The next day she got a letter from Mrs. Bullivant, dated from the Master’s House, Ananias College, Oxford.
“It may interest you to hear,” wrote Mrs. Bullivant, “that your sister has a little daughter. The child was born at daybreak this morning. I am worn out with watching. It is a very fine little girl, and both mother and child are doing well. I am not doing well at all. We had that excellent Dr. Williamson, I am thankful to say, or I don’t know what would have happened. Of course our darling Judith was mercifully spared knowing anything about it, for she was kept well under chloroform, but I knew and I feet very upset. I only wish I, too, could have been chloroformed during those anxious hours. As it is I am suffering much from shock, and it will be a long while before I recover. Dr. Williamson says that on these occasions he always pities most the mothers of the mothers. Your father—”
But here Ingeborg let the letter drop to the floor and sat thinking.
When Robert came in to dinner late that day, hot and pleased from his fields which were doing particularly well after the warm rains of several admirably timed thunderstorms, she gave him his food and waited till he had eaten it and begun to smoke, and then asked him if she were going to have chloroform.
“Chloroform?” he repeated, gazing at her while he fetched back his thoughts from their pleasurable lingering among his fields. “What for?”
“So that I don’t know about anything. Mother writes Judith had some. She’s got a little girl.”
Herr Dremmel took his cigar out of his mouth and stared at her. She was leaning both elbows on the table at her end and, with her chin on her hands, was looking at him with very bright eyes.
“But this is cowardice,” he said.
“I’d like some chloroform,” said Ingeborg.
“It is against nature,” said Herr Dremmel.
“I’d like some chloroform,” said Ingeborg.
“You have before you,” said Herr Dremmel, endeavouring to be patient, “an entirely natural process, as natural as going to sleep at night and waking up next morning.”
“It may be as natural,” said Ingeborg, “but I don’t believe it’s as nice. I’d like some chloroform.”
“What! Not nice? When it is going to introduce you to the supreme—”
“Y’es, I know. But I — I have a feeling it’s going to introduce me rather roughly. I’d like some chloroform.”
“God,” said Herr Dremmel solemnly, “has arranged these introductions Himself, and it is not for us to criticise.”
“That’s the first time,” said Ingeborg, “that you’ve talked like a bishop. You might be a bishop.”
“When it comes to the highest things,” said Herr Dremmel severely, “and this is the holiest, most exalted act a human being can perpetrate, all men are equally believers.”
“I expect they are,” said Ingeborg. “But the others — the ones who’re not men — they’d like some chloroform.”
“No healthy, normally built woman needs it,” said Herr Dremmel, greatly irritated by this persistence. “No doctor would give it. Besides, there will not be a doctor, and the midwife may not administer it. Why, I do not recognise my little wife, my little intelligent wife who must know that nothing is being required of her but that which is done by other women every day.”
“I don’t see what being intelligent has to do with this,” said Ingeborg, “and I’d like some chloroform.”
Herr Dremmel looked at her bright eyes and flushed cheeks in astonishment. Up to now she had rejoiced in her condition whenever he mentioned it, and indeed he could see no reason for any other attitude; she had apparently felt very little that was not pleasant during the whole time, known none of those distresses he had heard that women sometimes endure, been healthily free from complications. There had been moods, it is true, and he had occasionally found her lounging on sofas, but then women easily become lazy at these times. It had all been normal and would no doubt continue normal. What, then, was this shrinking at the eleventh hour, this inability to be as ordinarily courageous as every peasant woman in the place? It was a most unfortunate, unpleasant whim, the most unfortunate she could have had. He had been prepared for whims, but had always supposed they would be tinned pine apples. Of course he was not going to humour her. Too much was at stake. He had heard anæsthetics were harmful on these occasions, harmful and entirely unnecessary. The best thing by far for the child was the absence of everything except nature. Nature in this matter should be given a free hand. She was not always wise, he knew from his experience with his fields, but in this department he was informed she should be left completely to herself. If his wife was so soft as not to be able to bear a little pain what sort of sons was she likely to give him? A breed of shrinkers; a breed of white-skinned hiders. Why, he had not asked for gas even when he had three teeth out at one sitting two years before — it was the dentist who had insisted he should have it — and that was only teeth, objects of no value afterwards. But to have one’s son handicapped at the very beginning because his mother was not unselfish enough to endure a little for his sake....
