He had taken up the piece to show her she was mistaken, and had shaken the plate and made all the pieces on it spring about, and she had watched him and then begun over again to behave as if she could not lift one.
Then she dropped her hands down on to the sheet and looked up at him and began to whisper something else. “Heavy,” she whispered, but not, he was glad to say, without at least some sort of a slight smile indicating her awareness that she was conducting herself childishly, and Ilse, coming in, had taken the bread and fed her as if it were she who were the baby and not his son.
Herr Dremmel, therefore, was both puzzled and worried. He was still more puzzled and worried when, on the very day week after the birth, Ilse came to him and said that Frau Pastor was shaking her bed about and that she feared if she did not soon stop the bed, which was enfeebled as Herr Pastor knew by having two mended legs among its four, might break. She had reminded Frau Pastor of this, but she did not seem to care and continued to shake it.
“The good bed,” said Ilse, “the excellent bed. The best we have in the house. Would Herr Pastor step across?”
Herr Pastor stepped across, and found Ingeborg shivering with such astonishing energy that the bed did, as Ilse had described, rattle threateningly.
In reply to his questions Ilse told him, for Ingeborg was too busy shaking to explain, that nothing had happened except that Frau Pastor said she was thirsty and would like a glass of cold water, and she had fetched it fresh from the pump and Frau Pastor had asked to be held up to drink it and had drunk it all at one draught and immediately fallen back and begun this shaking.
“Ingeborg, what is this?” said Herr Dremmel with a show of severity, for he had heard severity acted as a sedative on those who, for instance, shake.
When, however, Ingeborg, instead of replying like a reasonable being, continued to shake and seem unaware of his presence, and when on touching her he found that in spite of the shivering she was extremely hot, he sent Johann for Frau Dosch, who on seeing her could only suggest that Johann should drive on into Meuk and bring out the doctor.
And so it was that Ingeborg, coming suddenly out of a thin, high confusion in which she seemed to have been hurrying since the world began, found it was night, for lamps were alight, and people — many people — were round her bed, and one was a man she did not know with a short black beard. But she did know him. It was the doctor. It flashed across her instantly. Then she had really got to being in extremity. That woman had said so, that big woman who used to come and see her in the garden long ago. And Ilse — that was Ilse at the foot of the bed crying. When one was in extremity Ilse did cry. She found herself stroking the doctor’s beard and begging him not to let go of her. She was reminded that it was unusual to stroke the doctor’s beard by his drawing back, but she thought it silly not to let one’s beard be stroked if somebody wanted to. She heard herself saying, “Don’t let go of me — please — don’t let go of me — please—” but it seemed that he could not hold her, for she was caught away almost immediately again into that thin, hot, hurrying confusion, high up in the treble, high up at the very top, where all the violins were insisting together over and over again on one thin, quivering, anxious note....
“It is impossible,” said the doctor, a Jew from Königsberg, lately married and set up at Menk, looking at Frau Dosch, “that this should have happened.”
And he proceeded to explain to Herr Dremmel that the child in future would have to seek its nourishment in tins.
“What?” exclaimed Herr Dremmel.
“Tins,” said the doctor.
“Tins? For my son? When there are cows in the world? Cows, which at least more closely resemble mothers than tins?”
“Tins,” repeated the doctor firmly. “Herr Pastor, cows have moods just as frequently as women. They are fed unwisely, and behold immediately a mood. Not having the gift of tongues they cannot convey their mood by speech, and baffled at one end they fall back upon the other and express their malignancies in milk.”
Herr Dremmel was silent. The complications and difficulties of family life were being lit up into a picture at which he could only gaze in dismay. On the bed Ingeborg was ceaselessly turning her head from one side to the other and rubbing her hands weakly up and down, up and down over the sheet. While he talked the doctor was watching her. Frau Dosch stood looking on with a locked-up mouth. Ilse wept. The baby whimpered.
The doctor said he would send some tins of patent food out by Johann on his return journey; if there should be much delay and the baby was noisy, said the doctor, a little water —
“Water! My son fed on water?” exclaimed Herr Dremmel. “Heavens above us, what diet is this for a good German? Tins and water in the place of blood and iron?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulder, and gently putting down Ingeborg’s hand which he had been holding for a moment to see if he could quiet it, prepared to go away, saying he would also send out a nurse.
“Ahh,” said Herr Dremmel, greatly relieved, “you know of a thoroughly healthy wet one?”
“Completely dry. For Frau Pastor. Impossible to leave her unnursed. There will be bandages. There must be punctuality and care” — he looked at Frau Dosch— “cleanliness, efficiency” — at each word he looked at Frau Dosch. “I will come out to-morrow. Perfectly normal, perfectly normal,” he said, as he got into the carriage while Herr Dremmel stood ruefully on the doorstep.
