Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  “Now then,” he said, “I’ll go with you anyhow to the end of the avenue. Where is home?”

  “Kökensee,” said Ingeborg, trotting to keep up with him. “It’s the next village. I’m the pastor’s wife.”

  Ingram — for it was that celebrated artist, then at thirty-five, already known all over Europe as more especially and letting alone his small exquisite things a surprising, indeed a disturbingly surprising painter of portraits — glanced down at her and stepped out more vigorously. “That’s an amusing thing to be,” he said. “And quite new.”

  “It isn’t very new. I’ve been it eighteen months. Why do you think it’s amusing?”

  “It’s different from anything else. Nobody was ever a pastor’s wife in — what did you call it? — before.”

  “Kökensee.”

  “Kökensee. Kökensee. I like that. You’re unique to live in Kökensee. Nobody else has achieved that.”

  “It wasn’t very difficult. I just stayed passive and was brought.”

  “And they didn’t mind?”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “Your people. Your father and mother. Or are you Melchisedec and never had any?”

  “Why should they mind?”

  “Coming so far. It’s rather the end of the world. You’re right up against the edge of Russia.”

  “I wanted to.”

  “Of course. I didn’t suppose you were dragged across Europe by your hair to Kökensee. I’ll come all the way with you. I want to see Kökensee.”

  “Don’t walk so fast, then,” said Ingeborg, panting. “I can’t walk like that.”

  He looked at her as he went slower. “Is that the effect of Kökensee?” he said. “Why can’t you walk like that? You’re only a girl.”

  “I’m not a girl at all. I’m a wife, I’m a mother. I’m everything really now except a mother-in-law and a grandmother. That’s all there’s still left to be. I think they’re rather dull things, both of them.”

  “You won’t think so when you’ve got there.”

  “That’s the dreadfullest part of it.”

  “It’s a kindly trick Time plays on us. Are you a real pastor’s wife who goes about her parish being an example?”

  “I haven’t yet. But I’m going to.”

  “What — not begun in eighteen months? But what do you do then all day long?”

  “First I cook, and then I — don’t cook.”

  They were out in the open, on the bit of road that passed between meadows. Ingram stopped and looked at something over to the left with sudden absorbed attention. She followed his eyes, but did not see much — a wisp of mist along the grass, the top twigs of a willow emerging from it, and above it the faint sky. He said nothing, and presently went on walking faster than ever.

  “Please go a little slower,” begged Ingeborg, her heart thumping with effort.

  “I think you know,” said Ingram, suiting himself to her, “you should be able to walk better than that.”

  “Yes,” said Ingeborg.

  “I suppose that’s the danger of places like Kökensee — one lets oneself get slack.”

  “Yes,” said Ingeborg.

  “You mustn’t, you know. Imagine losing one’s lines. Just think of the horrible indefinite lines of a fat woman.”

  “Yes,” said Ingeborg. “Do you paint much?” she asked, unable to endure this turn of the conversation.

  He looked at her and laughed. “A good deal,” he said. Then he added, “I’m Ingram.”

  “Is that your name? Mine’s Dremmel.”

  “Edward Ingram,” he said, looking at her. It was inconceivable she should not know.

  “Ingeborg Dremmel,” she said, as though it were a game.

  He was silent a moment. Then he stopped with a jerk. “I don’t think I’ll come any farther,” he said. “The Glambecks will be wondering what has become of me. Glambeck brought me down for a couple of nights, and I can’t be not there all the time.”

  “But you wanted to see Kökensee—”

  “Doesn’t anybody ever read in Kökensee?”

  “Read?”

  “Papers? Books? Reviews? Criticisms? What the world’s doing in all the million places that aren’t Kökensee? Who everybody is? What’s being thought and created?”

  He had an oddly nettled look.

  “Robert takes in the Norddeutscheallgemeinezeitung, and I’ve been reading Kipling—”

  “Kipling! Well, good-bye.”

  “But isn’t Kipling — why, till I married I had only the Litany.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “That and Psalms and things. I felt very empty on the Litany.”

  “I can imagine it. I’d lose no more time then in furnishing my emptiness. Good-bye.”

  “Oh, don’t go — wait a moment. It’s such ages since I’ve — Furnishing it how? What ought I — ?”

  “Read, read, read — everything you can lay your hands on.”

  “But there isn’t anything to lay hands on.”

  “My dear lady, haven’t you postcards? Write to London and order the reviews to be sent out to you. Get some notion of people and ideas. Good-bye.”

  “Oh — but won’t you really come and look at Kökensee?”

  “It’s a dark place. I’m afraid what I’d see there would be nothing.”

  “There’ll be more light to-morrow—”

  “I’m going south again to-morrow with Glambeck. I only came for a day. I was curious about provincial German interiors. Good-bye.”

  “Oh, but do—”

  “My advice is very sound, you know. One can’t shut one’s eyes and just sleep while the procession of men and women who are making the world goes past one, unless” — his eyes glanced over the want of trimness of her figure, the untidy way her loose coat was fastened— “unless one doesn’t mind running to seed.”

  “But I do mind,” cried Ingeborg. “It’s the last thing I want to run to—”

  “Then don’t. Good-bye.”

  He took off his hat and was already several steps away from her by the time it was on his head again. Then he turned round and called out to the dejected little figure standing where he had left it in the sandy road with the grey curtain of mist blurring it: “It really is everybody’s duty to know at least something of what’s being done in the world.”