Ingeborg got up and came and put her arms round his neck and whispered. “I’m — frightened,” she breathed. “Robert, I’m — frightened.”
Then he took her to the sofa, and made her sit down beside him while he reasoned with her.
He reasoned for at least twenty minutes, taking great pains and being patient. He told her she was not really frightened, but that her physical condition caused her to fancy she thought she was.
Ingeborg was interested by this, and readily admitted that it was possible.
He told her about the simple courage of the other women in Kökensee, and Ingeborg agreed, for she had seen it herself.
He told her how God had arranged she should bring forth in sorrow, but she fidgeted and began again to talk of bishops.
He told her it would only be a few hours’ suffering, perhaps less, and that in return there was a lifetime’s joy for them in their child.
She listened attentively to this, was quite quiet for a few minutes, then slid her hand into his.
He told her she might, by letting herself go to fear, hurt her child, and would she not in that case find difficulty afterwards in forgiving herself?
This completed her cure. An enormous courage took the place of her misgivings. She rose up from the sofa so superfluously brave, so glowing with enterprise, that she wanted to begin at once that she might show how much she could cheerfully endure. “As though,” she said, lifting her chin, “I couldn’t stand what other women stand — as though I wouldn’t stand anything sooner than hurt my baby!” And she flung back her head in the proudest defiance of whatever might be ahead of her.
Her baby, her husband, her happy home — to suffer for these would be beautiful if it were not such a little thing, almost too little to offer up at their dear altar. She would have been transfigured by her shining thoughts if any thing could have transfigured her, but no thoughts however bright could pierce through that sad body. Her outlines were not the outlines for heroic attitudes. She not only had a double chin, she seemed to be doubled all over. She looked the queerest figure, heavy, middle-aged, uncouth, ugly, standing there passionately expressing her readiness to begin; and Herr Dremmel unconsciously seeing this, and bored by having had to explain the obvious at such length and spend a valuable half hour bringing a woman to reason — why could they never go to it by themselves? — wasted no more words having got her there, but brushed a hasty kiss across her hair and went away looking at his watch.
And next day, just as she was putting the potatoes into that dinner-pot that so much simplified her cooking, she uttered a small exclamation and turned quickly to Ilse with a look of startled questioning.
“Geht’s los?” asked Ilse, pausing in the wiping dry of a wooden ladle.
“I — don’t know,” said Ingeborg, gasping a little. “No,” she added after a minute, during which they stood staring at each other, “it wasn’t anything.�
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And she went on with the potatoes.
But when presently there was another little fluttering exclamation, Ilse, with great decision, laid down her gloomy drying-cloth and sought out Johann, Herr Dremmel not having come in, and bade him harness the horses and fetch Frau Dosch.
“The first thing,” said Frau Dosch, arriving two hours later, surprisingly brisk and business-like considering her age and the heat, “the first thing is to plait your hair in two plaits.”
And still later, when Ingeborg had left off pretending or trying to be anything at all, when courage and unselfishness and stoicism and a desire to please Robert — who was Robert? — were like toys for drawing-room games, shoved aside in these grips with death, Frau Dosch nodded her head philosophically while she ate and drank from the trays Ilse kept on bringing her, and said at regular intervals, “Ja, ja — was sein muss sein muss.”
Such were the consolations of Frau Dosch.
CHAPTER XX
These things began on Tuesday at midday; and on Wednesday night, so late that bats and moths were busy in the garden and often in the room, Frau Dosch, grown very wispy about the hair and abandoned in the dress, dabbed a bundle of swaddle with a small red face emerging from it down on to the bed beside Ingeborg and said, tired but triumphant, “There!”
