Элизабет фон Арним
The Pastor's Wife
Coffee was served on the big table in front of the sofa. The Baroness sat beside Ingeborg, and the Baron and Herr Dremmel drew up chairs opposite. The coffee was good, and there was one excellent cake. No gooseberries, no flowers, no unwieldy sandwiches; just plainness and excellence.
The two men talked to each other, not to the women, the Baron stiffly and on his guard, Herr Dremmel taking immense pains to be amiable and not offend. Between them hung the memories of altercations. Between them also hung the knowledge of the three years during which the Baron and his wife, as a result of the last and hottest difference of opinion, had attended Divine Service in a church that did not belong to them. They had altogether cut Kökensee. For three years their private gallery in the church in which their ancestors had once a fortnight feared God had been a place where mice enjoyed themselves. Its chairs were covered with dust; its hymn-books, growing brown, still lay open at the place the Glambecks had praised God out of last. Such a withdrawal of approval would have made any other pastor's life a thing of chill and bleakness; Herr Dremmel hardly observed it. He had no vanities. He was pleased that the rival pastor should be gratified. He cared nothing for comment, and had no eye for shrugs and smiles. His eyes, his thoughts, were wanted for his work; and he found it a relief, a release from at least one interruption, when his patron took to leaving him frigidly alone.
Indeed, when he drove up to the Glambecks' house and remembered he had not had to go there for three peaceful years he felt really grateful, and he showed his gratitude by performing immense feats of social pleasantness during the visit. He agreed gigantically with everything the Baron said. Whatever subject was touched upon–very cautiously, for the Baron mistrusted all subjects with Herr Dremmel—he instantly dragged it off the dangerous shoals of the immediate and close up to a cosmic height and distance, a height and distance so enormous that even what the Kaiser said last became a negligible tinkling and Conscience and Dogma quavered off into silence; and he explained to the Baron, who guardedly said "Perhaps," that though people's opinions might and did vary seen near, if one spread them out wide enough, pushed them back far enough, took them up high enough, bored them down deep enough, got them away from detail and loose from foregrounds, one would come at last to the great Mother Opinion of them all, in whose huge lap men curled themselves up contentedly like the happy identities they indeed were and went, after kissing each other, in placidest agreement to sleep.
"Perhaps," said the Baron.
Personalities, immediate interests, duties, daily life, were swamped in the vast seas in which, with politeness but determination, Herr Dremmel took the Baron swimming. One only needed, he repeated, warm with the wish to keep in roomy regions, to trace back any two opinions, however bitterly different they now were, far enough to get at last to the point where they sweetly kissed.
"Perhaps," said the Baron.
"One only needed—" went on Herr Dremmel, making all-embracing movements with his arms.
But the Baron cleared his throat and began to enumerate contrary facts.
Herr Dremmel agreed at once that he was right just there, and pushed the point of kissing back a little further.
The Baron went after him with more facts.
Herr Dremmel again agreed, and went back further. In this way they came at last to the Garden of Eden, beyond which the Baron refused to budge, alleging that further back than that no Christian could go; and even in that he repudiated the kiss. He was convinced, though he concealed it, that at no period of human thought could his and Herr Dremmel's opinions, for example, have kissed.
But it was an amiable view, and Herr Dremmel was extremely polite and was bent evidently on peace, and the Baron, recognising this, became less distrustful. He even contributed a thought of his own at last, after having been negatively occupied in dissecting Herr Dremmel's, and said that in his opinion it was details that made life difficult.
The Baroness, who loved him and overheard him, was anxious he should have more coffee with plenty of milk in it after this.
"Men," she explained to Ingeborg in careful English as she poured it out, "need much nourishment because of all this head-work."
"I suppose they do," said Ingeborg.
"When I was first married I remember it was my chief pride and joy that at last I had some one of my very own to nourish."
"Oh?" said Ingeborg.
"It is an instinct," said the Baroness, who had the air of administering a lesson, "in a true woman. She wishes to nourish. And naturally the joy of nourishing two is double the joy of nourishing one."
"I suppose it is," said Ingeborg, who did not quite follow.
"When my first-born—"
"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg, glad to understand.
"When my first-born was laid in my arms I cannot express, Frau Pastor, what happiness I had in being given yet another human being to nourish."
"I suppose it was delightful," said Ingeborg, politely sympathetic.
The Baroness's eyes drooped a moment inquiringly from Ingeborg's face to her body.
"For six years," she went on, after a pause, "I had fresh reason for happiness regularly at Christmas."
"I suppose you have the loveliest Christmases here," said Ingeborg. "Like the ones in books. With trees."
