In Bavaria

by Katherine Mansfield

  Herr Brechenmacher’s colleagues greeted him with acclamation as he entered the door of the Festsaal, and the Frau straightened her brooch and folded her hands, assuming the air of dignity becoming to the wife of a postman and the mother of five children. Beautiful indeed was the Festsaal. Three long tables were grouped at one end, the remainder of the floor space cleared for dancing. Oil lamps, hanging from the ceiling, shed a warm, bright light on the walls decorated with paper flowers and garlands; shed a warmer, brighter light on the red faces of the guests in their best clothes.

  At the head of the centre table sat the bride and bridegroom, she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her, who wore a suit of white clothes much too large for him and a white silk tie that rose half-way up his collar. Grouped about them, with a fine regard for dignity and precedence, sat their parents and relations; and perched on a stool at the bride’s right hand a little girl in a crumpled muslin dress with a wreath of forget-me-nots hanging over one ear. Everybody was laughing and talking, sharing hands, clinking glasses, stamping on the floor — a stench of beer and perspiration filled the air.

  Frau Brechenmacher, following her man down the room after greeting the bridal party, knew that she was going to enjoy herself. She seemed to fill out and become rosy and warm as she sniffed that familiar festive smell. Somebody pulled at her skirt, and, looking down, she saw Frau Rupp, the butcher’s wife, who pulled out an empty chair and begged her to sit beside her.

  “Fritz will get you some beer,” she said. “My dear, your skirt is open at the back. We could not help laughing as you walked up the room with the white tape of your petticoat showing!”

  “But how frightful!” said Frau Brechenmacher, collapsing into her chair and biting her lip.

  “Na, it’s over now,” said Frau Rupp, stretching her fat hands over the table and regarding her three mourning rings with intense enjoyment; “but one must be careful, especially at a wedding.”

  “And such a wedding as this,” cried Frau Ledermann, who sat on the other side of Frau Brechenmacher. “Fancy Theresa bringing that child with her. It’s her own child, you know, my dear, and it’s going to live with them. That’s what I call a sin against the Church for a free-born child to attend its own mother’s wedding.”

  The three women sat and stared at the bride, who remained very still, with a little vacant smile on her lips, only her eyes shifting uneasily from side to side.

  “Beer they’ve given it, too,” whispered Frau Rupp, “and white wine and an ice. It never did have a stomach; she ought to have left it at home.”

  Frau Brechenmacher turned round and looked towards the bride’s mother. She never took her eyes off her daughter, but wrinkled her brown forehead like an old monkey, and nodded now and again very solemnly. Her hands shook as she raised her beer mug, and when she had drunk she spat on the floor and savagely wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Then the music started and she followed Theresa with her eyes, looking suspiciously at each man who danced with her.

  “Cheer up, old woman,” shouted her husband, digging her in the ribs; “this isn’t Theresa’s funeral.” He winked at the guests, who broke into loud laughter.

  “I am cheerful,” mumbled the old woman, and beat upon the table with her fist, keeping time to the music, proving she was not out of the festivities.

  “She can’t forget how wild Theresa has been,” said Frau Ledermann. “Who could — with the child there? I heard that last Sunday evening Theresa had hysterics and said that she would not marry this man. They had to get the priest to her.”

  “Where is the other one?” asked Frau Brechenmacher. “Why didn’t he marry her?”

  The woman shrugged her shoulders.

  “Gone — disappeared. He was a traveller, and only stayed at their house two nights. He was selling shirt buttons — I bought some myself, and they were beautiful shirt buttons — but what a pig of a fellow! I can’t think what he saw in such a plain girl — but you never know. Her mother says she’s been like fire ever since she was sixteen!”

  Frau Brechenmacher looked down at her beer and blew a little hole in the froth.

  “That’s not how a wedding should be,” she said; “it’s not religion to love two men.”

