The young lady behind the counter stared, too, but then there was only one of her. She very politely called Ingeborg gnädiges Fräulein and inquired whether her child was a boy or a girl.
“Lord God!” cried Ilse, “how should we know?”
But Ingeborg, with dignity and decision, said it was a boy.
“Then,” said the young lady, “you require blue ribbons.”
“Do I?” said Ingeborg, very willing to believe her.
The young lady sorted out small garments from green calico boxes labelled For Firsts. There were little jackets, little shirts, little caps, everything one could need for the upper portion of a baby.
“So,” said the young lady, pushing a pile of these articles across the counter to Ingeborg.
“God, God!” cried Ilse in an ecstasy at such tininess, thrusting her red thumb through one of the diminutive sleeves and holding it up to show how tightly it fitted.
“Nicht wahr?” agreed the young lady, though without excitement.
“But,” said Ingeborg, laboriously searching out her words, “the baby doesn’t leave off there, at its middle. It’ll go on. It’ll be a whole baby. It’ll have legs and things. What does one put on the rest of it?”
The young lady looked at Ilse for enlightenment.
“It’ll have a rest, Ilse,” said Ingeborg, also appealing to her. “These things are just clothes for cherubs.”
“Ach so,” said the young lady, visited by a glimmer of understanding, and turning round she dexterously whipped down more green boxes, and taking off the lids brought out squares of different materials, linen, flannel, and a soft white spongy stuff.
“Swaddle,” she said, holding them up.
“Swaddle?” said Ingeborg.
“Swaddle,” confirmed Ilse.
And as Ingeborg only stared, the young lady gradually plumbing her ignorance produced a small mattress in a white and frilly linen bag, and diving down beneath the counter, brought up a dusty doll which she deftly rolled up to the armpits in the squares, inserted it into the bag with its head out, and tied it firmly with tapes. “So,” she said, giving this neat object a resounding slap: and picking it up she pretended to rock it fondly in her arms. “Behold the First Born,” she said.
After that Ingeborg put herself entirely into these experienced hands. She bought all she was told to. She even bought the doll to practise on— “It will not do everything of course,” explained the young lady. The one thing she would not buy was a sewing machine to make her own swaddle with, as Ilse economically counselled. The young lady was against this purchase, which could only be made in another shop; she said true ladies always preferred Berding and Kühn to do such work for them. Ilse said true mothers always did it for themselves, and it was one of the chief joys of this blessed time, Ilse said, seeing the house grow fuller and fuller of swaddle.
At this the young lady pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders and assumed an air of waiting indifference.
Ilse, resenting her attitude, inquired of her heatedly what, then, she knew of Mutterglück.
The young lady, for some reason, was offended at this, though nothing was more certain than that knowledge of Mutterglück would have meant instant dismissal from Berding and Kühn’s. It became a wrangle across the counter, and was only ended by Ingeborg’s altogether siding with the young lady and the interests of Berding and Kühn, and ordering, as the Baroness had directed, ten dozen each of the ready-made squares. “I’d die if I had to hem ten dozen of anything,” she explained apologetically to Ilse.
And it was very bitter to Ilse, who meant well, to see the young lady look at her with a meditative comprehensiveness down her nose; it left no honourable course open to her but to sulk, and in her heart she would rather not have sulked on this exciting and unusual excursion. She was forced to, however, by her own public opinion, and she did it vigorously, thoroughly, blackly, all the rest of the day, all the way home; and neither cakes nor chocolate nor ices earnestly and successively applied to her by Ingeborg at the pastrycook’s were allowed to lighten the gloom.
“But I suppose,” Ingeborg said to herself as she crept into her bed that night in the spiritless mood called philosophical, for Ilse was her stay and refuge, and to have her not speaking to her, to feel she had hurt her, was a grievous thing, a thing when one is weary very like the last straw— “I suppose it’s all really only a part of B. Oh, oh,” she added with a sudden flare of rebellion that died out immediately in shame of it, “I don’t think I like B — I don’t think I like B....”
CHAPTER XIX
There was nevertheless an absorption and an excitement about this new strange business that did not for a moment allow her to be dull. She might feel ill, wretched, exhausted, but she was always interested. A tremendous event was ahead of her, and all her days were working up to it. She lived in preparation. Each one of her sensations was a preparation, an advance. There was a necessity for it; something was being made, was growing, had to be completed; life was full of meaning, and of plain meaning; she understood and saw reasons everywhere for what happened to her. Things had to be so if one wanted the supreme crown, and her part of the work was really very easy, it was just to be patient. She was often depressed, but only because the month seemed so endless and she was so tired of her discomfort — never because she was afraid. She had no fears, for she had no experience. She contemplated the final part of the adventure, the part Ilse alluded to cheerfully as her Difficult Hour, with the perfect tranquillity of ignorance. On the whole she was very free from the moods Herr Dremmel had braced himself to bear, and continued right through not to be exacting. She had no examples of more fussed over and tended women before her eyes to upset her contentment, and saw for herself how the village women in like condition worked on at their wash-tubs and in the fields up to the end. Besides, she had been trained in a healthy self-effacement.