"Trees? Naturally we have trees. But I had babies as well. Every Christmas for six years regularly my Christmas present to my dear husband was able to be a baby."
"What?" said Ingeborg, opening her eyes. "A fresh one?"
"Naturally it was fresh. One does not have the same baby twice."
"No, of course not. But—how did you hide it till Christmas day?"
"It could not, naturally," said the Baroness stiffly, "be as much a surprise as a present that was not a baby would have been, but it was for all practical purposes hidden till Christmas. On that day it was born."
"Oh, but I think that was very wonderful," said Ingeborg, genuinely pleased by such neatness. She leaned forward in her enthusiasm and clasped her hands about her knees.
"Yes," said the Baroness, relaxing a little before this flattering appreciation. "Yes. It was. Some people would call it chance. But we, as Christians, knew it was heaven."
"But how punctual," said Ingeborg admiringly, "how tidy!"
"Yes, yes," mused the Baroness, relaxing still more in the warm moisture of remembrance, "they were happy times. Happy, happy times. One's little ones coming and going—"
"Oh? Did they go as well as come?" asked Ingeborg, lowering her voice to condolence.
"About one's knees, I mean, and the house."
"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg, relieved.
"Every year the Christmas candles shining down on an addition to our treasures. Every year the gifts of past Christmases gathered about the tree again, bigger and stronger instead of being lost or broken as they would have been if they had been any other kind of gift."
"But what happened when there weren't any more to give?"
"Then I gave my husband cigar-cases."
"Oh."
"After all, most women have to do that all their lives. I did not grumble. When heaven ceased to provide me with a present for him, I knew how to bow my head and went and bought one. There are excellent cigar-cases at Wertheim's in Königsberg if you wish to give one to Herr Pastor next Christinas. They do not come unsewn at the corners by July or August in the way those one buys in other shops do. Ah, yes. Happy years. Happy, happy years. First the six years of great joy collecting my family, and then the years of happiness bringing it up. Of course you are fond of children?"
"I've never had any."
"Naturally you have not," said the Baroness, stiffening again.
"So I don't know," said Ingeborg.
"But every true woman loves little children," said the Baroness.
"But they must be there," said Ingeborg.
"One has God-implanted instincts," said the Baroness.
"But one must see something to practise them on," said Ingeborg.
"A true woman is all love," said the Baroness, in a voice that sounded very like scolding.
"I suppose she is," said Ingeborg, who felt that she never could have met one. She had a vision of something altogether soft and squelchy and humid and at the same time wonderful. "Are any of your children at home?" she asked, thinking she would like to test her instincts on the younger Glambecks.
"They are grown up and gone. Out into the world. Some far away in other countries. Ah, yes. One is lonely—" The Baroness became loftily plaintive. "It is the lot of parents. Lonely, lonely. I had five daughters. It was a great relief to get them all married. There was naturally the danger where there were so many of some of them staying with us always."
"But then you wouldn't have been lonely," said Ingeborg.
"But then, Frau Pastor, they would not have been married."
"No. And then," said Ingeborg, interested, "you wouldn't have been able to feel lonely."
The Baroness gazed at her.
"These things are nice, you know," said Ingeborg, leaning forward again in her interest. "One does like it somehow—being sad, you know, and thinking how lonely one is. Of course it's much more delicious to be happy, but not being happy has its jollinesses. There's a perfume...." She sought about in her mind—"It's like a wet day. It looks gloomy and miserable compared to what yesterday was like, but there is an enjoyment. And things"—she hesitated, groping—"things seem to grow. Different ones. Yet they're beautiful, too."
But the Baroness, who did not follow and did not want to, for it was not her business to listen to her pastor's wife, drooped an inquiring eye again over Ingeborg's body and cut her tendency to talk more than was becoming in her position short by remarking that she was still very thin.
When they had sat there till the coffee was cold Ingeborg, in a pause of the talk, got up to go.
The three others stared at her without moving. Even her own Robert stared uncomprehending. It seemed a lame thing to have to explain that she was now going home, but that was what she did at last murmur down to the motionless and surprised Baroness.
"Are you not feeling well?" inquired the Baroness.
"What is it, Ingeborg?" asked Herr Dremmel.
The Baron went over to a window and opened it. "A little faint, no doubt," he said, adding something about young wives.
The Baroness asked her if she would like to lie down.
Herr Dremmel became alert and interested. "What is it, Little One?" he asked again, getting up.
"I think it would be good if the Frau Pastor rested a little before supper," said the Baroness, getting up, too.
"Certainly," said Herr Dremmel, quite eagerly, and with a funny expression on his face.
