“There’s the laboratory,” said Ingeborg recklessly, to whom anything seemed better than letting her children go.
“The lab — ?”
“Only to sleep in,” she eagerly explained, “just sleep in, you know. The teacher needn’t be there at all in the daytime, for instance.”
“Ingeborg—” began Herr Dremmel; then he thought better of it, and merely held out his cup for more tea. Women were really much to be pitied. Their entire inability to reach even an elementary conception of values...
The children went to school in Meuk. They lodged with their grandmother, and were to come home on those vague Sundays when the weather was good and Herr Dremmel did not require the horses. Ingeborg could not believe in such a complete sweep out of her life. She loved Robertlet and Ditti with an extreme and odd tenderness. There was self-reproach in it, a passionate desire to protect. It was the love sometimes found in those who have to do all the loving by themselves. It was an acute and quivering thing. After her experiences in the winter she had doubts whether education at present was what they wanted. It was not school they wanted, she thought, but to run wild. She knew it would have been perhaps difficult to get them to run in this manner, but thought if she had had them a little longer and had thoroughly revised her plan, purging it of science and filling them up instead with different forms of wildness, she might eventually have induced them to. There could have been a carefully graduated course in wildness, she thought, beginning quietly with weeding paths, and going on by steps of ever-increasing abandonment to tree-climbing, bird-nesting, and midnight raids on apples.
And while she wandered about the deserted garden and was desolate, Robertlet and Ditti, safe in their grandmother’s house, were having the most beautiful dumplings every day for dinner that seemed to fit into each part of them as warmly and neatly as though they were bits of their own bodies come back, after having been artificially separated, to fill them with a delicious hot contentment, and their grandmother was saying to them at regular intervals with a raised forefinger: “My children, never forget that you are Germans.”
There was now nothing left for Ingeborg but, as she told Herr Dremmel the first Sunday Robertlet and Ditti had been coming home and then for some obscure reason did not come, thrusting the information tactlessly at tea-time between his attention and his book, her own inside.
“After all,” she said, as usual quite suddenly, breaking a valuable silence, “there’s still me.”
Herr Dremmel said nothing, for it was one of those statements of fact that luckily do not require an answer.
“Nobody,” said Ingeborg, throwing her head back a little, “can take that away.”
Herr Dremmel said nothing to that either, chiefly because he did not want to. He had no time nor desire to guess at meanings which were, no doubt, after all not there.
“Whatever happens,” she said, “I’ve still got my own inside.”
“Ingeborg,” said Herr Dremmel, “I will not ask you what you mean in case you should tell me.”
There was a drought going on, and Herr Dremmel, who justly prided himself on his sweetness of temper, was not as patient as usual; so Ingeborg, silenced, went into the garden where the drought was making the world glow and shimmer, and reflected that on the object she called her inside alone now depended her happiness.
It was useless to depend on others; it was useless to depend, as she had done in her ridiculous vanity, on others depending on her. After all, each year had a May in it and the birds sang. She would send away the extra servant and do the work herself, as she used to at first. She would begin again to develop her intelligence, and write that evening to London for the Spectator. Something, she remembered, had warmed and quickened her all those years ago after her meeting with Ingram — was it the Spectator? She would make plans. She would draw up plans in red ink. There were a thousand things she might study. There were languages.
She walked up and down the garden. If she let herself be beaten back this time into neglect of herself and indifference she would be done for. There was no one to save her. She would lapse and lapse; and not into fatnesses and peace like other women in Germany lopped of their children, and of a class above the class that stood at that instrument of salvation, its own washtub, not into afternoon slumbers and benevolences of a woolly nature that kept one’s hand knitting while one’s brains went to sleep till presently one was dead, but into something fretful and nipped, with a little shrivelled, skinny, steadily dwindling mind.
Her eyes grew very wide at this dreadful picture. Now was the moment, she thought, turning away from it quickly, now that there had come this pause in her life, to go over to England for a visit and see her relations and talk and come back refreshed to a new chapter of existence in Kökensee. She had not been out of Kökensee, except to Zoppot, since her marriage, and her throat tightened at the thought of England. But the Bishop had never forgiven her marriage; and her having had six children had also, it seemed from her mother’s letters when there used to be letters, made an unfavourable impression on him. It had, in fact, upset him. He had considered such conduct too distinctively German to be passed over; and when she added to the error in taste of having had them the further error or rather negligence — it must have been criminal, thought the Bishop — of not being able to keep them alive, the Palace, after having four times with an increasing severity condoled, withdrew into a disapproval so profound that it could only express itself adequately by silence.
And a stay with Judith was out of the question. One had for a stay with Judith to have clothes, and she had no clothes; at least, none newer than eight years old — her immense unworn trousseau dogged her through the years — for Judith gave many parties at the Master’s Lodge, brilliant gatherings, her mother called them in her rare letters, where London, come down on purpose and expressed in Prime and other ministers as well as in the fine flower of the aristocracy and a few selected fragrances from the world of literature and art — once her mother wrote that Ingram, the great painter, had been at the last party, and was so much enslaved by Judith’s loveliness that he had asked as a favour to be allowed to paint her — sat at Judith’s feet.