The illness went its perfectly normal course. A nurse came out from the principal Königsberg hospital and the disordered house at once became perfectly normal, too. Ilse returned to her kitchen, the baby was appeased by its scientific diet, Ingeborg’s bed grew smooth and spotless, her room was quiet, nobody knocked any more against the foot of the bed in passing or shook the floor and herself by heavy treading; she was no longer tended with the same vigour that made the kitchen floor spotless and the pig happy; bandages, unguents, and disinfectants stood neatly in rows, clean white cloths covered the tables, the windows were wide open day and night, and lamps left off burning exactly where they shone into her eyes. Everything was normal, including the behaviour of the abscess, which went its calm way, unhurried and undisturbed by anything the doctor tried to do to it, ripening, reaching its perfection, declining, in an order and obedience to causation that was beautiful for those capable of appreciating it. Everything was normal except the inside of Ingeborg’s mind.
There, in a black recess, crouched fear. She suspected life. She had lost, on that awful night and day and night again of birth, confidence in it. She knew it now. It was all death. Death and cruelty. Death and nameless horror. Death pretending, death waiting, waiting to be cruel again, to get her again, and get her altogether next time. What was this talk of life? It was only just death. The others didn’t know. She knew. She had seen it and been with it. She had been down into the valley of the shadow of it uncomforted. Her eyes had been wide open while she went. Each step of the way was cut into her memory. They had let her miss nothing. She knew. Out there in the garden the rustling leaves looked gay, and the sun looked cheerful, and the flowers she had so confidently loved looked beautiful and kind. They were death dressed up. Oh, she was not to be taken in any more. She knew the very sound of him. Often, while she was in that fever, she had heard him coming across the yard, up the steps, along the passage, pausing just outside the door, going back each time, but only for a little while. He would come again. The horror of it. The horror of living with that waiting. The horror of knowing that love ended in this, that new life was only more death. Fearfully she lay staring at the realities that she alone in that house could see. And she could hear her heart beating — if only she needn’t have to hear her heart beating — it beat in little irregular beats, little flutters, and then a pause — and then a sudden ping — oh, the weak, weak helplessness — nothing to hold on to anywhere in all the world — even the bed hadn’t an underneath — she was always dropping downwards, downwards, through it, away....
Sometimes the n
urse came and stood beside her, and with a big wholesome hand smoothed back the hair from her absorbed and frowning forehead. “What are you thinking about?” she would ask, bending down and smiling.
But Ingeborg never told.
To Herr Dremmel the nurse counselled patience.
He said he had been having it for ten months.
“You must have some more,” said the nurse, “and it will come right.”
And so it gradually did. Slowly Ingeborg began to creep up the curve of life again. It was a long and hesitating creeping, but there did come a time when there were definite and widening gaps in her vision of the realities. The first day she had meat for dinner she lost sight of them for several hours. The next day she had meat she shut her mouth. The day after, a feeling of shame for her black thoughts crept into her mind and stayed there. The day after that, when she not only had meat but began a new tonic, she asked for Robertlet and put her arms round him all by herself.
Then the nurse slipped out and called Herr Dremmel; and he, hurrying in and finding her propped on pillows, holding his baby and smiling down at him just as he had pictured she would, went down once more on his knees beside the bed and took the whole group, mother, baby, and pillows, into his arms, and quite frankly and openly cried for joy.
“Little sheep ... little sheep,...” he kept on saying. And Ingeborg, having reached that point in convalescence where one never misses a chance of crying, at once cried, too; and Robertlet beginning to cry, the nurse, who laughed, broke up the group.
After that things grew better every day. Ingeborg visibly improved; every hour almost it was possible to see some new step made back to her original self. She clung to the nurse, who stayed on long after the carrying into the next room stage had been passed and who did not leave her till she was walking about quite gaily in the garden and beginning to do the things with Robertlet that she had planned she would. She seemed, after the long months of ugliness, to be prettier than before. She was so glad, so grateful, to be back again, and her gladness lit her up. It was so wonderful to be back in the bright world of free movement, to be presently going to punt, and presently be off for a day in the forests, to be able to arrange, to be in clear possession of her time and her body. The deliciousness of health, the happiness of being just normal made her radiant.
The September that year was one of ripe days and glowing calms. Neither Herr Dremmel nor Ingeborg had ever been quite so happy. He loved her as warmly as before their marriage. He found himself noticing things like the fine texture of her skin, and observing how pretty the back of her neck was and the way her hair behaved just at that point. She was the brightest adornment and finish to a man’s house, he said to himself, independently busy with her baby and her housekeeping, not worrying him, not having to be thought about in his laboratory when he wished to work, absorbed in womanly interests, cheerful, affectionate, careful of her child. It was delightful to have her sit on his knee again, delightful to hear her talk the sweet and sometimes even amusing nonsense with which her head seemed full, delightful to see her sudden solemnity when there was anything to be done for the personal comfort of Robertlet.
“Aren’t we happy,” said Ingeborg one evening when they were strolling after supper along the path through the rye-field, all the old fearlessness and confidence in life surging in her again. “Did you ever know anything like it?”
“It is you, my little sun among sheep,” said Herr Dremmel, standing still to kiss her as energetically as though he had been beneath the pear-tree in the Bishop’s garden, “it is all you.”
“And presently,” she said, “I’m going to do such things — Robert, such things. First, I’m going to be a proper pastor’s wife at last and turn to in the village thoroughly. And besides that I’m going to—”
She stopped and flung out her hands with a familiar gesture.