Ingeborg gazed from one to the other.
"But, Robert," she said, wondering why he looked like that, "oughtn't we to go home?"
"Dear Frau Pastor," said the Baroness quite warmly, "you will feel better presently. Believe me. There is an hour still before supper. Come with me, and you shall lie down and rest."
"But Robert—" said Ingeborg, astonished.
She was, however, taken away—it seemed a sort of sweeping of her away—through glass doors, down a carpetless varnished passage into a spare bedroom, and commanded to put herself on the high white bed with her head a little lower than her feet.
"But," she said, "why?"
"You will be better by supper-time. Oh, I know all these things," said the Baroness, who was opening windows and had grown suddenly friendly. "Do you feel sick?"
"Sick?"
She wondered whether the amount of cake she had eaten had appeared excessive. She had had two pieces. Perhaps there was a rigid local custom prescribing only one. She felt again that she was in a net of customs, with nobody to explain. The Baroness seemed quite disappointed when she assured her she did not feel sick at all. Ought guests to feel sick? Was it a subtle way of drawing attention to the irresistibleness of the host's food? It then occurred to her that it might very possibly be the custom in these country places to put callers to bed for an hour in the middle of their call, and that her omission to put her mother-in-law there was one of the causes of her tears. Next to going home as quickly as one did in England she felt going to bed was altogether the best thing.
This thought, that it must be the custom, made her instantly pliable. With every gesture of politeness she hastened to clamber up on to the billows of feathers and white quilt. There was a smell of naphthalin as she sank downwards, a smell of careful warfare carried on incessantly with moth.
The Baroness came away from letting in floods of air, and looked at her. "I am sure," she said, "you do feel sick."
"I think I do—a little," said Ingeborg, anxious to give every satisfaction.
It was evidently the right thing to say, for her hostess's face lit up. She went out of the room quickly and came back with some Eau de Cologne and a fan.
Ingeborg watched her with bright alert eyes over the edge of a billow of feathers while she fetched a little table and brought it to the bed and arranged these things on it.
How odd it was, she thought, greatly interested. Was the Baron simultaneously putting Robert to bed in some other room? She felt she had grown suddenly popular, that she was doing all the right things at last. Contrasted with its loftiness during the first part of the call the Baroness's manner was quite human and warm. She put the table close to her side, and told her the best thing she could do, quite the best thing, would be to try and sleep a little; if she wanted anything she was to ring, and the maid Tina would appear.
"Ah, yes," she said in conclusion, standing for a moment looking down at her and heaving a great sigh that seemed to Ingeborg somehow to be pleasurable, "ah, yes. When one has said A, dear Frau Pastor, one must say B. Ah, yes."
And she went out again on tip-toe, softly closing the door and leaving Ingeborg in a state of extreme and active interest and interrogation. "When one has said A one must say B...." Why must one? And what was B? What, indeed, if you came to that, was A?
She listened a moment, raised on her elbow, her bright head more ruffled than ever after its descent into the billows, then she slid down on to the slippery floor and ran across in her stockings to one of the big open windows.
It looked on to a tangle of garden, a sort of wilderness of lilac bushes and syringa and neglected roses and rough grass and hemlock at the back of the house. There was nobody anywhere to be seen, and she got up on to the sill and sat there in great enjoyment, swinging her feet, for it all smelt very sweet at the end of the long hot day, till she thought the hour, the blessed hour, must be nearly over. Then she stole back and rearranged herself carefully on the bed.
"But this is the way of paying calls," she thought, pulling the quilt up tidily under her chin and waiting for what would be done to her next.
CHAPTER XVI
They did not get away till nine o'clock.
There was supper at seven, an elaborate meal, and they sat over it an hour and a half. Then came more coffee, served on the terrace by servants in white cotton gloves, and half an hour later, just before they left, tea and sandwiches and cakes and fruit and beer.
Ingeborg was now quite clear about the reason for her mother-in-law's tears. She saw very vividly how dreadful her behaviour must have seemed. That groaning supper-table, that piling up as the end of the visit drew near of more food and more and more, and the refreshment of bed in the middle....
"I shall invite her all over again," she said suddenly, determined to make amends.
When she said this the carriage had finally detached them from sight and sound of the now quite cordial Glambecks, and was heaving through the sand of the dark wooded road beyond their gate.
"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down. He had got his arm round her, and at the bigger joltings tightened his hold and lifted her a little. His voice was tender, and when he bent down there was an enveloping smell of cigars and wine, mixed with the india-rubber of his mackintosh.