No; England was not for her. Her place was in Kökensee, and her business now was to do what her governesses used to call improve her mind. Perhaps if she improved it enough Robert would talk to her again sometimes, and this time not on the Little Treasure basis but on the solid one of intellectual companionship. Might she not end by being a real helpmeet to him? Somebody who would gradually learn to be quiet and analytical and artful with grains?
She went indoors and wrote then and there to London, renewing the long-ended subscriptions to the Times, Spectator, Clarion, Hibbert’s Journal, and the rest. She asked for a catalogue of the newest publications that were not novels — her determination was too serious just then for novels — ordered Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” for she felt she would like to have some principles, especially first ones, and said she would be glad of any little hint the news-agent could give her as to what he thought a married lady ought to know; and she spent the rest of the evening and the two following days laying the foundations of intellectual companionship by looking up the article Manure in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” and paraphrasing it into conversational observations that sounded to her so clever when she tried them on Herr Dremmel three days later at tea-time that she was astonished herself.
She was still more astonished when Herr Dremmel, having listened, remarked that her facts were wrong.
“But they can’t possibly—” she began; then broke off, feeling the awkwardness of a position in which one was unable to argue without at once revealing the “Encyclopædia.”
CHAPTER XXVII
This was in May. By the end of the following May Ingeborg had read so much that she felt quite uncomfortable.
It had been a fine confused reading, in which Ruskin jostled Mr. Roger Fry and Shelley lingered, as it were, in the lap of Mr. Masefie
ld. The news-agent, who must have lived chiefly a great many years before, steadily sent her mid, early, and pre-Victorian literature; and she, ordering on her own account books advertised in the weekly papers, found herself as a result one day in the placid arms of the Lake Poets, and the next being disciplined by Mr. Marinetti, one day ambling unconcernedly with Lamb, and the next caught in the exquisite intricacies of Mr. Henry James. She read books of travel, she learned poetry by heart, she grew skilful at combining her studies with her cooking; and propping up Keats on the dresser could run to him for a fresh line in the very middle of the pudding almost without the pudding minding. And since she loved to hear the beautiful words she learned aloud, and the kitchen was full of a pleasant buzzing, a murmurous sound of sonnets as well as flies, to which the servant got used in time.
But though she set about this new life with solemnity — for was she not a lopped and lonely woman whose husband had left off loving her and whose children had been taken away? — cheerfulness kept on creeping in. The chief obstacle to any sort of continued gloom was that there was a morning to every day. Also she had enthusiasms, those most uplifting and outlifting from oneself of spiritual attitudes, and developed a pretty talent for tingling. She would tingle on the least provocation, with joy over a poem, with admiration over the description of a picture, and thrilled and quivered with response to tales of Beauty — of the beauty of the cathedrals in France, miracles of coloured glass held together delicately by stone, blown together, she could only think from the descriptions, in their exquisite fragility by the breath of God rather than built up slowly by men’s hands; of the beauty of places, the lagoons round Venice at sunrise, the desert toward evening; of the beauty of love, faithful, splendid, equal love; of all the beauty men made with their hands, little spuddy things running over dead stuff, blocks of stone, bits of glass and canvas, fashioning and fashioning till at last there was the vision, pulled out of a brain and caught forever into the glory of line and colour. She longed to talk about the wonderful and stirring and vivid things life outside Kökensee seemed to flash with. What must it be like to talk to people who knew and had seen? What could it be like to see for oneself, to travel, to go to France and its cathedrals, to go to Italy in the spring-time when the jewels of the world could be looked at in a setting of clear skies and generous flowers? Or in autumn, when Kökensee was grey and tortured with rainstorms, to go away there into serenity, to where the sun burned the chestnuts golden all day long and the air smelt of ripened grapes?
And she had only seen the Rigi.
Well, that was something; and it seemed somehow appropriate for a pastor’s wife. She turned again to her books. What she had was very good; and she had found an old woman in the village who did not mind being comforted, so that added to everything else was now the joy of gratitude.
It seemed, indeed, that she was to have a run of joys that spring, for besides these came suddenly yet another, the joy so long dreamed of of having some one to talk to. And such a some one, thought Ingeborg, entirely dazzled by her good fortune — for it was Ingram.
She was paddling the punt as usual down the lake one afternoon, a pile of books at her feet, when, passing the end of the arm of reeds that stretched out round her hidden bay, she perceived that her little beach was not empty; and pausing astonished with her paddle arrested in the air to look, she recognized in the middle of a confusion of objects strewn round him that no doubt had to do with painting, sitting with his elbows on his drawn-up knees and his chin in his hand, Ingram.
He was doing nothing: just staring. She came from behind the arm of reeds, half drifting along noiselessly out towards the middle of the lake, straight across his line of sight.
