She pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed her cap thoughtfully. It had been raining all the morning, and now late in the afternoon the garden was a quiet grey place of fallen leaves and gathering dusk and occasional small shakings of wet off the trees when a silent bird perched on the sodden branches. Some drops fell on her bare head while she was drying her cap. She put up her hand mechanically and rubbed them off. She stood wiping her cap long after it was dry, absorbed in thought.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said presently, half aloud, “but I do know what it isn’t.”
She put on her cap again, pulling it over her ears with both hands and much care, and staring while she did it at a slug in the path in front of her.
“And what it isn’t,” she said after another interval, shaking her head and screwing up her face into an expression of profoundest negation, “is love.”
“Well,” she added, deeply astonished.
Then, with a flash of insight, “It’s because he works.”
Then, with a quick desire to cover up the wound to her vanity, “If he didn’t get lost in his work he’d remember he loves me — it’s only that he forgets.”
Then, with a white flare of candour, “He’s a bigger thing than I am.”
Then, with the old eagerness to help, “So it’s my business to see that he can be big in happy peace.”
Then, remembrance smiting her with its flat, cold hand, “But he is happy.”
Then, “So where do I come in?”
Then, with a great, frank acceptance of the truth, “I don’t come in.”
Then, swept by swift, indignant honesty, “Why should I want to come in? What is all this coming in? Oh” — she stamped her foot— “the simple fact, the naked fact when I’ve pulled all the silly clothes off, is that I only want him to be happy if it’s I who make him happy, and I’m nothing but a — I’m just a—” She twisted round on her heels, her arms flung out, in search of the exact raw word— “I’m nothing but just a common tyrant.”
At tea-time her condition can best, though yet imperfectly, be described as chastened.
CHAPTER XXV
Nevertheless, though she tried to face it squarely and help herself by indignation at her own selfish vanity, she felt a great emptiness round her, a great chill.
It was impossible to get used all at once to this new knowledge, so astonishing after seven years of conviction that one was loved, and so astonishing when one remembered that as recently as August — one could positively count the days — just coming home again after an absence had drawn forth from Robert any number of manifestations of it. It had the suddenness and completeness of the switching off of light. A second before, one was illuminated; another second, and one was groping in the dark. For she did grope. She was groping for reasons. It seemed for a long time so incredible that her entire importance and interest as a human being should depend on whether she was or was not what he called a true wife that she preferred to go on groping rather than take hold of this as an explanation.
She had been so sure of Robert. She had been so familiar with him and unafraid. When she thought of her days at home, of her abject fear of her father, of her insignificance, she felt that Robert’s love and admiration had lifted her up from being a creeping thing to being a creature with quite bright brave wings. He had come suddenly into her life and told her she was a süsses Kleines: and behold she became a süsses Kleines. And now he didn’t think her even that any more; he had dropped her again, and she was already falling back into the old state of timidity towards the man in the house.
She turned to the children and the housekeeping and to a search for something she could do in the parish, so that at least while she was making efforts to clear her confusion about Robert she might not be wasting time. If she was no use to him she might be of use to the less independent. She was entirely humble at this moment, and would have thanked a dog if it had been so kind as to allow her to persuade it to wag its tail. It had always been her hope throughout each of her illnesses that presently when that one was over she would get up and begin to do good, and now here she was, finally up, with two children who had not yet had much mother, two servants whose lives might perhaps be made more interesting, a whole field outside her gates for practise in deeds of mercy, and enormous tracts of time on her hands. All she had to do was to begin.
But it was rather like an over-delayed resurrection. Things had filled up. Everybody seemed used to being left alone, and such a thing as district-visiting, so familiar to a person bred in Redchester, was unknown in East Prussia. The wife of a country pastor had as many duties in her own house as one woman could perform in a day, and nobody expected to see her going about into other houses consoling and alleviating. Also, the peasants thought, why should one be consoled and alleviated? The social difference between the peasant and the pastor was so small and rested so often only on education that it would have appeared equally natural, if the thing could from any point of view have been made natural, for the wife of the peasant to go and console and alleviate the parsonage. Who wanted sympathy in Kökensee? Certainly not the men, and the women were too busy with family cares, those many crushing cares that yet kept them interested and alive, to have time for consolations. And those with most cares, most children who died, most internal complaints, most gloom and weariness, achieved just because of these things almost as much distinction and popularity in the village as those with most money. Ingeborg herself was popular so long as her children were drowned out of punts, or died of mumps, or were stillborn; but now that nothing happened to her and she went about, after having had six of them, still straight and slender, Kökensee regarded her coldly and with distrust. Doing nothing for anybody on a sofa in an untidy black tea-gown she had been respected. Trim and anxious to be of use she was disapproved of.
