He turned his head away; and as he did this did she see something actually glistening in his eyes, glistening like something wet?
In an instant she had put her arms round him. “Of course I do — of course I want one,” she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his mackintosh, “some — heaps — of course we’ll have them — everybody has them — of course I’ll soon begin — don’t mind my not having been ill to-night — I’m so sorry — I will be ill — dear Robert — I didn’t know I had to be ill — but I will be soon — I’m sure I will be — I — I feel quite like soon being ill now—”
He patted her face, his face still turned away. “Good little wife,” he said; “good little wife.”
She felt nearer to him than she had ever felt, so close in understanding and sympathy. She had seen tears, a man’s tears. Of what tremendous depths of feeling were they not the signal? The sentence, A strong man’s tears, floated up from somewhere and hung about her mind. She pressed him to her in a passion of desire to make him altogether happy, to protect him from feeling too much. She held him like that, her cheek against his arm, rubbing it up and down every now and then to show how well she understood, till they got home. When he lifted her down from the carriage at their door she slipped her hand round the back of his neck and kept it there a moment with the tenderest lingering touch.
“Dear Robert,” she whispered, her lips on his ear while he lifted her down; and implicit in the words was the mother-assurance, the yearning mother-promise, “Oh, little thing, little man thing, I’ll take care of you.”
She hung about the parlour and the passage while he went, as he said, for a moment into his laboratory for a final look round, waiting for him in a strangely warmed exalted state, entirely at one with him, suddenly very intimate, sure that after letting her see things so sacred as tears he would only want to spend the rest of the evening with her, being comforted and reassured, held close to her heart, talking sweetly with her in the quiet dark garden.
But there were six saucerfuls of differently treated last year’s rye ready on the laboratory table for counting and weighing. Herr Dremmel beheld them, and forgot the world. He began to count and weigh. He continued to count and weigh. He ended by counting and weighing them all; and it was dawn before, satisfied and consoled for his lost afternoon, it occurred to him that perhaps it might be bedtime.
CHAPTER XVII
The winter came before Ingeborg, after many false alarms due to her extreme eagerness to give Robert the happiness he wanted, was able to assure him with certainty that he would presently become a father. “And I,” she said, looking at him with a kind of surprised awe now that it had really come upon her, “I suppose I will be a mother.”
Herr Dremmel remarked with dryness that he supposed in that case she would, and refused to become enthusiastic until there was more certainty.
He had been disappointed during the summer so often. Her zeal to meet his wishes made her pounce upon the slightest little feeling of not being well and run triumphantly to his laboratory, daring its locked door, defying its sacredness, to tell him the great news. She would stand there radiantly saying things that sounded like paraphrases of the Scripture, and almost the first German she really learned and used was the German so familiar in every household for being of Good Hope, for being in Blessed Circumstance.
For some time Herr Dremmel greeted these tidings with emotion and excitement; but as the summer went on, he had become so incredulous that she fainted twice in December before he was convinced. Then, indeed, for nearly a whole day his joy was touching. One cannot, however, keep up such joy, and Ingeborg found that things after this brief upheaval of emotion settled back again into how they were before, except that she felt extraordinarily and persistently ill.
Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick. The summer that year in East Prussia had been a long drought, a long bath of sunshine, and Ingeborg lived out in it in an ecstasy of freedom. Her body, light and perfectly balanced, did wonders of exploration in the mighty forests that began at the north of the Kökensee lake and went on without stopping to the sea. She would get Robert’s dinner ready for him early, and then put some bread and butter and a cucumber into a knapsack with her German grammar, and paddle the punt down the lake, tie it up where the trees began, and start. Nothing seemed to tire her. She would walk for miles along the endless forest tracks, just as much suited to her environment, just as harmonious and as much a creature of air and sunshine as the white butterflies that fluttered among the enormous pine trunks. Every now and then, for sheer delight in these things, she would throw herself down on the springy delicious carpet of whortleberries and lie still watching the blue-green tops of the pine-trees delicately swaying backwards and forwards far away over her head against the serene northern sky. They made a gentle sighing noise in the wind. It was the only sound, except the occasional cry of a woodpecker or the cry, immensely distant, of a hawk.
Nobody but herself seemed to use the forests. It was the rarest thing that she met a woodman, or children picking whortleberries. When she did she was much stared at. The forests were quite out of the beat of tourists or foreigners, and the indigenous ladies were too properly occupied by indoor duties to wander, even if they liked forests, away from their home anchorage; and for those whose business sent them into these lonely places to come across somebody belonging to the class that can have dinner every day regularly in a house if it likes and to the sex that ought to be there cooking, it was an amazement.
The young lady, however, seemed so happy that they all smiled at her when she looked at them. They supposed she must be some one grown white in a town, and come to stay the summer weeks with one of the Crown foresters. That would explain her detachment from duty, her knapsack, and the colour of her skin. Anyhow, just her passing made their dull day interesting; and they would watch her glinting in and out of the trees till at last, hardly distinguishable from one of the white butterflies, the distance took her.