“Well, little hare?”
“Oh, I don’t know — but it’s fun being alive, isn’t it? I feel as if I’d only got to stretch up my hands to all those stars and catch as many of them as I want to.”
And hardly had the nurse left and the household had returned to its normal arrangements, and the parlour was no longer disfigured by Herr Dremmel’s temporary bed, and life was clear again, and all one had to do was to go ahead praising the dear God who had made it so spacious and so kind, than she began to have her second child.
PART III
CHAPTER XXI
There was a little bay about five minutes’ paddle down the lake round a corner made by the jutting out of reeds. You took your punt round the end of an arm of reeds, and you found a small beach of fine shells, an oak-tree with half-bared roots overhanging one side of it, and a fringe of coarse grass along the top. On this you sat and listened to the faint wash of the water at your feet and watched the sun flashing off the wings of innumerable gulls. You couldn’t see Kökensee and Kökensee couldn’t see you, and you clasped your hands round your knees and thought. Behind you were the rye-fields. Opposite you was the forest. It was a place of gentleness, of fair afternoon light, of bland colours — silvers, and blues, and the pale gold that reeds take on in October.
Ingeborg did not bring Robertlet to this place. She decided, after four months’ close association with him had cleared her mind of misconceptions, that he was too young. She would not admit, with all her dreams about what she was going to do with him still vivid in her memory, that she preferred to be alone. She would not admit that she did anything but love him ardently. He was so good. He never cried. Nor did he ever do what she supposed must be the converse of crying, crow. He neither cried nor crowed. He neither complained nor applauded. He ate with appetite and he slept with punctuality. He grew big and round while you looked at him. Who would not esteem him? She did esteem him — more highly perhaps than she had ever esteemed anybody; but the ardent love she had been told a mother felt for her first-born was a thing about which she had to keep on saying to herself, “Of course.”
He was a grave baby; and she did her best by cheery gesticulations and encouraging, humorous sounds, to accustom him to mirth, but her efforts were fruitless. Then one day as she was bending over him trying to extract a smile by an elaborate tickling of his naked ribs she caught his eye, and instantly she jerked back and stared down at him in dismay, for she had had the sudden horrid conviction that what she was tickling was her mother-in-law.
That was the first time she noticed it, but the resemblance was unmistakable, was, when you had once seen it, overwhelming. There was no trace, now that she tremblingly examined him, of either Robert or herself; and as for her own family, what had become of all that very real beauty, the beauty of the Bishop, the dazzlingness of Judith, and the sweet regularities of her mother?
Robertlet was as much like Frau Dremmel as he might have been if Frau Dremmel had herself produced him in some miraculous manner entirely unassisted. The resemblance was flagrant. It grew with every bottle. He had the same steady eyes. He had the same prolonged silences. His nose was a copy. His head, hairless, was more like Frau Dremmel’s, thought Ingeborg, than Frau Dremmel’s could ever have possibly been, and if ever his hair grew, she said to herself gazing at him wide-eyed, it would undoubtedly do it from the beginning in a knob. Gradually as the days passed and the likeness appeared more and more she came, when she tubbed him and powdered his many creases, to have a sensation of infinite indiscretion; and she announced to Herr Dremmel, who did not understand, that Robertlet’s first word would certainly be Bratkartoffel.
“Why?” asked Herr Dremmel, from the other side of a wall of thinking.
“You’ll see if it isn’t,” nodded Ingeborg, with a perturbed face.
But Robertlet’s first word, and for a long time his only one, was Nein. His next, which did not join it till some months later, was Adieu, which is the German for good-bye and which he said whenever anybody arrived.
“He isn’t very hospitable,” thought Ingeborg; and remembered with a chill that not once since her marria
ge had her mother-in-law invited her to her house in Meuk. But she made excuses for him immediately. “Everybody,” she said to herself, “feels a little stiff at first.”...
To this beautiful corner of the lake, for it was very beautiful those delicate autumn afternoons, she went during Robertlet’s dinner sleep to do what she called think things out; and she sat on the little shells with her hands round her knees, staring across the quiet water at the line of pale reeds along the other shore, doing it. Presently, however, she perceived that her thinking was more a general discomfort of the mind punctuated irregularly by flashes than anything that could honestly be called clear. Things would not be thought out — at least they would not be thought out by her; and she was feeling sick again; and how, she asked herself, can people who are busy being sick be anything but sick? Besides, things wouldn’t bear thinking out. Her eyes grew bright with fear when one of those flashes lit up what was once more ahead of her. It was like a scarlet spear of terror suddenly leaping at her heart....
No, thought Ingeborg, turning quickly away all cold and trembling, better not think; better just sit in the sun and wonder what Robertlet would look like later on if he persisted in being exactly like Frau Dremmel and yet in due season had to go into trousers, and what would happen if the next one were like Frau Dremmel, too, and whether she would presently be teaching a row of little mothers-in-law its infant hymns. The thought of Frau Dremmel become plural, diminished into socks and pinafores, standing neatly at her knee being taught to lisp in numbers, seized her with laughter. She laughed and laughed; and only stopped when she discovered that what she was really doing was crying.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 155