When she went round to try to interest the women in the getting up of little gatherings that were to brighten the parish once a fortnight during the winter months, they shook their heads over their washtubs and told each other after she had gone that it was because she kept two servants. Hausfraus who did not do their own work, they said, shaking their heads with many ja, ja’s, were sure to get into mischief. All they asked of the pastor’s wife was that she should attend to her own business and let them attend to theirs. They did not walk into her living-room; why should she walk into theirs? They did not want to brighten her winter; why should she want to brighten theirs? She should take example from her husband, they said, who never visited anybody. But a Frau who kept two servants and who after six children still wore skirts shorter than a Confirmation candidate’s — ja, ja, das kommt davon.
And things had filled up at home. Rosa and the cook had been used so long to managing alone, and were so completely obsessed by the idea that the Frau Pastor was half dead and that her one real function was to lie down, that they regarded her suddenly frequent appearances in the kitchen with the uneasiness and discomfort with which they would have regarded the appearances of a ghost. No more than if she had been a ghost did they know what to do with her. She did not seem real, separated from her bedroom and her beef-tea. They could not work with her. She would make them jump when, on looking up, they saw her in their midst, having come in unheard with her strange lightness of movement. Their nerves were shaken when they discovered her on her knees in odd corners of the house doing things with dusters. To see her prodding potatoes over the fire, and weighing meat, and approaching onions familiarly made them creep.
It was like some dreadful miracle.
It was like, said Rosa, whispering, being obliged to cook dinners and make beds with the help of — side by side with —
“With what then?” cried the cook, pretending courage but catching fear from Rosa’s face.
“Mit einem Lazarus,” whispered Rosa, behind her hand.
The cook shrieked.
They did not, however, give notice, being good girls and prepared to bear much, till they saw their names in red ink in one o
f the squares ruled on a sheet of paper the Frau Pastor pinned up on the sitting-room wall above her writing-table.
For a day or two they were filled with nameless horror because the ink was red. Then, when they discovered what the numbers against the square, 3 — 4, meant, the horror was swept away in indignation, for it was the hour in the afternoon in which they usually mended or knitted and gossiped together, and it appeared that the Frau Pastor intended to come and sit with them during this hour and read aloud.
“Nice books are so — so nice,” said Ingeborg, explaining her idea. “Don’t you think you’ll like nice books?”
She faltered a little, because of the expression on their faces.
“There is the pig,” said the cook desperately.
“The pig?”
“It has to be fed between three and four.”
“Oh, but we’re not going to mind things like pigs!” said Ingeborg with a slightly laboured brightness.
The next day they gave notice.
But the plan pinned up in the parlour had nothing, except during this one hour, to do with Rosa and the cook; it had been drawn up solely on behalf of Robertlet and Ditti.
Ingeborg had pored over it for days, making careful squares with a ruler and doing all the principal words in red ink, her hair touzled by the stresses of thinking out, and her cheeks flushed. The winter was upon them, and already rain and gales made being out of doors impossible except for one daily courageous trudge after dinner with the children in waterproofs and goloshes, and she thought that with a little arranging she might shorten and brighten the long months to the spring. The children were so passive. They seemed hardly conscious, she thought, of the world round them. Wouldn’t they enjoy themselves more if they could be taught to look at things? Their resemblance to the elder Frau Dremmel was remarkable, it is true, but of course only superficial. Why they were apathetic was because they had had so little mother in their lives. She had only been able to teach them their prayers and their grace, and beyond that had had to leave them to God. Now, however, she could take over her charge again, and teach them things that would make them lissom, quick, interested, and gay.
What would make Robertlet and Ditti lissom, quick, interested, and gay? She pored profoundly over this question, and was steeped in red ink and with the end of her pen bitten off and the floor white with torn-up plans before she had answered it.
At the end of the winter she thought she could not have answered it right. There was something wrong with education. The children had been immensely patient. They had borne immensely with their mother. Yet by the end of a whole winter’s application of the plan they knew only how cats and dogs were spelt, and the sole wonder that they felt after six months’ parental effort to stir them to that important preliminary to knowledge was a dim surprise that such familiar beasts should need spelling.
It was very unfortunate, but they could not be got, for instance, to like the heavenly bodies. Useless for their mother to press them upon their notice on clear evenings when all the sky was a-blink. From first to last they saw nothing in the sunsets that lit the white winter world into a vast cave of colour except a sign that it must be tea-time. Not once could they be induced to shudder at the thought, on great starry nights, of infinite space. They were unmoved by the information that they were being hurled at an incredible speed through it; and they didn’t mind the moon being all those miles away. In the dancing class it was Ingeborg who danced. In the gymnastic class it was she who grew lissom. The English and German Chatting, owing to an absence in Robertlet and Ditti of any of the ingredients of chat, was a monologue; and for the course on Introductions to Insects Collected in the House it was Ingeborg who caught the flies.
They were, however, very good. Nothing to which they were subjected altered that. When their mother in spite of discouragements went on bravely, so did they. When out of doors she snowballed them they stood patiently till she had done. She showed them how to make a snow man, and they did not complain. She gave them little sledges at Christmas, and explained the emotions to be extracted from these objects by sliding on them swiftly down slopes, and they bore her no ill-will when, having slid, they fell off, but quietly preferred the level garden paths and drew each other in turn on one sledge up and down them, while their mother on the other sledge did the sorts of things they had come to expect from mothers, and kept on disappearing over the brink of the slope to the frozen lake head first and face downward.