When she was quite hot she would sit down in a carefully chosen spot where, if possible, a deciduous tree, a maple or a bird cherry, splashed its vivid green exquisitely against the peculiar misty bloom of pink and grey that hung about the pine trunks, a tree that looked quite little down among these giants, hardly as if it reached to their knees, and yet when she stood under it it was almost as big as the lime-trees in the Kökensee garden. She did not sit in its shade; she went some distance away where she could look at it quivering in the light, and leaning her back against a pine-tree she would eat her bread and cucumber and feel utterly filled with the love and glory of God.
Impossible to reason about this feeling. It was there. It seemed in that summer to go with her where-ever she went and whatever she did. She walked in blessing. It was in the light, she thought, looking round her, the wonderful light, the soft radiance of the forest; it was in the air, warm and fresh, scented and pungent; it was in the feel of the pine needles and the dry crisp last year’s cones she crushed as she went along; it was in the cushions of moss so green and cool that she stopped to pat them, or in the hot lichen that came off in flakes when her feet brushed a root; it was in being young and healthy and having had one’s dinner and sitting quiet and getting rested and knowing the hours ahead were roomy; it was in all these things, everywhere and in everything. She would pick up her German grammar in a quick desire to do something in return, something that gave her real trouble — shall one not say somehow Thank you? — and she engulfed huge tracts of it on these expeditions, learning pages of it by heart and repeating them aloud to the pine-trees and the woodpeckers.
When the sun began to go down she set out for home, sometimes losing her way for quite a long while, and then she would hurry because of Robert’s supper, and then she would get very hot; and the combined heat and hurry and cucumber, to which presently was added fatigue, would
end in one of those triumphal appearances later on in his laboratory to which he was growing so much accustomed.
In January, when she was just a sick thing, she thought of these days as something too beautiful to have really happened.
There was from the first no shyness about her on the subject of babies. She had not considered it during her life at home, for babies were never mentioned at the Palace — of course, she thought, remembering this omission, because there were none, and it would be as meaningless to talk about babies when there were none as it would be in Kökensee to talk about bishops when there were none. She arrived, therefore, at Kökensee with her mind a blank from prejudice, and finding the atmosphere thick with babies immediately with her usual uninquiring pliability adopted the prevailing attitude and was not shy either.
The neighbourhood did not wait till they were born to talk about its own children. It did not think of its children as unmentionable until they had been baptised into decency by birth. They were important things, the most important of all in the life of the women, and it was natural to discuss them thoroughly. The childless woman was a pitied creature. The woman who had most children was proudest. She might be poor and tormented by them, but it was something she possessed more of than her neighbours. Ilse had early inquired which room would be the nursery. That obvious pattern of respectability, Baroness Glambeck, talked of births with a detail and interest only second to that with which she talked of deaths. It seemed to her a most proper topic of conversation with any young married woman; and on her returning the Dremmel call a fortnight after it had been made she was quite taken aback and annoyed to find it had become irrelevant owing to Ingeborg’s being perfectly well.
Indeed, this failure of Ingeborg’s entirely spoilt the visit. The Baroness, who had arrived friendly, withdrew into frost with the manner of one who felt she had been thawed on the last occasion on false pretences. Impossible to meet one’s pastor’s wife — and such an odd-looking and free-mannered one, too — with any familiarity except on the Christian footing of impending birth or death. A pastor’s wife belonged to the class one is only really pleasant with in suffering or guilt. Offended, yet forced to continue the call, the Baroness confined such conversation as she made to questions that had a flavour of hostility: where was it possible to get such shoes, and did the Frau Pastor think toes so narrow good for the circulation and the housework?
Ingeborg could not believe this was the motherly lady who had fussed round her bed that day at Glambeck. She felt set away at a great distance from her, on the other side of a gulf. For the first time it was borne in upon her that her marriage made a difference to her socially, that here in Germany the gulf was a wide one. She was a pastor’s wife; and when asked about her family, which happened early and searchingly in the call, could only give an impression of more pastors.
“Ah, that is the same as what we call superintendent,” said the Baroness, nodding several times slowly on learning that Ingeborg’s father was a bishop; and after a series of questions as to the Frau Pastor’s sister’s marriage nodded her head slowly several times again, and informed Ingeborg that what her sister had married was a schoolmaster. “Like Herr Schultz,” said the Baroness — Herr Schultz being the village schoolmaster.
There was a photograph of Judith on the table that caught and kept the Baroness’s eye and also, in an even greater but more careful degree, the Baron’s. It was Judith dressed in evening beauty, bare-necked, perfect.
Ingeborg took it up with a natural pride in having such a lovely thing for her very own sister and handed it to the Baroness.
“Here she is,” said Ingeborg, full of natural pride.
The Baroness stared in real consternation.
“What?” she said. “This is a schoolmaster’s wife? This is our pastor’s sister-in-law? I had thought—”
She broke off, and with a firm gesture put the photograph on the table again and said she could not stay to supper.
Since then there had been no intercourse with Glambeck, and the Baroness did not know of the satisfactory turn things had taken at the parsonage till on Christmas Eve, from her gallery in church to which she and the Baron had decided to return on the greater festivals as a mark of their awareness that Herr Dremmel desired to make amends, she beheld during the drawn-out verses of the chorale Ingeborg drop sideways on the seat in her pew below and remain motionless and bunched up, her hymn-book pushed crooked on the desk in front of her, and her attitude one of complete indifference to appearances.
