Ilse was called in, and came very rosy and shining from careful washing to be given her presents. There were surprises for Ingeborg — she had to shut her eyes while they were arranged — that touched and astonished her, so totally blind had Robert seemed to be for weeks past to anything outside his work — a pot of hyacinths twisted about with pink crinkly paper and satin bows that he must have got with immense difficulty and elaborate precautions to prevent her seeing it, a volume of Heine’s poetry, a pair of fur gloves, a silver curb bracelet, and a smiling pig of marzipan with a label round its neck, Ich bringe Glück. She, not realising what a German Christmas meant, had only a cigar-case for him; and when, her lap full of his presents and her wrist decorated with the bracelet in which he showed an honest pride, carefully explaining the trick of its fastening and assuring her it was real silver and that little women, he well knew, liked being hung with these barbaric splendours, she put her arm round his neck and apologised for her dreadful ignorance of custom and want of imagination and solitary, unsurprising, miserable cigar-case — when she did this, with her cheek laid on his furry head, he drew her very close to him and blessed her, blessed her his little wife and that greatest of gifts that she was bringing him.
Both of them had wet eyes when this blessing, solemnly administered and received, was over. It was done in the presence of Ilse, who looked on benevolently and at the end came and shook their hands and joined to her thanks for what she had been given her congratulations on the happy event of the coming summer.
“July,” said Ilse, after a moment’s reflection. “We must furnish that room,” she added.
Ingeborg felt as though her very bones were soft with love.
CHAPTER XVIII
But these high moments of swimming in warm emotion do not last, she found; they are not final, they are not, as she had fondly believed, a state of understanding and cloudless love at last attained to and rested in radiantly. She discovered that the littlest thing puts an end to them, just such a little thing as its being bedtime, for instance, is enough, and the mood does not return, and not only does it not return but it seems forgotten.
She became aware of this next morning at breakfast, and it caused at first an immense surprise. She had got the coffee ready with the glow of the evening before still warming her rosily, she was still altogether thinking dear Robert, and wondering, her head on one side as she cut the bread — Ilse was a little cross after the marzipan — and a smile on her lips, at the happiness the world contains; and when he came in she ran to him, shiningly ready to take up the mood at the exact point where bedtime had broken it off the night before.
But Herr Dremmel had travelled a thousand miles in thought since then. He hardly saw her. He kissed her mechanically and sat down to eat. To him she was as everyday and usual again as the bread and coffee of his breakfast. She was his wife who was going presently to be a mother. It was normal, ordinary, and satisfactory; and the matter being settled and the proper first joy and sentiment felt, he could go on with more concentration than ever with his work, for there would not now be the perturbing moments so frequent in the last six months when his wife’s condition, or rather negation of condition, had thrust itself with the annoyance of an irrepressible weed up among his thinking. The matter was settled; and he put it aside as every worker must put the extraneous aside. Just on this morning he was profoundly concerned with the function of potash in the formation of carbohydrates. He had sat up late — long after Ingeborg, feeling as if she were dissolved in stars and happily certain that Robert felt just as liquidly starry, had gone to bed — considering potash. He wanted more starch in his grain, more woody-fibre in his straw. She was not across the passage into their bedroom before his mind had sprung back to potash. More starch in his grain, more woody-fibre in his straw, less fungoid disease on his mangels....
At breakfast his thoughts were so sticky with the glucose and cane sugar of digestible carbohydrates that he could not even get them free for his newspaper, but sat quite silently munching bread and butter, his eyes on his plate.
“Well, Robert?” said Ingeborg, smiling at him round the coffee pot, a smile in which lurked the joyful importance of the evening before.
“Well, Little One?” he said absently, not looking at her.
“Well, Robert?” she said again, challengingly.
“What is it, Little One?” he asked, looking up with the slight irritation of the interrupted.
“What? You’re not pleased any more?” she asked, pretending indignation.
“Pleased about what?”
She stared at him at this without pretending anything.
“About what?” she repeated, her lips dropping apart.
He had forgotten.
She thought this really very extraordinary. She poured herself out a cup of coffee slowly, thinking. He had forgotten. The thing he had said so often that he wanted most was a thing he could forget, once he had the certain promise of it, in a night. The candles on the Christmas tree in the corner were not more burned out and finished than his tender intensity of feeling of the evening before.
Well, that was Robert. That was the way, of course, of clever men. But — the tears? He had felt enough for tears. It was without a doubt that he had felt tremendously. How wonderful then, she thought, slowly dropping sugar into her cup, for even the memory of it to be wiped out!
Well, that, too, was Robert. He did not cling as she did to moments, but passed on intelligently; and she was merely stupid to suppose any one with his brains would linger, would loiter about with her indefinitely, gloating over their happiness.
She left her coffee and got up and went over to him and kissed him. “Dear Robert,” she murmured, accommodating herself to him, proud even, now, that he could be so deeply preoccupied with profound thoughts as to forget an event so really great: for after all, a child to be born, a new life to be launched, was not that something really great? Yet his thoughts, her husband’s thoughts, were greater.
