The question occupied him regularly every year in the first warm days of spring. For the rest of the year he mostly forgot it, absorbed in his work. And here he was on the top of the Rigi, a cool place, almost, wintry, with it suddenly become so living that compared to it his fertilizers seemed ridiculous.
He examined this change of attitude with care. He was proud of the way he had fallen in love; he, a poor man, doing it without any knowledge of whether the young lady had enough or indeed any money. He sat there and took pleasure in this proof that though he was thirty-five he could yet be reckless. He was greatly pleased at finding himself so much attracted that if it should turn out that she was penniless he would still manage to marry her, and would make it possible by a series of masterly financial skirmishings, the chief of which would be the dismissal of the widow and the replacing of her dinginess, her arrested effect of having been nipped in the bud although there was no bud, by this incorporate sunshine. The young lady’s tact, of which he had seen several instances, would cause her to confine her sunshine to appropriate moments. She would not overflow it into his working hours. Besides, marriage was a great readjuster of values. After it, he had not a doubt his wife would fall quite naturally into her place, which would, though honourable, be yet a little lower than the fertilizers. If it were not so, if marriage did not readjust the upset incidental to its preliminaries, what a disastrous thing falling in love would be. No serious man would be able to let himself do it. But how interesting it was the way Nature, that old Hostility, that Ancient Enemy to man’s thought, did somehow manage to trip him up sooner or later; and how still more interesting the ingenuity with which man, aware of this trick and determined to avoid the disturbance of a duration of affection, had invented marriage.
He gazed very benevolently at the little figure on the edge of the view. Why not marry her now, and frugally convert the tail-end of Dent’s Excursion into a honeymoon?
With the large simplicity and obliviousness to banns and licences of a man of scientific preoccupations he saw no reason against this course. It was obvious. It was desirable. It would not only save her going back to England first, it would save the extra journey there for him. They would go straight home to East Prussia together at the end of the week; and as for doing it without her family’s knowledge, if she could run away from them as she had told him she had done just for the sake of a jaunt, how much more readily, with what increase of swiftness, indeed, would she run for the sake of a husband?
“Tell me, Little One,” he said when she rejoined him, “will you marry me?”
CHAPTER IV
Ingeborg was astonished.
She stared at him speechless. The gulf between even the warmest friendliness and marriage! She had, she knew, been daily increasing in warm friendliness towards him, characteristically expecting nothing back. That he, too, should grow warm had not remotely occurred to her. Nobody had ever grown warm to her in that way. There had always been Judith, that miracle of beauty, to blot her into plainness. It is true the senior curate of the Redchester parish church had said to her once in his exhausted Oxford voice, “You know, I don’t mind about faces — will you marry me?” and she had refused so gingerly, with such fear of hurting his feelings, that for a week he had supposed he was engaged; but one would not call that warmth. As the sun puts out the light of a candle so did the radiance of Judith extinguish Ingeborg. They were so oddly alike; and Ingeborg was the pale, diminished shadow. Judith was Ingeborg grown tall, grown exquisite, Ingeborg wrought wonderfully in ivory and gold. No man could possibly fall in love with Ingeborg while there before his very eyes was apparently exactly the same girl, only translated into loveliness.
From the first it had been the most natural thing in the world to Ingeborg to be plain and passed over. Judith was always beside her. Whenever there was a pause in her work for her father it was filled by the chaperoning of Judith. She accepted the situation with complete philosophy, for nothing was quite so evident as Judith’s beauty; and she used, in corners at parties, to keep herself awake by saying over bits of the Psalms, on which, not being allowed to read novels, her literary enthusiasms were concentrated.
It was, then, really a very astonishing thing to a person practised in this healthy and useful humility to have some one asking her to marry him. That it should be Herr Dremmel seemed to her even more astonishing. He didn’t look like somebody one married. He didn’t even look like somebody who wanted to marry one. He sat there, his hands folded on the knob of his stick, gazing at her with an entirely placid benevolence and asked her the surprising question as though it were a way of making conversation. It is true he had not called her Little One before, but that, she felt as she stood before him considering this thing that had happened to her, was pretty rather than impassioned.