The great moment had come: the supreme moment of a woman’s life. Herr Dremmel was present, dishevelled and moist-eyed; Ilse was present, glowing and hot. It was a boy, a magnificent boy, Frau Dosch pronounced, and the three stood watching for the first ray of Mutterglück, the first illumination that was to light the face on the pillow.
“There!” said Frau Dosch; but Ingeborg did not open her eyes.
“There!” said Frau Dosch again, picking up the bundle and laying it slantwise on Ingeborg’s breast and addressing her very loudly. “Frau Pastor — rouse yourself — behold your son — a splendid boy — almost a man already.”
She took Ingeborg’s arm and laid it round the bundle.
It slid off and hung over the edge of the bed as before.
“Tut, tut!” said Frau Dosch, becoming scandalised: and stooping down she shouted into Ingeborg’s ear: “Frau Pastor — wake up — look at your son — a magnificent fellow — with a chest, I tell you — oh, but he will break the hearts of the maidens he will—”
Still the blankest indifference on the face on the pillow.
Herr Dremmel knelt down so as to be on a level with it, and took the limp damp hand hanging down in his and patted it.
“Little wife,” he said in German, “it is all over. Open your eyes and rejoice with me in our new happiness. You have given me a son.”
“Ja eben,” said Frau Dosch emphatically.
“You have filled my cup with joy.”
“Ja eben,” said Frau Dosch, still louder.
“Open your eyes, and welcome him to his mother’s heart.”
“Ja eben” said Frau Dosch indignantly.
Then Ingeborg did slowly open her eyes — it seemed as if she could hardly lift their heavy lids — and looked at Robert as though she were looking at him from an immense distance. Her mouth remained open; her face was vacant.
Frau Dosch seized the bundle, and with clucking sounds jerked it up and down between the faces of the parents so that its mother’s eyes must needs fall upon it. Its red contents began to cry.
“Ah — there now — now we shall see,” exclaimed Frau Dosch, who had been secretly perturbed by the newborn’s absence of comment while it was being washed and swaddled.
“The first cry of our son,” said Herr Dremmel, kissing Ingeborg’s hand with deep emotion.
“Now we will try,” said Frau Dosch, once more laying the baby on Ingeborg’s chest and folding her arm round it. This time she took the precaution to hold the mother’s arm firmly in position herself. “Oh, the splendid fellow!” she exclaimed. “Frau Pastor, what do you say to your eldest son?”
But Frau Pastor said nothing. Her eyelids drooped over her eyes again, and shut the world and all its vigours out. The sound of these people round her bed came to her from far away. There was a singing in her ears, a black remoteness in her soul. Somewhere from behind the vast sea of nothingness in which she seemed to sink, through the constant singing in her ears, came little faint voices with words. She wanted to listen, she wanted to listen, why would these people interrupt her — the same words over and over again, faintly throbbing in a rhythm like the rhythm of the wheels of the train that had brought her through the night long ago across Europe to her German home, only very distant, tiny, muffled— “From battle and murder” — yes, she had caught that— “from all women labouring with child” — yes— “from all sick persons” — yes— “and young children” — yes, go on— “Good Lord deliver us” — oh, yes — please.... Good Lord deliver us — please — please — deliver us....
“Perhaps a little brandy?” suggested Herr Dremmel, puzzled.
“Brandy! If her own son cannot cheer her — Does the Herr Pastor then not know that one gives nothing at first to a lady lying-in but water-soup?”
Herr Dremmel, feeling ignorant, let go the idea of brandy. “Her hand is rather cold,” he said, almost apologetically, for who knew but what it was cold because it ought to be?