“Dear Robert,” she murmured; and kissed him proudly.
But the winter, in spite of these convictions of happiness and of having every reason for pride, was a time that she dragged through with difficulty. She who had never thought of her body, who had found in it the perfect instrument for carrying out her will, was forced to think of it almost continuously. It mastered her. She had endlessly to humour it before she could use it even a little. She seemed for ever to be having to take it to a sofa and lay it down flat and not make it do anything. She seemed for ever to be trying to persuade it that it did not mind the smell of the pig, or the smell that came across from Glambeck when the wind was that way of potato spirits being made in the distillery there. When these smells got through the window chinks she would shut her eyes and think hard of the scent of roses and pinks, and of that lovely orange scent of the orange-coloured lupin she had seen grown everywhere in the summer; but sooner or later her efforts, however valiant, ended in the creeping coldness, the icy perspiration, of sick faintness.
As the months went on her body became fastidious even about daily inevitable smells such as the roasting of coffee and the frying of potatoes, which was extremely awkward when one had to see to these things oneself; and it often happened that Ilse, coming out of the scullery or in from the yard fresh and energetic with health, would find her mistress dropped on a chair with her head on the kitchen table in quite an absurd condition considering that everybody assured her it was not an illness at all of feeling as though it were one.
Ilse would look at her with a kind of amused sympathy. “The Frau Pastor will be worse before she is better,” she would say cheerfully; and if things were very bad and Ingeborg, white and damp, clung to her in a silent struggle to feel not white and damp, she used the formula first heard on the lips of Baroness Glambeck and nodded encouragingly, though not without a certain air of something that was a little like pleasure, and said, “Ja, ja, those who have said A must also say B.”
When Ingeborg’s spirit
was at its lowest in these unequal combats she would droop her head and shut her eyes and feel she hated — oh, she faintly, coldly, sicklily hated — B.
The fun of housekeeping, of doing everything yourself, wore extremely thin during the next few months. She no longer jumped out of bed eager to get to her duties again and bless the beginning of each new day by a charming and cheerful breakfast table for her man. She felt heavy; reluctant to face the business of dressing; sure that no sooner would she be on her feet than she would feel ill again. She talked of getting another servant, a cook; and Herr Dremmel, who left these arrangements entirely to her, agreed at once. But when it came to taking the necessary steps, to advertising or journeying in to Königsberg to an agency, she flagged and did nothing. It was all so difficult. She might faint on the way. She might be sick. And she could not ask Robert to help her because she did not know what problem nearing a triumphant solution she might not disastrously interrupt.
It seemed to her monstrous to take a man off his thinking, to tear its threads, perhaps to spoil for good that particular line of thought, with demands that he should write advertisements for a cook or go with her in search of one. And as no cook was to be found locally, every wife and mother except ladies like Baroness Glambeck carrying out these higher domestic rites herself, she did nothing. She resigned herself to a fate that was, after all, everybody else’s in Kökensee. It was easier to be resigned than to be energetic. Her will grew very flabby. Once she said prayers about cooking, and asked that she might never see or smell it again; but she broke off on realising suddenly and chillily that only death could get her out of the kitchen.
Herr Dremmel was, as he had always been, good and kind to her. He saw nothing, as indeed there was nothing, but the normal and the satisfactory in anything she felt, yet he did what he could, whenever he remembered to, to cheer and encourage. When, coming out of his laboratory to meals, he found her not at the table but on the sofa, her face turned to the wall and buried in an orange so that the dinner smell might be in some small measure dissembled and cloaked, he often patted her before beginning to eat and said, “Poor little woman.” One cannot, however, go on saying poor little woman continuously, and of necessity there were gaps in these sympathies; but at least twice he put off his return to work for a few minutes in order to hearten her by painting the great happiness that was in store for her at the end of these tiresome months, the marvellous moment not equalled, he was informed, by any other moment in a human being’s life, when the young mother first beheld her offspring.
“I see my little wife so proud, so happy,” he would say; and each time the picture dimmed his eyes and brought him over to her to stroke her hair.
Then she would forget how sick she felt, and smile and be ashamed that she had minded anything. The highest good — what would not one practise in the way of being sick to attain the highest good?
“And he’ll be full of brains like yours,” she would say, pulling down his hand from her hair and kissing it and looking up at him smiling.
“And I shall have to double the size of my heart,” Herr Dremmel would say, “to take in two loves.”
Then Ingeborg would laugh for joy, and for quite a long while manage very nearly to glory in feeling sick.
About March, when the snow that had been heaped on either side of the path to the gate all the winter began to dwindle dirtily, and at midday the eaves dripped melting icicles, and the sun had warmth in it, and great winds set the world creaking, things got better. She no longer felt the grip of faintness on her heart. She left off looking quite so plain and sharp-nosed. An increasing dignity attended her steps, which every week were slower and heavier. After months of not being able to look at food she grew surprisingly hungry, she became suddenly voracious, and ate and ate.