Here was an awkward and odd result of her holiday enterprise.
“It’s — very unexpected,” she said, lamely.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is unexpected. It has greatly surprised me.”
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
“About what are you sorry, Little One?”
“I can’t accept your — your offer.”
“What! There is some one else?”
“Not that sort of some one. But there’s my father.”
He made a great sweep with his arm. “Fathers,” he said; and pushed the whole breed out of sight.
“He’s very important.”
“Important! Little One, when will you marry me?”
“I can’t leave him.”
He became patient. “It has been laid down that a woman shall leave father and mother and any other related obstacle she may have the misfortune to be hampered with, and cleave only to her husband.”
“That was about a man cleaving to his wife. There wasn’t anything said about a woman. Besides—” She stopped. She couldn’t tell him that she didn’t want to cleave.
He gazed at her a moment in silence. He had not contemplated a necessity for persuasion.
“This,” he then said with severity, “is prevarication.”
She sat down on the grass and clasped her hands round her knees and looked up at him. She had taken off her hat when first she got to the top to fan herself, and had not put it on again. As she sat there with her back to the glow of the sky, the wind softly lifted the rings of her hair and the sun shone through them wonderfully. They seemed to flicker gently to and fro, little tongues of fire.
“Why,” said Herr Dremmel, suddenly leaning forward and staring, “you are like a spirit.”
This pleased her. For a moment her eyes danced.
“Like a spirit,” he repeated. “And here am I talking heavily to you, as though you were an ordinary woman. Little One, how does one trap a spirit into marrying? Tell me. For very earnestly do I desire to be shown the way.”
“One doesn’t,” said Ingeborg.
“Ah, do not be difficult. You have been so easy, of such a comfortable response in all things up to now.”
“But this—” began Ingeborg.
“Yes. This, I well know—”
He was more stirred than he had thought possible. He was becoming almost eager.
“But,” asked Ingeborg, exploring this new interesting situation, “why do you want to?”
“Want to marry you?”
“Yes.”
“Because,” said Herr Dremmel, immensely prompt, “I have had the extreme good fortune to fall in love with you.”
Again she looked pleased.
“And I do not ask you,” he went on, “to love me, or whether you do love me. It would be presumption on my part, and not, if you did, very modest on yours. That is the difference between a man and a woman. He loves before marriage, and she does not love till after.”
“Oh?” said Ingeborg, interested. “And what does he—”
“The woman,” continued Herr Dremmel, “feels affection and esteem before marriage, and the man feels affection and esteem after.”
“Oh,” said Ingeborg, reflecting. She began to tear up tufts of grass. “It seems — chilly,” she said.
“Chilly?” he echoed.
He let his stick drop, and got up and came and sat down, or rather let himself down carefully, on the grass beside her.
“Chilly? Do you not know that a decent chill is a great preservative? Hot things decay. Frozen things do not live. A just measure of chill preserves the life of the affections. It is, by a very proper dispensation of Nature, provided before marriage by the woman, and afterwards by the man. The balance is, in this way, nicely held, and peace and harmony, which nourish best at a low temperature, prevail.”
She looked at him and laughed. There was no one in Redchester, and Redchester was all she knew of life, in the least like Herr Dremmel. She stretched herself in the roomy difference, happy, free, at her ease.
“But I cannot believe,” burst out Herr Dremmel with a passionate vigour that astonished him more than anything in his whole life as he seized the hand that kept on tearing up grass, “I cannot believe that you will not marry me. I cannot believe that you will refuse a good and loving husband, that you will prefer to remain with your father and solidify into yet one more frostbitten virgin.”