The Baroness did not nudge the Baron, because in her position one does not nudge, but her instinct was all for nudging.
Herr Dremmel could not see what had happened, custom concealing him during the singing in a wooden box at the foot of the pulpit where he was busy imagining agricultural experiments. Till he came out the singing went on; and suppose, thought the Baroness, he were to forget to come out? Once he had forgotten, she had heard, and had stayed in his box, having very unfortunately been visited there by a revelation concerning potash that caught him up into oblivion for the best part of an hour, during which the chorale was gone through with an increasing faintness fifteen times. She knew about the hour, but did not know it was potash. Suppose he once again fell into a meditation? There was no verger, beadle, pew-opener, or official person of any sort to take action. The congregation would do nothing that was outside the customary and the prescribed. There was no female relative such as the Frau Pastor would have had staying with her over Christmas if she had been what she ought to have been, and what every other pastor’s wife so felicitously was, a German. And for her herself to descend and help in the eyes of all Kökensee would have been too great a condescension, besides involving her in difficulties with the wife of the forester, and the wife of the Glambeck schoolmaster, who was also the postman, both of whom were of the same social standing as the younger Frau Dremmel and would jealously resent the least mark of what they would interpret as special favour.
Herr Dremmel, however, came out punctually and went up into the pulpit and opened his well-worn manuscript and read out the well-known text, and the congregation sat as nearly thrilled as it could be waiting for the moment when his eye would fall on to his own pew and what was in it. Would he interrupt the service to go down and carry his wife out? Would the congregation have to wait till he came back again, or would it be allowed to disperse to its Christmas trees and rejoicings?
Herr Dremmel read on and on, expounding the innocent Christmas story, describing its white accessories of flocks and angels and virgins and stars with the thunderous vehemence near scolding that had become a habit with him when he preached. His text was Peace on earth, goodwill among men, and from custom he hit his desk with his clenched fist while he read it out and hurled it at his congregation as if it were a threat.
He did not look in his wife’s direction. He was not thinking of her at all. He wondered a little at the stillness and attention of his listeners. Nobody coughed. Nobody shuffled. The school children hung over the edge of the organ loft, motionless and intent. Baron Glambeck remained awake.
At the end of the service Herr Dremmel had to stay according to custom in his wooden box till every one had gone, and it was not till he came out of that to go through the church to its only door that he perceived Ingeborg. For a moment he thought she was waiting for him in an attitude of inappropriately childish laxity, and he was about to rebuke her when it flashed upon him that she had fainted, that it was the second time in ten days, and that he was indeed and without any doubt at last the happiest of men.
In spite of the bitter wind that was raking the churchyard every person who had been inside the church was waiting outside to see the pastor come out. The Glambecks and elders of the church would have waited in any case on Christmas Eve to wish him the compliments of the season and receive his in return, but on this occasion they waited with pleasure as well as patience, and the rest of the congregation waited, too.
They were rewarded by seeing him pr
esently appear in the doorway in his gown and bands carrying the bundle that was the still unconscious Frau Pastor as if she were a baby, his face illuminated with joy and pride. It was as entertaining as a funeral. Double congratulations were poured upon him, double and treble handshakes of the hand he protruded for the purpose from beneath Ingeborg’s relaxed body, and his spectacles as he responded were misty, to the immense gratification of the crowd, with happy tears.
This was the first popular thing Ingeborg had done since her arrival. She could not if she had planned it out with all her care and wits have achieved anything more dramatically ingratiating. The day was the most appropriate day in the whole year. It had been well worth waiting, thought her overjoyed Robert, in order to receive such a Christmas gift. The Baroness, who with the Baron was most cordial, felt flattered, as if — only of course less perfectly, for she herself had produced her children in actual time for the tree — her example had been taken to heart and followed. The village was deeply gratified to see an unconscious Frau Pastor carried through its midst, and her limp body had all the prestige of a corpse. Everybody was moved and pleased; and when Ingeborg, after much persuasion, woke up to the world again on the sofa of the parsonage parlour it was to live through the happiest day she had yet had in her life, the day of Robert’s greatest joy in her and devotion and care and pride and petting.
Once more and for this day she outstripped the fertilizers in interest, and the laboratory was a place forgotten. She was pampered. She lay on the sofa, feeling quite well again, but staying obediently on it because he told her to and she loved him to care, watching him with happy eyes as he tremendously hovered. He finished the arranging of the tree for her and fixed the candles on it, interrupting himself every now and then to come and kiss her hands and pat her. Beams seemed to proceed from him and penetrate into the remotest corners. In a land where all homes were glowing that Christmas night this little home glowed the brightest. The candles of the tree shone down on Ingeborg curled up in the sofa corner, talking and laughing gaily, but with an infinitely proud and solemn gladness in her heart that at last he believed, that at last she was fairly started on the road of the Higher Duty, that at last she was going to be able to do something back, something in return for all this happiness that had come to her through and because of him.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 151