Ingeborg knew that for some reason she could not discover she had made herself popular. There was the distinct consciousness of having suddenly, half way through the visit, become a success. And she was still going on being a success, she felt. But why? Robert was extraordinarily attentive. Too attentive, really, for oh, what a wonderful night of stars and warm scents it was, once they were in the open—what a night, what a marvel of a night! And when he bent over her it was blotted out. Dear Robert. She did love him. But away there on that low meadow, far away over there where a white mist lay on the swampy places and the leaves of the flags that grew along the ditch stood up like silver spears in the moonlight, one could imagine the damp cool fragrance rising up as one's feet stirred the grass, the perfect solitariness and the perfect silence. Except for the bittern. There was a bittern, she had discovered, in those swamps. If she were over there now, lying quite quiet on the higher ground by the ditch, quite quiet and alone, she would hear him presently, solemnly booming.
"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down across the whole of the Milky Way and every single one of all the multitude of scents the night was softly throwing against her face.
He kissed her very kindly and at unusual length. It lasted so long that she missed the smell of an entire clover field.
"Your mother," said Ingeborg, when she again emerged.
"Heavens and earth!" said Herr Dremmel.
"I know now what I did—or rather didn't do. I know now why she kept on saying Bratkartoffel. Oh, Robert, she must have been hurt. She must have thought I didn't care a bit. And I did so want her to be happy. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you what, little sheep?"
"About there having to be supper, and about her having to go to bed."
"To bed?"
"Did the Baron put you?"
"Put me?"
"To bed?"
Herr Dremmel bent down again and looked a little anxiously at as much of her face as he could see in the moonlight. It seemed normal; not in the least flushed or feverish. He touched her cheek with his finger. It was cool.
"Little One," he said, "what is this talk of beds?"
"Only that it would save rather a lot of awful things happening if you would just give me an idea beforehand of what is expected. It wouldn't take a minute. I wouldn't disturb you at your work for anything, but at some odd time—breakfast, for instance, or while you're shaving—if you'd say about beds and things like that. One couldn't guess it, you know. In Redchester one didn't do it, you see. And it's such a really beautiful arrangement. Oh"—she suddenly flung her arms round him and held him tight—"I am glad I married one of you!"
"One of me?"
Herr Dremmel again peered anxiously at her face.
"One of you wonderful people—you magnificent, spacious people. In Redchester we got rid of difficulties by running away. You face them and overcome them. There isn't much doubt, is there, which is the finer?"
He transferred his cigar to the hand that was round her shoulder and spread his right one largely over her forehead. It was quite cool.
"Who," went on Ingeborg enthusiastically, jerking her head away from his hand, "would have a custom that makes calls last five hours without rebelling? You are too splendidly disciplined to rebel. You don't. You just set about finding some way of making the calls endurable, and you hit on the nicest way. I loved that hour in bed. If only I'd known that the other day when your mother came! The relief of it...."
"But my mother—" began Herr Dremmel in a puzzled voice. Then he added with a touch of severity, "Your remarks, my treasure, are not in your usual taste. You forget my mother is a widow."
"Oh? Don't widows?"
"Do not widows what?"
"Go to bed?"
"Now kindly tell me," he said, with an impatience he concealed beneath calm, for he had heard that a husband who wishes to become successfully a father has to accommodate himself to many moods, "what it is you are really talking about."
"Why, about your not explaining things to me in time."
"What things?"
"About your mother having to go to bed."
"Why should my mother have to go to bed?"
"Oh, Robert—because it's the custom."
"It is not. Why do you suppose it is the custom?"
"What? When I've just been put there? And you saw me go?"
"Ingeborg—"
"Oh, don't call me Ingeborg—"
"Ingeborg, this is levity. I am prepared for much accommodating of myself to whims in regard to food and kindred matters, but am I to endure levity for nine months?"
She stared at him.
"You went to bed because you were ill," he said.
"I wasn't," she said indignantly. Did he, too, think she did not know how to control herself in the presence of cake?
"What? You were not?"
There was a note of such sharp disappointment in his voice that in her turn she peered at his face.
"Now kindly tell me, Robert," she said, giving his sleeve a slight pull, "what it is you are really talking about."
"You did not feel faint? You feel quite well? You do not feel ill after all?"
Again the note of astonished disappointment.
"But why should I feel ill?"
"Then why did you ask to be taken home almost before we had arrived?"
For the first time she heard anger in his voice, anger and a great aggrievedness.
"Almost before we'd arrived? We'd been there hours. You hadn't told me a call meant supper."