“Into a what?” repeated Ingeborg, struck by this image of herself in the future.
She began to laugh, then stopped. She stared at him, her grey eyes very wide open. She forgot Herr Dremmel, and that he was still clutching her hand and all the grass in it, while her mind flashed over the years that had gone and the years that were to come. They would be alike. They had not been able to frostbite her yet because she had been too young; but they would get her presently. Their daily repeated busy emptiness, their rush of barren duties, their meagre moments of what when she was younger used to be happiness but had lately only been relief, those rare moments when her father praised her, would settle down presently and freeze her dead.
Her face grew solemn. “It’s true,” she said slowly. “I shall be a frostbitten virgin. I’m doomed. My father won’t ever let me marry.”
“You infinitely childish one!” he cried, becoming angry. “When it is well known that all fathers wish to get rid of all daughters.”
“You don’t understand. It’s different. My father — why,” she broke out, “I used to dose myself secretly with cod liver oil so as to keep up to his level. He’s wonderful. When he praised me I usedn’t to sleep. And if he scolded me it seemed to send me lame.”
Herr Dremmel sawed her hand up and down in his irritation.
“What is this irrelevant talk?” he said. “I offer you marriage, and you respond with information about cod liver oil. I do not believe the father obstacle. I do not recognize my honest little friend of these last days. It is waste of time, not being open. Would you, then, if it were not for your father, marry me?”
“But,” Ingeborg flashed round at him, swept off her feet as she so often was by an impulse of utter truth, “it’s because of him that I would.”
And the instant she had said it she was shocked.
She stared at Herr Dremmel wide-eyed with contrition. The disloyalty of it. The ugliness of telling a stranger — and a stranger with hair like fur — anything at all about those closely related persons she had been taught to describe to herself as her dear ones.
“Oh,” she cried, dragging her hand away, “let my hand go — let my hand go!”
She tried to get on to her feet, but with an energy he did not know he possessed he pulled her down again. He did not recognize any of the things he was feeling and doing. The Dremmel of his real nature, of those calm depths where lay happy fields of future fertilizers, gazed at this inflamed conduct going on at the top in astonishment.
“No,” he said, with immense determination, “you will sit here and explain about your father.”
“It’s a dreadful thing,” replied Ingeborg, suddenly discovering that of all things she did not like being clutched, and looking straight into his eyes, her head a little thrown back, “that one can’t leave one’s home even for a week without getting into a scrape.”
“A scrape! You call it a scrape when a good man—”
“Here’s a person who goes away for a little change — privately. And before she knows where she is she’s being held down on the top of the Rigi and ordered by a strange man—”
“By her future husband!” cried Herr Dremmel, who was finding the making of offers more difficult than he had supposed.
“ — by a strange man to explain her father. As though anybody could ever explain their father. As though anybody could ever explain anything.”
“God in Heaven,” cried Herr Dremmel, “do not explain him then. Just marry me.”
And at this moment the snake-like procession of the rest of Dent’s Tour, headed by Mr. Ascough watch in hand, emerged from the hôtel, where it had been having tea, on to the plateau, wiping its mouths in readiness for the sunset.
With the jerk of a thing that has been stung it swerved aside as it was about almost to tread on the two on the grass.
Ingeborg sat very stiff and straight and pretended to be staring intently at the view, forgetting that it was behind her. She flushed when she found there was no time to move far enough from Herr Dremmel for a gap to be visible between them.
“Look at those two now,” whispered the young lady last in the procession to the young man brushing bread and butter out of his tie who walked beside her.
He looked, and seemed inclined to linger.
“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” he said.
“Oh, do you think so?” said his companion. “I never think anybody’s pretty who isn’t — you know what I mean — really nice, you know — lady-like—”
And she hurried him on, because, she said, if he didn’t hurry he’d miss the sunset.
CHAPTER V
Ingeborg spent most of the night on a hard chair at her bedroom window earnestly endeavouring to think.