  “Nice time she’ll have with this one,” Frau Rupp exclaimed. “He was lodging with me last summer and I had to get rid of him. He never changed his clothes once in two months, and when I spoke to him of the smell in his room he told me he was sure it floated up from the shop. Ah, every wife has her cross. Isn’t that true, my dear?”

  Frau Brechenmacher saw her husband among his colleagues at the next table. He was drinking far too much, she knew — gesticulating wildly, the saliva spluttering out of his mouth as he talked.

  “Yes,” she assented, “that’s true. Girls have a lot to learn.”

  Wedged in between these two fat old women, the Frau had no hope of being asked to dance. She watched the couples going round and round; she forgot her five babies and her man and felt almost like a girl again. The music sounded sad and sweet. Her roughened hands clasped and unclasped themselves in the folds of her skirt. While the music went on she was afraid to look anybody in the face, and she smiled with a little nervous tremor round the mouth.

  “But, my God,” Frau Rupp cried, “they’ve given that child of Theresa’s a piece of sausage. It’s to keep her quiet. There’s going to be a presentation now — your man has to speak.”

  Frau Brechenmacher sat up stiffly. The music ceased, and the dancers took their places again at the tables.

  Herr Brechenmacher alone remained standing — he held in his hands a big silver coffee-pot. Everybody laughed at his speech, except the Frau; everybody roared at his grimaces, and at the way he carried the coffee-pot to the bridal pair, as if it were a baby he was holding.

  She lifted the lid, peeped in, then shut it down with a little scream and sat biting her lips. The bridegroom wrenched the pot away from her and drew forth a baby’s bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls. As he dandled these treasures before Theresa the whole room seemed to heave and sway with laughter.

  Frau Brechenmacher did not think it funny. She stared round at the laughing faces, and suddenly they all seemed strange to her. She wanted to go home and never come out again. She imagined that all these people were laughing at her, more people than there were in the room even — all laughing at her because they were so much stronger than she was.

  —

  They walked home in silence. Herr Brechenmacher strode ahead, she stumbled after him. White and forsaken lay the road from the railway station to their house — a cold rush of wind blew her hood from her face, and suddenly she remembered how they had come home together the first night. Now they had five babies and twice as much money; but—

  “Na, what is it all for?” she muttered, and not until she had reached home, and prepared a little supper of meat and bread for her man did she stop asking herself that silly question.

  Herr Brechenmacher broke the bread into his plate, smeared it round with his fork and chewed greedily.

  “Good?” she asked, leaning her arms on the table and pillowing her breast against them.

  “But fine!”

  He took a piece of the crumb, wiped it round his plate edge, and held it up to her mouth. She shook her head.

  “Not hungry,” she said.

  “But it is one of the best pieces, and full of the fat.”

  He cleared the plate; then pulled off his boots and flung them into a corner.

  “Not much of a wedding,” he said, stretching out his feet and wriggling his toes in the worsted socks.

  “N— no,” she replied, taking up the discarded boots and placing them on the oven to dry.

  Herr Brechenmacher yawned and stretched himself, and then looked up at her, grinning.

  “Remember the night that we came home
? You were an innocent one, you were.”

  “Get along! Such a time ago I forget.” Well she remembered.

  “Such a clout on the ear as you gave me.… But I soon taught you.”

  “Oh, don’t start talking. You’ve too much beer. Come to bed.”

  He tilted back in his chair, chuckling with laughter.

  “That’s not what you said to me that night. God, the trouble you gave me!”

  But the little Frau seized the candle and went into the next room. The children were all soundly sleeping. She stripped the mattress off the baby’s bed to see if he was still dry, then began unfastening her blouse and skirt.

  “Always the same,” she said — “all over the world the same; but, God in heaven — but stupid.”

  Then even the memory of the wedding faded quite. She lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.

  The Sister of the Baroness

  — 1910 —

  “There are two new guests arriving this afternoon,” said the manager of the pension, placing a chair for me at the breakfast table. “I have only received the letter acquainting me with the fact this morning. The Baroness von Gall is sending her little daughter — the poor child is dumb — to make the ‘cure’. She is to stay with us a month, and then the Baroness herself is coming.”