For an instant he stared motionless, while she, holding her paddle out of the water, stared equally motionless at him. Then he seized his sketching book and began furiously to draw. She was out in the sun and had no hat on. Her hair was the strangest colour against the background of water and sky, more like a larch in autumn than anything he could think of. She seemed the vividest thing, suddenly cleaving the pallors and uncertainties of reeds and water and flecked northern sky.
“Don’t move,” he shouted in what he supposed was German, sketching violently.
“So it’s you?” she called back in English, and her voice sang.
“Yes, it’s me all right,” he said, his pencil flying.
He did not recognise her. He had seen too many people in seven years to keep the foggy figure of that distant November evening in his mind.
“I’m coming in,” she called, digging her paddle into the water.
“Sit still!” he shouted.
“But I want to talk.”
“Sit still!”
She sat still, watching him, unable to believe her good fortune. If he were only here again for a single day and she could only talk to him for a single hour, what a refreshment, what a delight: to talk in English; to talk to some one who had painted Judith; to talk to some one so wonderful; to talk at all! She was as little shy as a person stranded on a desert island would be of anybody, kings included, who should appear after years on the solitary beach.
“Well?” she called, after sitting patiently for what she felt must be half an hour but which was five minutes.
He did not answer, absorbed in what he was doing.
She waited for what seemed another half-hour, and then turned the punt in the direction of the shore.
“I’m coming in,” she called; and as he did not answer she paddled towards the bay.
He stared at her, his head a little on one side, as she came close. “What are you going to do?” he asked, seeing she was manoeuvring the punt into the corner under the oak-tree.
“Land,” said Ingeborg.
He got up and caught hold of the chain fastened to the punt’s nose and dragged it up the beach.
“How do you do?” she said, jumping out and holding out her hand. “Mr. Ingram,” she added, looking up at him, her face quite solemn with pleasure.
“Well, now, but who on earth are you?” he asked, shaking her hand and staring. Her clothes, now that she was standing up, were the oddest things, recalling back numbers of Punch. “You’re not staying at the Glambecks’, and except for the Glambecks there isn’t anywhere to stay.”
“But I told you I was the pastor’s wife.”
“You did?”
“Last time. Well, and I still am.”
“But when was last time?”
“Don’t you remember? You were staying with the Glambecks then, too.”
“But I haven’t stayed with the Glambecks for an eternity. At least ten years.”
“Seven,” said Ingeborg. “Seven and a half. It was in November.”
“But you must have been in pinafores.”
“And you walked down the avenue with me. Don’t you remember?”
“No,” said Ingram, staring at her.
“And you scolded me because I couldn’t walk as fast as you did. Don’t you remember?”
“No,” said Ingram.
“And you said I’d run to seed if I wasn’t careful. Don’t you remember?”
“No,” said Ingram.
“And I had on my grey coat and skirt. Don’t you remember?”
“No, no, no,” said Ingram, smiting his forehead, “and I don’t believe a word of it. You’re just making it up. Look here,” he said, clearing away his things to make room for her, “sit down and let us talk. Are you real?”
“Yes, and I live at Kökensee, just round the corner behind the reeds. But I told you that before,” said Ingeborg.
“You do live?” he said, pushing his things aside. “You’re not just a flame-headed little dream that will presently disappear again?”
“My name’s Dremmel. Frau Dremmel. But I told you that before, too.”
“The things a man forgets!” he exclaimed, spreading a silk handkerchief over the coarse grass. “There! Sit on that.”
“You’re laughing at me,” s
he said, sitting down, “and I don’t mind a bit. I’m much too glad to see you.”
“If I laugh it’s with pleasure,” he said, staring at the effect of her against the pale green of the reeds — where had he seen just that before, that Scandinavian colouring, that burning sort of brightness in the hair? “It’s so amusing of you to be Frau anything.”
She smiled at him with the frankness of a pleased boy.
“You’re very nice, you know,” he said, smiling back.
“You didn’t think so last time. You called me your dear lady, and asked me if I never read.”
“Well, and didn’t you?” he said, sitting down, too, but a little way off so that he could get her effect better.
“Yes, do sit down. Then I shan’t be so dreadfully afraid you’re going.”
“Why, but I’ve only just found you.”
“But last time you disappeared almost at once into the fog, and you’d only just found me then,” she said, her hands clasped round her knees, her face the face of the entirely happy.
“After all I seem to have made some progress in seven years,” he said. “I apparently couldn’t see then.”
“No, it was me. I was very invisible—”
“Invisible?”
“Oh, moth-eaten, dilapidated, dun-coloured. And I’d been crying.”
“You? Look here, nobody with your kind of colouring should ever cry. It’s a sin. It would be most distressing, seriously, if you were ever less white than you are at this moment.”
“See how nice it is not to be a painter,” said Ingeborg. “I don’t mind a bit if you’re white or not so long as it’s you.”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 162
