Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  He was exceedingly ruffled; for while he had been wrestling with these various acquiescences and evasions his real work was lying neglected out there in the sun, in there in the laboratory, and a whole day of twelve precious hours was gone for ever; and when Ingeborg said, “Who lives in that big white house?” Herr Dremmel, with his wasted day behind him, and the continued brassiness of the heavens above him, and the persistence in that place of trees of mosquitoes, stared at her a moment and then said, bringing his hand down violently on the table, “Hell and Devils.”

  “Who?” said Ingeborg.

  “We must call on them at once.”

  “What?”

  “My patron. He will be incensed that I have not presented you sooner. I forgot him. That will be another day lost. These claims, these social claims—”

  He got up and took some agitated steps about the table.

  “No sooner,” he said, frowning angrily at the path, “has one settled one thing than there appears another. To-day, all day the poor. To-morrow, all day the rich—”

  “Do we call continuously all day?”

  “ — both equally obstinate, both equally encased from head to foot in the impenetrable thick armour of intellectual sloth. How,” he inquired, turning to her with all the indignant wrath of the thwarted worker, “is a man to work if he lives in a constant social whirl?”

  Ingeborg sat regarding him with astonishment. “He can’t,” she said. “But — do we whirl, Robert? Would one call what we do here whirling?”

  “What? When my work has been neglected all day to-day on behalf of the poor and will be neglected all day to-morrow on behalf of the rich?”

  “But why will it take us all day?”

  “A man must prepare, he cannot call as he is. He must,” said Herr Dremmel with irritable gloom, “wash.” And he added with still greater irritation and gloom, “There has to be a clean shirt.”

  “But—” began Ingeborg.

  He waved her into silence. “I do not like,” he said, with a magnificent sweep of his arm, “clean shirts.”

  She stared at him with the parted lips of interest.

  “I am not at home in them. I am not myself in a clean shirt for at least the first two hours.”

  “Don’t let’s call,” said Ingeborg. “We’re so happy as we are.”

  “Nay,” said Herr Dremmel, immediately brought to reason by his wife’s support of his unreason, “but we must call. There are duties no decent man neglects. And I am a decent man. I will send a messenger to inquire if our visit to-morrow will be acceptable. I will put on my shirt early in order to get used to it. And I will endeavour, by a persistent amiability so long as the visit lasts, to induce my patron to forget that I forgot him.”

  Herr Dremmel had for some time past been practising forgetting his patron. He had found this course, after divers differences of opinion, simplest and most convenient. The patron, Baron Glambeck of Glambeck, was a serious real Christian who believed that the poor should, like some vast pudding that will not otherwise turn out well, be constantly stirred up, and he was unable to approve of a pastor who except in church and on every alternate Tuesday forbore to stir. It was for this forbearance, however, that Herr Dremmel was popular in the parish. Before his time there had been a constant dribble of pastor all over it, making it never a moment safe from intrusion. Herr Pastor Dremmel might be fiery in the pulpit, but he was quite quiet out of it; he was like a good watchdog, savage in its kennel and indifferent when loose. Kökensee had as one man refused to support the patron when he had wished some time before to bring about Herr Dremmel’s removal. Its pastor did not go from house to house giving advice. Its pastor was invisible and absorbed. These were great things in a clergyman, and should not lightly be let go. Nothing could be done in the face of the parish’s opposition, and Kökensee kept its pastor; but Baron Glambeck ceased to patronise Divine Service in Kökensee, and until Herr Dremmel brought Ingeborg to make his wedding call he had had no word with him for three years.

  The Dremmels had announced themselves for four o’clock, and when they drove up to the house along the shady grass road and through the white gate they were met on the steps of the terrace by a servant who, if he had been in Redchester, would have been Wilson. On the top of the steps stood Baron Glambeck, tightly buttoned-up in black, formal, grave. Further back, beneath the glass roof of the terrace, stood his wife, tightly buttoned-up in black, formal, grave. They were both, if Ingeborg had known it, extremely correct according to the standards of their part of the country. They were unadorned, smoothed out, black, she abundant in her smoothness, he spare in his; and they greeted Ingeborg with exactly the cordiality suitable to the reception of one’s pastor’s new wife, who ought to have been brought to call long ago but was not in any way responsible for those bygones which studded their memory so disagreeably in connection with her husband, a cordiality with the chill on. Dignity and coats of arms pervaded the place. Monograms with coronets were embroidered and painted on everything one sat on or touched. The antlers of deer shot by the Baron, with the dates and places of their shooting affixed to each, bristled thickly on the walls. They saw no servant who was not a man.

  “Please take your hat off,” said the Baroness in English, carefully keeping her voice slightly on the side of coldness.

  Ingeborg was very nearly frightened.

  She would have been quite frightened if she had been less well trained by the Bishop in unimportance. She had, however, owing to this training, left off being shy years before. She had so small an opinion of herself that there was no room in her at all for self-consciousness; and she arrived at the Glambecks’ in her usual condition of excessive naturalness, ready to talk, ready to be pleased and interested.