  “Baroness von Gall,” cried the Frau Doktor, coming into the room and positively scenting the name. “Coming here? There was a picture of her only last week; in Sport and Salon. She is a friend of the court: I have heard that the Kaiserin says ‘du’ to her. But this is delightful! I shall take my doctor’s advice and spend an extra six weeks here. There is nothing like young society.”

  “But the child is dumb,” ventured the manager apologetically.

  “Bah! What does that matter? Afflicted children have such pretty ways.”

  Each guest who came into the breakfast room was bombarded with the wonderful news. “The Baroness von Gall is sending her little daughter here; the Baroness herself is coming in a month’s time.” Coffee and rolls took on the nature of an orgy. We positively scintillated. Anecdotes of the High Born were poured out, sweetened and sipped: we gorged on scandals of High Birth generously buttered.

  “They are to have the room next to yours,” said the manager, addressing me. “I was wondering if you would permit me to take down the portrait of the Kaiserin Elizabeth from above your bed to hang over their sofa.”

  “Yes, indeed, something homelike” — the Frau Oberregierungsrat patted my hand — “and of no possible significance to you.”

  I felt a little crushed. Not at the prospect of losing that vision of diamonds and blue velvet bust, but at the tone — placing me outside the pale — branding me as a foreigner.

  We dissipated the day in valid speculations. Decided it was too warm to walk in the afternoon, so lay down on our beds, mustering in great force for afternoon coffee. And a carriage drew up at the door. A tall young girl got out, leading a child by the hand. They entered the hall, were greeted and shown to their room. Ten minutes later she came down with the child to sign the visitors’ book. She wore a black, closely fitting dress, touched at throat and wrists with white frilling. Her brown hair, braided, was tied with a black bow — unusually pale, with a small mole on her left cheek.

  “I am the Baroness Von Gall’s sister,” she said, trying the pen on a piece of blotting paper, and smiling at us deprecatingly. Even for the most jaded of us life holds its thrilling moments. Two Baronesses in two months! The manager immediately left the room to find a new nib.

  To my plebeian eyes that afflicted child was singularly unattractive. She had the air of having been perpetually washed with a blue bag, and hair like grey wool — dressed, too, in a pinafore so stiffly starched that she could only peer at us over the frill of it — a social barrier of a pinafore — and perhaps it was too much to expect a noble aunt to attend to the menial consideration of her niece’s ears. But a dumb niece with unwashed ears struck me as a most depressing object.

  They were given places at the head of the table. For a moment we all looked at one another with an eena-deena-dina-do expression. Then the Frau Oberregierungsrat:

  “I hope you are not tired after your journey.”

  “No,” said the sister of the Baroness, smiling into her cup.

  “I hope the dear child is not tired,” said the Frau Doktor.

  “Not at all.”

  “I expect, I hope you will sleep well tonight,” the Herr Oberlehrer said reverently.

  “Yes.”

  The poet from Munich never took his eyes off the pair. He allowed his tie to absorb most of his coffee while he gazed at them exceedingly soulfully.

  Unyoking Pegasus, thought I. Death spasms of his Odes to Solitude! There were possibilities in that young woman for an inspiration, not to mention a dedication, and from that moment his suffering temperament took up its bed and walked.

  They retired after the meal, leaving us to discuss them at leisure.

  “There is a likeness,” mused the Frau Doktor. “Quite. What a manner she has. Such reserve, such a tender way with the child.”

  “Pity she has the child to attend to,” exclaimed the student from Bonn. He had hitherto relied upon three scars and a ribbon to produce an effect, but the sister of a Baroness demanded more than these.

  Absorbing days followed. Had she been one whit less beautifully born we could not have endured the continual conversation about her, the songs in her praise, the detailed account of her movements. But she graciously suffered our worship and we were more than content.