“It’s very difficult,” thought Ingeborg sometimes, as the winter dragged on.
There she was, heavy with facts about flies and stars and distances extracted in the evenings during her preparation hours from the “Encyclopædia Britannica” which had been procured from London for the purpose — the parsonage groaned beneath it — and longing to unload them, and she was not able to because the two vessels which ought to have received them were fitted so impenetrably with lids.
They seemed to grow, if anything, more lidded. Quieter and quieter. The hour at the end of the day, marked on the plan Lap, an hour she had thought might easily become beautiful, something her children would remember years hence, which was to have been all white intimacy, with kisses and talks about angels and the best and quickest ways of getting to heaven while Robertlet sat in the lap on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Ditti sat in it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (there being scarcity in laps), was from the beginning an hour of semi-somnolence for the children, of staring sleepily into the glow of the stove, resting while they waited for what their mother would do or say next.
Ingeborg was inclined to be disheartened at this hour. It was the last one of the children’s day, and the day had been long. There was the firelight, the mother’s lap and knee, the mother herself ready to kiss and be confided in and more than ready to confide in her turn those discoveries she had made in the regions of science, and nothing happened. Robertlet and Ditti either stared fixedly at the glow from the open stove door or at Ingeborg herself; but whichever they stared at they did it in silence.
“What are you thinking of?” she would ask them sometimes, disturbing their dreamless dream, their happy freedom from thought. And then together they would answer, “Nothing.”
“No, but tell me really — you can’t really think of nothing. It’s impossible. Nothing is” — she floundered— “is always something — .”
But the next time she asked the same question they answered with one voice just as before, “Nothing.”
Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were having too much mother. This also happened in the hour called Lap.
“A mother,” she reflected, both her arms round her children according to plan, “must often be rather a nuisance.”
She looked down with a new sympathy at Ditti’s head reposing, also according to plan, on her shoulder.
“Especially if she’s a devoted mother.”
She laid her cheek on the black smooth hair, parted and pigtailed and as unlike Robert’s fair furry stuff or her own as it was like the elder Frau Dremmel’s.
“A devoted mother,” continued Ingeborg to herself, her eyes on the glowing heart of the stove and her cheek on Ditti’s head, “is one who gives up all her time to trying to make her children different.”
“I’m a devoted mother,” she added, after a pause in which she had faced her conscience.
“How dreadful!” she thought.
She began to kiss Ditti’s head very softly.
“How, too, dreadful to be in the power of somebody different; of somebody quick if you’re not quick, or dull if you’re not dull, and anyhow so old, so very old compared to you, and have to be made like her! How would I like being in my mother-in-law’s power, with years and years for her to work at forcing me to be what she’d think I ought to be? And what she’d think I ought to be would be herself, what she tries to be. Of course. You can’t think outside yourself.”
She drew the children tighter. “You poor little things!” she exclaimed alou
d, suddenly overcome by the vision of what it must be like to have to put up with a person so fundamentally alien through a whole winter; and she kissed them one after the other, holding their faces close to hers with her hands against their cheeks in a passion of apology.
Even to that exclamation, a quite new one in a quite new voice, they said nothing, but waited patiently for what would no doubt happen next.
CHAPTER XXVI
What happened next was that they went to school.
Just as Ingeborg was beginning to ask herself rather shy questions — for she was very full of respects — about the value of education and the claims of free development, the State stepped in and swept Robertlet and Ditti away from her into its competent keeping. In an instant, so it seemed to her afterward when in the empty house she had nothing to do but put away their traces, she was bereft.
“You never told me this is what happens to mothers,” she said to Herr Dremmel the day the brief order from the Chief Inspector of Schools arrived.
Herr Dremmel, who was annoyed that he should have forgotten his parental and civic duties, and still more annoyed, it being April and his fields needing much attention as a new-born infant, or a young woman one wishes, impelled by amorous motives, to marry, that there should be parental and civic duties to forget, was short with her.
“Every German of six has to be educated,” he said.
“But they are being educated,” said Ingeborg, her mind weighted with all she herself had learned.
He waved her aside.
“But, Robert — my children — surely there’s some way of educating them besides sending them away from me?”
He continued to wave her aside.
There was no doubt about it: the children had to go, and they went.
Of the alternatives, their being taught at home by a person with Government certificates, or attending the village school, Herr Dremmel would not hear. He was having differences of a personal nature with the village schoolmaster, who refused with a steadiness that annoyed Herr Dremmel to recognise that he was a Schafskopf, while Herr Dremmel held, and patiently explained, that a person who is born a Schafskopf should be simple and frank about it, and not persist in behaving as if he were not one; and as for a teacher in the house, that was altogether impossible, because there was no room.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 161