  But it was conveyed to her instantly on seeing the Baroness — there was an astonishment in the way she looked at her — that her clothes were not right. And just the request or suggestion or demand — she did not know which of these it really was — that she should take off her hat, made her realise she was on new ground, in places where the webs of strange customs were thick about her feet.

  She was, for a moment, very nearly frightened.

  “You will be more comfortable,” said the Baroness, “without your hat.”

  She took it off obediently, glancing beneath her eyelashes, as she drew out the pins, at the Baroness’s smooth black head and unwrinkled black body, perceiving with the clearness of a revelation that that was how she ought to look herself. Skimpier, of course, for the years had not yet had their will with her, but she ought to be a version of the effect done in lean. She resolved, in her thirst after fulfilled duty, to get a black dress and practise.

  She thought it wisest not to think what her hair must be looking like when her hat was off, for she had not expected to be hatless, and well did she know it by nature for a straggler, a thing inclined to wander from the grasp of hairpins and go off on its own account into wantonings and rings which were all the more conspicuous because of their lurid approach in colouring to the beards of her ancestors — sun-kissed Scandinavians who walked the earth in their strength hung, according to the way the light took them, with beards that were either the colour of flames, or of apricots, or of honey. Well, if they would make her take her hat off....

  By the time she was on the sofa she was presently put on in the inner hall she had caught up with her usual condition of naturalness again, and sat on it interested and forgetful of self. The Baroness’s eyes wandered over her, and they wandered over her with much the same quality in their look that had been in her mother-in-law’s. And always when they got to her feet they lingered. Her skirt again reached only to her ankles. All her outdoor skirts did that. “But I can’t help having feet,” thought Ingeborg, noticing this. They were small by nature, and the artful shoes of the London shoemaker who had shared in providing her and Judith’s trousseau made them seem still smaller. She did not try to hide them as she had tried when Frau Dremmel stared. It was Frau Dremmel’s h
eavy silence that had unnerved her. These people talked; and the Baroness’s English was reassuringly good.

  Nobody, the Baroness was thinking, and also simultaneously the Baron, who was fit to be a pastor’s wife had feet like that — little, incapable feet. Nobody, indeed, who was a really nice woman had them. One left off having them when one was a child and never had them again. The errands of domesticity on which one ran, the perpetual up and down of stairs, the hours standing on the cold stone floor of servants’ quarters seeing that one was not cheated, the innumerable honourable activities that beautified and dignified womanhood, necessitated large loose shoes. A true wife’s feet should have room to spread and flatten. Feet were one of those numerous portions of the body that had been devised by an all-wise Creator for use and not show.

  As for the rest of the Frau Pastor’s appearance there were, it is true, some young ladies in the country who dressed rather like that in the summer, but they were ladies in the Glambeck set, ladies of family or married into family. That the person who had married one’s pastor, a man whose father had been of such obscure beginnings, and indeed continuations, that even his having been dead ten years hardly made him respectable, should dress in this manner was a catastrophe. Already they had suffered too much from the conduct of their loose-talking, unchristian pastor; and now, instead of bringing a neat woman in black to be presented to them, a neat woman with a gold chain, perhaps, round her high black collar, it being a state occasion and she, after all, newly married — but only a very light chain, and inherited not bought — and a dress so sufficient that it reached beyond and enveloped anything she might possess in the way of wrist or ankle or throat, here was the most unsuitable wife he could have chosen — short, of course, of marrying among Jews. While as for her hair, when it came to her hair their thoughts ceased to formulate. That small and flattened and disordered head, like a boy’s head run wild, like something on fire, which emerged when she took off her hat....

  Coffee was served on the big table in front of the sofa. The Baroness sat beside Ingeborg, and the Baron and Herr Dremmel drew up chairs opposite. The coffee was good, and there was one excellent cake. No gooseberries, no flowers, no unwieldy sandwiches; just plainness and excellence.

  The two men talked to each other, not to the women, the Baron stiffly and on his guard, Herr Dremmel taking immense pains to be amiable and not offend. Between them hung the memories of altercations. Between them also hung the knowledge of the three years during which the Baron and his wife, as a result of the last and hottest difference of opinion, had attended Divine Service in a church that did not belong to them. They had altogether cut Kökensee. For three years their private gallery in the church in which their ancestors had once a fortnight feared God had been a place where mice enjoyed themselves. Its chairs were covered with dust; its hymn-books, growing brown, still lay open at the place the Glambecks had praised God out of last. Such a withdrawal of approval would have made any other pastor’s life a thing of chill and bleakness; Herr Dremmel hardly observed it. He had no vanities. He was pleased that the rival pastor should be gratified. He cared nothing for comment, and had no eye for shrugs and smiles. His eyes, his thoughts, were wanted for his work; and he found it a relief, a release from at least one interruption, when his patron took to leaving him frigidly alone.