  The poet she took into her confidence. He carried her books when we went walking, he jumped the afflicted one on his knee — poetic licence, this — and one morning brought his notebook into the salon and read to us.

  “The sister of the Baroness has assured me she is going into a convent,” he said. (That made the student from Bonn sit up.) “I have written these few lines last night from my window in the sweet night air—”

  “Oh, your delicate chest,” commented the Frau Doktor.

  He fixed a stony eye on her, and she blushed.

  “I have written these lines:

  Ah, will you to a convent fly,

  So young, so fresh, so fair

  Spring like a doe upon the fields

  And find your beauty there.”

  Nine verses equally lovely commanded her to equally violent action. I am certain that had she followed his advice not even the remainder of her life in a convent would have given her time to recover her breath.

  “I have presented her with a copy,” he said. “And to-day we are going to look for wild flowers in the wood.”

  The student from Bonn got up and left the room. I begged the poet to repeat the verses once more. At the end of the sixth verse I saw from the window the sister of the Baroness and the scarred youth disappearing through the front gate, which enabled me to thank the poet so charmingly that he offered to write me out a copy.

  But we were living at too high pressure in those days. Swinging from our humble pension to the high walls of palaces, how could we help but fall? Late one afternoon the Frau Doktor came upon me in the writing room and took me to her bosom.

  “She has been telling me all about her life,” whispered the Frau Doktor. “She came to my bedroom and offered to massage my arm. You know, I am the greatest martyr to rheumatism. And, fancy now, she has already had six proposals of marriage. Such beautiful offers that I assure you I wept — and every one of noble birth. My dear, the most beautiful was in the wood. Not that I do not think a proposal should take place in a drawing-room — it is more fitting to have four walls — but this was a private wood. He said, the young officer, she was like a young tree whose branches had never been touched by the ruthless hand of man. Such delicacy!” She sighed and turned up her eyes.

  “Of course it is difficult for you English to understand when you are always exposing yo
ur legs on cricket fields, and breeding dogs in your back gardens. The pity of it! Youth should be like a wild rose. For myself I do not understand how your women ever get married at all.”

  She shook her head so violently that I shook mine too, and a gloom settled round my heart. It seemed we were really in a very bad way. Did the spirit of romance spread her rose wings only over aristocratic Germany?

  I went to my room, bound a pink scarf about my hair, and took a volume of Mörike’s lyrics into the garden. A great bush of purple lilac grew behind the summer-house. There I sat down, finding a sad significance in the delicate suggestion of half mourning. I began to write a poem myself.

  They sway and languish dreamily,

  And we, close pressed, are kissing there.

  It ended! “Close pressed” did not sound at all fascinating. Savoured of wardrobes. Did my wild rose then already trail in the dust? I chewed a leaf and hugged my knees. Then — magic moment — I heard voices from the summer-house, the sister of the Baroness and the student from Bonn.

  Second-hand was better than nothing; I pricked up my ears.

  “What small hands you have,” said the student from Bonn. “They were like white lilies lying in the pool of your black dress.” This certainly sounded the real thing. Her high-born reply was what interested me. Sympathetic murmur only.

  “May I hold one?”

  I heard two sighs — presumed they held — he had rifled those dark waters of a noble blossom.

  “Look at my great fingers beside yours.”

  “But they are beautifully kept,” said the sister of the Baroness shyly.

  The minx! Was love then a question of manicure?

  “How I should adore to kiss you,” murmured the student. “But you know I am suffering from severe nasal catarrh, and I dare not risk giving it to you. Sixteen times last night did I count myself sneezing. And three different handkerchiefs.”

  I threw Mörike into the lilac bush, and went back to the house. A great automobile snorted at the front door. In the salon great commotion. The Baroness was paying a surprise visit to her little daughter. Clad in a yellow mackintosh she stood in the middle of the room questioning the manager. And every guest the pension contained was grouped about her, even the Frau Doktor, presumably examining a timetable, as near to the august skirts as possible.