"Almighty Heaven," he cried, "am I to dwell on every detail of life? Am I personally to conduct you over each of the inches of your steps? Do you regard me as an elementary school? Can you not imagine? Can you not calculate probabilities? Can you not construct some searchlight of inference of your own, and illuminate with it the outline of at least the next few hours?"
She gazed at him a moment in astonishment.
"Well," she said.
If her father had asked her only one of these questions in that sort of voice she would have been without an answer, beaten down and crushed. But Robert had not had the steady continuous frightening of her from babyhood. He could not hold over her, like an awful rod, that she owed her very existence to him. He could not claim perpetual gratitude for this remote tremendous gift, bestowed on her in the days of her unconsciousness. He was a kindly stranger appointed by the Church to walk hand in hand with her along the path of grown-up life. He had admired her, and kissed her, and quite often during their engagement had abased himself at her feet. Also she had seen him at moments such as shaving.
"I believe," she said after another astonished pause, "that you're scolding me. And you're scolding me because you're angry with me, and you're angry with me—Robert, is it possible you're angry with me because I'm not ill?"
He threw away his cigar and seized her in his arms and began to whisper voluminously into her ear.
"What?" she kept on saying. "What? You're tickling me—what? I can't hear-"
But she did in the end hear, and drew herself a little back from him to look at him with a new interest. It seemed the oddest thing that he, so busy, so nearly always somewhere else in thought, so deeply and frequently absent from the surface of life, so entirely occupied by his work that often he could hardly remember he had a wife, should want to have yet another object of the kind added unto him, a child; and that she who lived altogether on the surface, who knew, as it were, the very taste of each of the day's minutes and possessed them all, who never lost consciousness of the present and never for an instant let go of her awareness of the visible and the now, should be without any such desire.
"But," she said, "we're so happy. We're so happy as we are."
"It is nothing compared to what we would be."
"But I haven't even begun to get used to this happiness yet—to the one I've got."
"You will infinitely prefer the one that is yet to come."
"But Robert—don't rush me along. Don't let us rush past what we've got. Let us love all this thoroughly first-"
He looked at her very gravely. "We have now been married two months," he said. "I become anxious. To-night—I cannot tell you how glad I was. And then—it was nothing after all."
She gazed at him with a feeling of a new incumbency. He had said the last words in a voice she did not know, with a catch in it.
"Robert—" she said quickly, putting out her hand and touching his with a little soft stroking movement.
She wished above all things to make him perfectly happy. Always she had loved making people happy. And she was so grateful to him, so grateful for the freedom she had got through him, that just her gratitude even if she had not loved him would have made her try to do and be everything he wished. But she did love him. She certainly loved him. And here was something he seemed to want beyond everything, and that she alone could provide him with.
He turned his head away; and as he did this did she see something actually glistening in his eyes, glistening like something wet?
In an instant she had put her arms round him. "Of course I do—of course I want one," she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his mackintosh, "some—heaps—of course we'll have them—everybody has them—of course I'll soon begin—don't mind my not having been ill to-night—I'm so sorry—I will be ill—dear Robert—I didn't know I had to be ill—but I will be soon—I'm sure I will be—I—I feel quite like soon being ill now—"
He patted her face, his face still turned away. "Good little wife," he said; "good little wife."
She felt nearer to him than she had ever felt, so close in understanding and sympathy. She had seen tears, a man's tears. Of what tremendous depths of feeling were they not the signal? The sentence, A strong man's tears, floated up from somewhere and hung about her mind. She pressed him to her in a passion of desire to make him altogether happy, to protect him from feeling too much. She held him like that, her cheek against his arm, rubbing it up and down every now and then to show how well she understood, till they got home. When he lifted her down from the carriage at their door she slipped her hand round the back of his neck and kept it there a moment with the tenderest lingering touch.
"Dear Robert," she whispered, her lips on his ear while he lifted her down; and implicit in the words was the mother-assurance, the yearning mother-promise, "Oh, little thing, little man thing, I'll take care of you."
She hung about the parlour and the passage while he went, as he said, for a moment into his laboratory for a final look round, waiting for him in a strangely warmed exalted state, entirely at one with him, suddenly very intimate, sure that after letting her see things so sacred as tears he would only want to spend the rest of the evening with her, being comforted and reassured, held close to her heart, talking sweetly with her in the quiet dark garden.
But there were six saucerfuls of differently treated last year's rye ready on the laboratory table for counting and weighing. Herr Dremmel beheld them, and forgot the world. He began to count and weigh. He continued to count and weigh. He ended by counting and weighing them all; and it was dawn before, satisfied and consoled for his lost afternoon, it occurred to him that perhaps it might be bedtime.