Frau Dosch expressed the opinion that it was not, and that if it were it was not so cold as her heart. “See here,” she said, “see this beautiful boy addressing his mother in the only language he knows, and she not even looking at him. Come, my little fellow — come, then — we are not wanted — come with Aunt Dosch — the old Aunt Dosch—”
And she took the baby off Ingeborg’s passive chest, and after a few turns with it up and down the room slapping the underside of its swaddle in a way experience had taught choked out crying, put it in the pale blue cradle that stood ready on two chairs.
“Well, well,” said Herr Dremmel getting up, for his knees were hurting him, and looking at his watch, “it is bedtime for all of us. It is past midnight. To-morrow, after a sleep, my wife will be herself again.”
He went towards the door, followed by Ilse with one of the two lamps that were adding to the stifling heat in the room, then paused and looked back.
Ingeborg was lying as before.
“You are sure only water-soup?” he said, hesitating. “Is that — will that by the time it reaches my son nourish him?”
For all answer Frau Dosch advanced heavily and shut the door.
She was tired to death. She was not, at that hour of the night, going to defend her methods to a husband. She locked the door and began pulling off her dress. She could hardly stand. It had been one of those perfectly normal births that yet are endless and half kill an honest midwife who is not as young as she used to be. Before dropping on to the bed provided for her she took a final look at the object in the cradle, which was noiselessly sleeping, and then at the other object on the bed, which was lying as before. Well, if the Frau Pastor preferred behaving like a log instead of a proud mother — Frau Dosch shrugged her shoulder, put on a coloured dimity jacket over her petticoat, kicked off her slippers, and went, stockinged and hairpinned, to bed and to instant sleep.
But the life in the parsonage puzzled Herr Dremmel during the next few weeks. He had expected the simple joys of realised family happiness to succeed the act of birth. It was a reasonable expectation. It occurred in other houses. He had been patient for nine months, supported during their interminableness by the thought that what he bore would be amply made up to him at the end of them by a delighted young wife restored to him in her slenderness and health, running singing about the house with a healthy son in her arms. The son was there and seemed satisfactory, but where was the healthy young wife? And as for running about the house, when the fifth day came, the day on which the other women in the parish got up and began to be brisk again, Ingeborg made no sign of even being aware it was expected of her. She looked at him vaguely when he suggested it, with the same vagueness and want of interest in anything with
which she lay for hours staring out of the window, her mouth always a little open, her position always the same, unless Ilse came and changed it for her.
Frau Dosch had left the morning after the birth according to the custom of midwives, returning on each of the three following mornings to wash the mother and child, and after that Ilse had taken over these duties, and as far as he could see performed them with zeal and vigour. Everything was done that could be done; why then did Ingeborg remain apathetic and uninterested in bed, and not take the trouble even to shut her mouth?
He was puzzled and disappointed. The days passed, and nothing was changed. He could not but view these manifestations of want of backbone with uneasiness, occurring as they did in the mother of his children. The least thing that was demanded of her in the way of exertion made her break out into a perspiration. She had not yet, so far as he knew, voluntarily put her arms once round her son — Ilse had to hold them round him. She had not even said anything about him. He might have been a girl for any pride she showed. And that holiest function of a mother, the nursing of her child, instead of being a recurring joy was a recurring and apparently increasing difficulty.
He had pointed out to her that it was not only the greatest privilege of a mother to nurse her child but it was an established fact that it gave her the deepest, the holiest satisfaction. In all pictures where there is a mother, he had reminded her, she is invariably either nursing or has just been doing so, and on her face is the satisfied serenity that attends the fulfilment of natural functions.
She had not answered, and her face remained turned away and flushed, with beads rolling down it. Ilse held the baby, he observed; there was a most regrettable want of hold in his wife.
And she appeared to have odd fancies. She imagined, for instance, that the pieces of buttered bread Ilse put on a plate and laid beside her on her bed at tea-time were stuck to the plate. He had found her struggling one afternoon and becoming hot endeavouring to lift one of these pieces up off the plate. He had asked her, Ilse not being in the room, what she was doing. As usual she had whispered — it was another of her fancies that she had lost her voice — and when he bent down he found that she was whispering the word stuck.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 154