Ilse’s amused interest continued. Her mother had had fourteen children and was still regularly having more, and Ilse was well acquainted with the stages. The Frau Pastor, it is true, took the stages more seriously, with more difficulty, with a greater stress on them than Ilse’s mother or other Kökensee women, but roughly it was always the same story. “It will be easier next time,” prophesied Ilse inspiritingly; though the thought of a next time before she had finished this one depressed rather than inspirited Ingeborg.
She had written home to Redchester to tell her great news, and received a letter from Mrs. Bullivant in return in which there was an extremity of absence of enthusiasm. Indeed, the coming baby was only alluded to sideways as it were, indirectly, and if written words could whisper, in a whisper. “Your father is overworked,” the letter went on, getting away as quickly as possible from matters of such doubtful decency as an unborn German, “he has too much to do. Delicate as I am, I would gladly help him with his correspondence if I could, but I fear the strain would be too much. He sadly needs a complete rest and change. Alas, shorthanded as he is and obliged now as we are to retrench, there is no prospect of one.”
Whereupon Ingeborg impulsively wrote suggesting in loving and enthusiastic terms a visit to Kökensee as the most complete change she could think of, and also as the most economical.
The answer to this when it did come was an extraordinarily dignified No.
In April Baroness Glambeck drove over one fine afternoon and questioned her as to her preparations, and was astonished to find there were none.
“But, my dear Frau Pastor!” she cried, holding up both her yellow kid hands.
“What ought there to be?” asked Ingeborg, who had been too busy wrestling with her daily tasks in her heavily handicapped state to think of further labours.
“Many things — necessary, indispensable things.”
“What things?” asked Ingeborg faintly.
She had little spirit. She was more tired every day. Just the difficulty of keeping even with her housekeeping, of keeping herself tidy in dresses that seemed to shrink smaller each time she put them on, took up what strength she had. There was none left over. “What things?” she asked; and her hands, lying listlessly on her lap, were flaccid and damp.
Then the Baroness poured forth an endless and bewildering list with all the gusto and interest of health and leisure. When her English gave out she went on in German. Her list ended with a midwife.
“Have you spoken with her?” she asked.
“No,” said Ingeborg. “I didn’t know — where is she?”
“In our village. Frau Dosch. It is lucky for you she is not further away. Sometimes there is none for miles. She is a very good sort of person. A little old now, but at least she has been very good. You ought to see her at once and arrange.”
“Oh!” said Ingeborg, who felt as if the one blessedness in life would be to creep away somewhere and never arrange anything about anything for ever.
But it did after this become clear to her that certain preparations would undoubtedly have to be made, and she braced herself to driving into Meuk with Ilse and going by train to Königsberg for a day’s shopping.
With sandwiches in her pocket and doubt in her heart she went off to shop for the first time in German. Ilse, full of importance, and dressed astonishingly in stockings and new spring garments, sat by her side with an eye to right and left in search of some one to witness her splendour. Herr Dremmel had laid many and strict injunctions on her to take care of her mistress, and in between these wandering glances she did her best by loud inquiries as to Frau Pastor’s sensations. Frau Pastor’s sensations were those of a perilously jolted woman. She held tight to the hand rail on one side while the Meuk cobbles lasted and to Ilse’s arm on the other, and was thankful when the station was reached and she somehow, with a shameful clumsiness, got down out of the high carriage. Incredible to remember that last time she had been at that station she had jumped up into the same carriage as lightly as a bird. She felt humiliated, ashamed of her awkward distorted body. She drew the foolish little cloak and scarf she had put on anxiously about her. People stared. She seemed to be the only woman going to have a child; all the othe
rs were free, unhampered, vigorous persons like Ilse. It was as though she had suddenly grown old, this slowness, this fear of not being able to get out of the way of trucks and porters in time.
In Königsberg the noise in the streets where the shops were was deafening. All the drays of all the world seemed to be spending that day driving furiously over the stones and tram-lines filled with cases of empty beer bottles or empty milk cans or long, shivering, screaming iron laths, while endless processions of electric-trams rang their bells at them.
Ingeborg clung to Ilse’s arm bewildered. After Kökensee alone in its fields, after the dignified tranquillities of Redchester, the noise hammered on her head like showers of blows. There were not many people about, but those there were stared to the extent of stopping dead in front of the two women in order not to miss anything. It was at Ingeborg they stared. Ilse was a familiar figure, just a sunburnt country girl with oiled hair, in her Sunday clothes; but Ingeborg was a foreigner, an astonishment. Men and women stopped, children loitered, half-grown youths whistled and called out comments that her slow German could not follow. She flushed and turned pale, and held on tighter to Ilse. She supposed she must be looking more grotesque even than she had feared. She put it all down to her condition, not knowing on this her first walk in a German provincial town that it was her being a stranger, dressed a little differently, doing her hair a little differently, that caused the interest. She walked as quickly as she could to get away from these people into a shop, little beads of effort round her mouth, looking straight before her, fighting down a dreadful desire to cry; and it was with thankfulness that she sank on to a chair in the quiet midday emptiness of Berding and Kühn’s drapery and linen establishment.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 152