She only cried once, but then it was February and enough to make anybody cry, with the sleet stinging the windows and the wind howling round the dark little house. She put it down to February, a month she had never thought anything of, and hid from herself as she hurriedly wiped away her tears — where did they all come from? — that she was disgracefully crying because she had been alone so long, and Ilse had gone out somewhere without asking, and Robert hadn’t spoken to her for days, and there was nobody to bring in the lamp if she didn’t fetch it herself, and she couldn’t fetch it because she felt so funny and might drop it, and what she wanted most in the world was a mother. Not a mother somewhere else, away in Redchester, but a real soft warm mother sitting beside her in that room, with her (the mother’s) arm under her (Ingeborg’s) head, and her (Ingeborg’s) face against her (the mother’s) bosom. A mother with feathers all over her like a kind hen would be very ideal, but short of that there was a soft black dress she remembered her mother used to wear with amiable old lace on it that wouldn’t scratch, and the comfort it would be, the comfort, if for half an hour she might put her cheek against this and keep it there and say nothing.
And she cried more and more, and told herself more and more eagerly, with a kind of rage, that February was no sort of month at all.
When Herr Dremmel came out of his laboratory to ask why his lamp had not been brought, and found no light anywhere and no Ilse when he shouted, he was vexed; but when he had fetched a lamp himself and put it on the table where it shone on to Ingeborg’s swollen and blinking eyes, he was still more vexed.
“This is foolish,” he said, staring down at her a moment. “You will only harm my child.”
She did not cry again.
The spring had dried up the roads, but she did not for all that take walks that obliged her to pass through the village; instead, she spent hours in the budding garden up and down on one of the two available paths, the one at the end on the edge of the rye-fields which were now the vividest green, or the one on the east side of the house beneath Robert’s laboratory windows where the lilacs grew.
His
table was at right angles to the end window, and she often stood on the path watching him, his head bent over his work in an absorption that went on hour after hour. He kept the windows shut because the spring disturbed him. It had a way of coming in irrepressibly and wantoning among his papers, or throwing a handful of lilac blossoms into his rye samples, or sending an officious bee to lumber round him.
Ingeborg walked up and down, up and down on this path every day, taking the exercise Baroness Glambeck had recommended, and for three weeks just this path was the most beautiful thing in the world, for it was planted on either side with ancient lilac bushes and they were a revelation to her when they came out after the spare and frugal lilacs in the gardens at home. Above their swaying scented loveliness of light and colour and shape she could see Robert’s low-coloured head inside the window bending over his table every time she came to the end of her tramp and turned round again. It was the best part of the whole nine months, these three weeks of lilacs and fine weather on that scented path, with Robert busy and content where she could see him. She loved being able to see him; it was a companionable thing.
By June everything was ready. The nursery was furnished, the cradle trimmed, a pale blue perambulator blocked the passage, neat stacks of little clothes filled the cupboards, and Frau Dosch, a hoary person of unseemly conversation, interviewed and told to be on the alert. The idea of arranging for a doctor to be on the alert too would not of itself have entered Ingeborg’s head, and nobody put it there. Such a being was indeed mentioned once by Baroness Glambeck, whose interest, increasing with the months, brought her over several times, but only vaguely as some one who had to be sent for when the midwife judged the patient to have reached the stage. Then, apparently, the law obliged the midwife to send for a doctor.
“There is much difference, however,” said the Baroness, “between thinking one is in extremity and really being in it,” and the patient was apt to be biassed on these occasions, she explained, and inclined rashly to jump to conclusions. Therefore wisdom dictated the leaving of such a decision to the midwife.
“Yes,” said Ingeborg placidly.
“Of course,” said the Baroness, “all this is different from other illnesses, because it is not one.”
“Yes,” said Ingeborg, placidly.
“And when I speak of the patient I do not mean the patient, because without an illness there cannot be a patient.”
“No,” said Ingeborg, placidly.
“Nor without a patient can there be an illness.”
“No,” said Ingeborg, placidly.
She was leaning back in a low chair watching the sun shining on the tops of the lime-trees over her head, for it was the end of June and they were in the garden. It all seemed very satisfactory. Nobody was ill, nobody was going to be ill. There would be rather a troublesome moment that would be met and got over with patience and Frau Dosch, but no illness, just nature having its way, and then — it really seemed altogether too wonderful that then, quite soon now, perhaps in a week or two, any day really, there would be a baby. And she was going to love it with this passion of love that only mothers know, and it was going to fill her life most beautifully to the brim, and it would make her so happy that she would never want anything but just it.
That is what they had told her. On her own account she had added to this that the baby would be every bit as clever as Robert but with more leisure; that it would have his brains but not his laboratory; that it wouldn’t be able, it wouldn’t want, to get out of its perambulator and go and lock itself up away from her and weigh rye grains; and that it wouldn’t mind, in fact it would prefer, being fetched out of its thoughts to come and be kissed.