It was very unfortunate, but she found an immense difficulty at all times in thinking. She could keep her father’s affairs in the neatest order, but not her own thoughts. There were so many of them, and they all seemed to jump about inside her and want to get thought first. They would not go into ordered rows. They had no patience. Often she had suspected they were not thoughts at all but just feelings, and that depressed her, for it made her drop, she feared, to the level of the insect world and enter the category of things that were not going to be able to get to heaven; and to a bishop’s daughter this was disquieting. Most of her thoughts she was immediately sorry for, they were so unlike anything she could, with propriety, say out loud at home. To Herr Dremmel she had been able to say them all as far as speech, a limping vehicle, could be made to go, and this was another of his refreshing qualities. She did not of course know of that absorbed man’s habit of listening to her with only one ear — a benevolent ear, but only one — while with the other, turned inwards, he listened to the working out in his mind of problems in Chilisaltpetre and super-phosphates.
She sat staring out of the window at the stars and chimney-pots, her hands held tightly in her lap, and told herself that the moment had come for clear, consecutive thought — consecutive thought, she repeated severely, aware already of the interlaced dancing going on in her brain. What was she going to do about Herr Dremmel? About going home? About — oh, about anything?
They had come down the Rigi soberly and in the train. Nobody, as usual, spoke to them, and for the first time in their friendship neither had they spoken to each other. They had had a speechless dinner. He had looked preoccupied. And when directly after it she said good night, he had drawn her out into the passage and solemnly adjured her, while the hall-porter pretended he was out of ear-shot, to have done with prevarications. What he would suggest, he said, was a comfortable betrothal next day; it was too late for one that night, he said, pulling out his watch, but next day; and as she retreated sideways step by step up the stairs, silent through an inability immediate
ly to find an answer that seemed tactful enough, he had eyed her very severely and inquired of her with a raised voice what, then, the ado was all about. She had turned at that, giving up the search for tact, and had run up the remaining stairs rather breathlessly, feeling that Herr Dremmel on marriage had an engulfing quality; and he, after a moment’s perplexity on the mat at the bottom, had gone to the reading-room a baffled man.
Now she sat at the window considering.
Her journey home was only two days off, and the thought of what would be said to her when she got there and of what her answers would be like, ran down the back of her neck and spine as though some one were drawing a light, ice-cold finger over the shrinking skin. She had been persuading herself that her little holiday was harmless and natural; and now this business with Herr Dremmel would, she felt, do away with all that, and justify a wrath in her father that she might, else for her private solace and encouragement, have looked upon as unreasonable. It is a peculiarity of parents, reflected Ingeborg, that they are always being justified. However small and innocent what you are doing may be, if they disapprove something turns up to cause them to have been altogether right. She remembered little things, small occasions, of her younger days.... This was a big occasion, and what had turned up on it was Herr Dremmel. It was a pity — oh, it was a pity she hadn’t considered before she left London so impulsively whether when she got back to Redchester she was going to be untruthful or not. She had considered nothing, except the acuteness of the joy of running away. Now she was faced by the really awful question of lying or not lying. It was ugly to lie at all. It was dreadful to lie to one’s father. But to lie to a bishop raised the operation from just a private sin which God would deal with kindly on being asked, to a crime you were punished for if it was a cathedral you did it to, a real crime, the crime of sacrilege. Impossible to profane a sacred and consecrated object like a bishop. Doubly and trebly impossible if you were that object’s own daughter. Her tightly folded hands went cold as she realised she was undoubtedly going to be truthful. She was every bit as valiant as her Swedish grandmother had been, that grandmother who was aware of the dangers of the things she did with her mountains and her gusty lakes and defied them, but her grandmother knew no fear and Ingeborg knew it very well. Hers was the real courage found only in the entirely terrified, who, terrified, yet see the thing, whatever it is, doggedly through. She was faint, yet pursuing.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 138