  Indeed, when he drove up to the Glambecks’ house and remembered he had not had to go there for three peaceful years he felt really grateful, and he showed his gratitude by performing immense feats of social pleasantness during the visit. He agreed gigantically with everything the Baron said. Whatever subject was touched upon — very cautiously, for the Baron mistrusted all subjects with Herr Dremmel — he instantly dragged it off the dangerous shoals of the immediate and close up to a cosmic height and distance, a height and distance so enormous that even what the Kaiser said last became a negligible tinkling and Conscience and Dogma quavered off into silence; and he explained to the Baron, who guardedly said “Perhaps,” that though people’s opinions might and did vary seen near, if one spread them out wide enough, pushed them back far enough, took them up high enough, bored them down deep enough, got them away from detail and loose from foregrounds, one would come at last to the great Mother Opinion of them all, in whose huge lap men curled themselves up contentedly like the happy identities they indeed were and went, after kissing each other, in placidest agreement to sleep.

  “Perhaps,” said the Baron.

  Personalities, immediate interests, duties, daily life, were swamped in the vast seas in which, with politeness but determination, Herr Dremmel took the Baron swimming. One only needed, he repeated, warm with the wish to keep in roomy regions, to trace back any two opinions, however bitterly different they now were, far enough to get at last to the point where they sweetly kissed.

  “Perhaps,” said the Baron.

  “One only needed—” went on Herr Dremmel, making all-embracing movements with his arms.

  But the Baron cleared his throat and began to enumerate contrary facts.

  Herr Dremmel agreed at once that he was right just there, and pushed the point of kissing back a little further.

  The Baron went after him with more facts.

  Herr Dremmel again agreed, and went back further. In this way they came at last to the Garden of Eden, beyond which the Baron refused to budge, alleging that further back than that no Christian could go; and even in that he repudiated the kiss. He was convinced, though he concealed it, that at no period of human thought could his and Herr Dremmel’s opinions, for example, have kissed.

  But it was an amiable view, and Herr Dremmel was extremely polite and was bent evidently on peace, and the Baron, recognising this, became less distrustful. He even contributed a thought of his own at last, after having been negatively occupied in dissecting Herr Dremmel’s, and said that in his opinion it was details that made life difficult.

  The Baroness, who loved him and overheard him, was anxious he should have more coffee with plenty of milk in it after this.

  “Men,” she explained to Ingeborg in careful English as she poured it out, “need much nourishment because of all this head-work.”

  “I suppose they do,” said Ingeborg.

  “When I was first married I remember it was my chief pride and joy that at last I had some one of my very own to nourish.”

  “Oh?” said Ingeborg.

  “It is an instinct,” said the Baroness, who had the air of administering a lesson, “in a true woman. She wishes to nourish. And naturally the joy of nourishing two is double the joy of nourishing one.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Ingeborg, who did not quite follow.

  “When my first-born—”

  “Oh, yes,” said Ingeborg, glad to understand.

  “When my first-born was laid in my arms I cannot express, Frau Pastor, what happiness I had in being given yet another human being to nourish.”

  “I suppose it was delightful,” said Ingeborg, politely sympathetic.

  The Baroness’s eyes drooped a moment inquiringly from Ingeborg’s face to her body.

  “For six years,” she went on, after a pause, “I had fresh reason for happiness regularly at Christmas.”

  “I suppose you have the loveliest Christmases here,” said Ingeborg. “Like the ones in books. With trees.”

  “Trees? Naturally we have trees. But I had babies as well. Every Christmas for six years regularly my Christmas present to my dear husband was able to be a baby.”

  “What?” said Ingeborg, opening her eyes. “A fresh one?”

  “Naturally it was fresh. One does not have the same baby twice.”

  “No, of course not. But — how did you hide it till Christmas day?”

  “It could not, naturally,” said the Baroness stiffly, “be as much a surprise as a present that was not a baby would have been, but it was for all practical purposes hidden till Christmas. On that day it was born.”

  “Oh, but I think that was very wonderful,” said Ingebor
g, genuinely pleased by such neatness. She leaned forward in her enthusiasm and clasped her hands about her knees.

  “Yes,” said the Baroness, relaxing a little before this flattering appreciation. “Yes. It was. Some people would call it chance. But we, as Christians, knew it was heaven.”

  “But how punctual,” said Ingeborg admiringly, “how tidy!”

  “Yes, yes,” mused the Baroness, relaxing still more in the warm moisture of remembrance, “they were happy times. Happy, happy times. One’s little ones coming and going—”

  “Oh? Did they go as well as come?” asked Ingeborg, lowering her voice to condolence.

  “About one’s knees, I mean, and the house.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Ingeborg, relieved.

  “Every year the Christmas candles shining down on an addition to our treasures. Every year the gifts of past Christmases gathered about the tree again, bigger and stronger instead of being lost or broken as they would have been if they had been any other kind of gift.”

  “But what happened when there weren’t any more to give?”

  “Then I gave my husband cigar-cases.”