For ages, for years, it was going to be her dear and close companion, her fellow-paddler in the lake, her fellow-wanderer in God’s woods. Her eyes were soft with joy at the thought of how soon now she was going to be able to tuck this precious being under her arm and take it with her lightly and easily into the garden, restored to her own slim nimbleness again, and point out the exceeding beauty of the world to its new, astonished eyes. She would show it the rye-fields, and the great heaped-up sky. She would make it acquainted with the frogs, and introduce it to the bittern. She would draw its attention to the delight of lying face downwards on hot grass where tufts of thyme grew and watching the busy life among the blades and roots. She would insist on its observing the storks standing in their nest on the stable roof and how the light lay along their white wings, and how the red of their legs was like the red of the pollard willows in March. And at night, if it were so ill-advised as not to sleep, she would pick it up and take it to the window and impress its soft mind all over with shining little stars. Wonderful to think that before the orange-coloured lupins, those August glories, had done flowering, she would be out among them again, only with her son this time, her flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, her Robertlet.
Baroness Glambeck watched her face curiously as she lay looking up at the sunny tree-tops with the amused smile of these thoughts on it. It was clear the Frau Pastor had forgotten her presence; and even her being so near her Difficult Hour did not explain or excuse a social lapse. Indeed, the Frau Pastor received her visits with an absence of excitement and of realisation of the honour being done her that was almost beyond the limits of the forgivable. Always she behaved as though she were an equal, and a particularly equal equal. Much, however, could be excused in a person who was not only English — a nation the Baroness had heard described as rude — but so near her first confinement. When this was over there would be a severe readjustment of relationships, but meanwhile one could not really be angry with her; just her amazing and terrible ignorance of the simplest facts connected with child-bearing made it impossible to be angry with her. She reminded the Baroness of a sheep going tranquilly to the slaughter, quite pleased with the promenade, quite without a thought of what lay at the end of it. Did English mothers then all keep their daughters in such darkness on the one great subject for a woman?
For some subtle reason the expression of extreme placidness on Ingeborg’s face as she lay silently watching the tree-tops and planning what she would do with her baby annoyed the Baroness.
“It will hurt, you know,” she said.
Ingeborg brought her gaze slowly down to earth again, and looked at her a moment.
“What?” she said.
“It will hurt,” repeated the Baroness.
“Oh, yes,” said Ingeborg. “I know. But it’s all natural.”
“Certainly it is natural. Nevertheless—”
The Baroness stopped grimly, screwed up her mouth, and shook her head three times with an awful suggestiveness.
Ingeborg looked at her, and then suddenly some words out of her cathedral-going days at Redchester flashed into her mind. She had totally forgotten them, and now her memory began jerking them together. They came, she knew, in the Prayer-book somewhere; was it in the Litany? No; but anyhow they were in that truthful book, the Book of Common Prayer, and they were — yes, that was it: The great danger of child-birth. Yes; and again: The great pain and peril of child-birth.
A quick flush came into her face, and for the first time a look of fear into her eyes. She sat up, leaning on both her hands, and stared at the Baroness.
“Is it so very dreadful?” she asked.
The Baroness merely shook her head.
“It can’t be very” said Ingeborg, watching the Baroness’s expression in search of agreement, “or there wouldn’t be any mothers left.”
The Baroness went on screwing up her mouth and shaking her head.
“It must be bearable,” said Ingeborg again, anxiously.
The Baroness would not commit herself.
“They’d die, you see, if it wasn’t — the mothers all would. But there seem” — her voice trembled a little in her desire for the Baroness’s agreement— “there seem to be lots of mothers still about.”
She paused, but the Baroness continued not to commit herself.
>
“I can bear anything,” said Ingeborg, with a great show of pride and a voice that trembled, “if it’s — if it’s reasonable.”
“It is not reasonable,” said the Baroness. “It is the Will of God.”
“Oh, that’s the same thing, the same thing,” said Ingeborg, throwing herself back on her cushions and nervously pulling some white pinks she had been smelling to pieces.
She was ashamed of her terror. But all that evening she was restless and nervous, struggling with this new feeling of fear. She could not keep still, but walked about the sitting-room while Robert ate his supper at the table, pressing her cold hands together, trying to reason herself into tranquillity again.
She stood still a moment watching Robert’s quiet black back as he bent over his supper. Then she went over to him impulsively and rubbed both her hands quickly through his hair, which had not been cut for some time, making it stand up on ends.
“There!” she said. “Now you look really sweet.” And she bent and kissed him, lingeringly, on the back of his neck. He was near her, he was alive, she could hold on to him for a little before she went alone into whatever it was of icy and awful and unknown that waited for her.
“Good little wife,” he said, still going on eating, but putting his left arm round her while his right continued to do what was necessary with the supper, and not looking up.
His affection at this time had watered down into a mild theory. She was not a wife to him, though he called her so; she was a werdende Mutter. This, Herr Dremmel told himself when he, too, felt bored by the length of the months, is a most honourable, creditable, and respectable condition; but no man can feel warm towards a condition. His little sheep had disappeared into the immensities of the werdende Mutter. He would be glad when she was restored to him.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 153