm of one who sweeps his surroundings clear of rubbish, and the most that could be extracted from him was a general observation as to the small amount of good to be obtained from proximities. But Ingeborg one afternoon, walking longer than usual, facing the hot sun and the flies and sand of the road beyond the village to see where it led to instead of, as she generally did, exploring footpaths in the forest, came after much heat and exertion to a thicket of trees that were not firs or pines but green cool things, oaks, and acacias and silver birches, and going through them along a grass-grown road fanning herself with her hat as she walked in the pleasant shade, found herself stopped by a white gate, a notice telling her she was not to advance further, and a garden. Beyond the flower beds and long untidy grass of this garden she saw a big steep-roofed house built high on a terrace. On the terrace a dog was lying panting, with its tongue out. Nothing else alive was in sight, and there were no sounds except the rustling of the leaves over her head and such faint chirping as birds make in July.
“Who lives in that big white house away over there?” she asked Herr Dremmel when next she saw him, which was not till that evening at supper; and she nodded her head, her hands being full of the coffee pot, in the direction of the north.
Herr Dremmel was ruffled. He had been plunged in parish affairs since breakfast, for it was the day appointed by him and recurring once a fortnight into which by skilful organizing he packed them all. The world in consequence on every second Tuesday appeared to him a place of folly. People were born and lived embedded in ancient folly. The folly of their parents, already stale when they got it, was handed down to them intact, not shot at all, thought Herr Dremmel on these alternate Tuesdays, with the smallest ray of perception of different and better things. The school children were still learning about Bismarck’s birthday, the schoolmaster was still laboriously computing attendances and endeavouring to obey the difficult law which commanded him to cane the absent, the elders of the church were still refusing to repair the steeple in time, the confirmation class was still meeting explanations and exhortations with thick inattention, the ecclesiastical authorities were still demanding detailed reports of progress when there was not and could not be progress, couples were still forgetting marriage until the last hurried moment and then demanding it with insistent cries, infants were still being hastily christened before the same neglects that killed those other infants who else might have been their proud and happy grandparents carried them off, and peasants were still slinking away at the bare mention of intelligence and manure.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 148