  And he jerked away into the dusk towards Glambeck.

  She stood a long while looking at the place where the gloom had blotted him out. Wonderful to have met somebody who really talked to one, who actually told one what to do. She went home making impulsive resolutions, suddenly brave again, her chin in the air. Ill or not ill she was not going to be beaten, she was not going to wait another day before beginning to fill her stupid mind. It was monstrous she should be so ignorant, so uneducated. What was she made of, then, what poor cheap stuff, that she could think of nothing better than to cry because she did not feel as well as she used to? Weren’t there heaps of things to do even when one was ill? Had she not herself heard of sick people whose minds triumphed so entirely over their prostrate flesh that from really quite perpetual beds they shed brightness on whole parishes?

  She wrote that night to Mudie demanding catalogues of him almost with fierceness, and ordered as a beginning the Spectator and Hibbert Journal, both of which at Redchester had been mentioned in her presence by prebendaries. When they arrived she read them laboriously from cover to cover, and then ordered all the monthly reviews they advertised. She subscribed at once to the Times and to a weekly paper called the Clarion because it was alluded to in one of the reviews; she showered postcards on Mudie, for whatever books she read about she immediately bought, deciding that that was as good a way of starting as any other; and she had not been reading papers a week before she came across Edward Ingram’s name.

  A great light dawned on her. “Oh—” she said with a little catch of the breath, turning hot; and became aware that she had just been having the most recognisably interesting encou
nter of her life.

  CHAPTER XXII

  In seven years Ingeborg had six children. She completely realised during that period the Psalmist’s ideal of a reward for a good man and was altogether the fruitful vine about the walls of his house. She was uninterruptedly fruitful. She rambled richly. She saw herself, at first with an astonished chagrin and afterwards with resignation, swarming up to the eaves of her little home, pauseless, gapless, luxuriantly threatening choke the very chimneys. At the beginning she deplored this uninterrupted abundance, for she could not but see that beneath it the family roof grew a little rotten and sometimes, though she made feeble efforts to keep it out, a rather dismal rain of discomfort soaked in and dimmed the brightness of things. Good servants would not come to such a teeming household. The children that were there suffered because of the children that were soon going to be there. It was a pity, she thought, that when one produced a new child one could not simultaneously produce a new mother for it, so that it should be as well looked after as one’s first child had been. She could mend their stockings, because that could be done lying on a sofa, but she was never sure about anything else that concerned them. And there were so many things, such endless vital things to be seen to if babies were to flourish. And when the first ones grew bigger and she might have begun those intimate expeditions and communions with them she used to plan, she found that, too, was impossible, for she was so deeply engaged in providing them with more brothers and sisters that she was unable to move.

  The days between her first and second child were the best. She was still strong enough to tub Robertlet every night and prepare his food, and keep a watchful eye on him most of the time; also, he was only one, and easy to deal with. And he was so exact and punctual in his ways that he seemed like a clock you wound up at regular intervals and knew would then go on by itself; and his clothes, naturally, were all new and needed little mending; and she still had Ilse, who did not marry till a year later; and she had persuaded herself, for one must needs persuade oneself of something, that after this next baby there would be a pause.

  This persuasion, and the few admonishments Edward Ingram had thrown at her that afternoon, helped her extraordinarily. So easily could she be stirred to courage and enthusiasm that she was able to forget most of her fears and discomforts in the new business of training her mind to triumph over her body, and she got through a surprising quantity of mixed reading that winter and spring; and when at last in the following May her hour had come, she marched off almost recklessly with her two plaits already hanging down her back and her head held high and her eyes wide and shining to the fatal bedroom where Death she supposed, but refused to care, sat waiting to see if he could not get her this time, so filled was she with the spirit she had been cultivating for six months of proud determination not to be beaten.

  She was, however, beaten.

  It was the absence of pauses that beat her. She came to be, as the German phrase put it, in a continual condition of being blest. She came to be also continually more bloodless. Gradually sinking away more and more from energy as one child after the other sapped her up, she left off reading, dropping the more difficult things first. The Hibbert Journal went almost at once. Soon the Times was looked at languidly and not opened. The National Review gave her an earache. Presently she was too far gone even for the Spectator. The Clarion lasted longest, but a growing distaste for its tone caused it finally to be abandoned. For she was becoming definitely religious; she was ceasing to criticise or to ask Why? She would sit for hours contemplating the beauty of acquiescence. It gave her a boneless satisfaction. The more anæmic she grew the easier religion seemed to be. It was much the least difficult thing to be passive, to yield, not to think, not to decide, never to want explanations. And everybody praised her. How nice that was! Baroness Glambeck approved, Frau Dosch approved loudly. The elder Frau Dremmel came out each year twice and silently approved of a mother whose offspring was so strikingly like herself; while as for Kökensee, it regarded her with the respect due to a person becoming proverbial. It is true Robert seemed to love her rather less than more, in spite of her obviously deserving to be loved more than ever now that she was at one with him about Providence; yet it was hardly fair to say that, either, for nobody could be kinder than he was when he was not busy. He was busy from morning to night. How nice that was, she thought, her hands folded; she had always thought it nice to be busy.

  Of her six children Robertlet flourished, and so did the sister who came after him. The next two died, one doing it boldly of mumps, a thing that had never been achieved before and greatly interested the doctor, who predicted a memorable future for him if he had been going to have one, and the other, more explicably, by falling out of the punt when his very existence depended on his keeping in it. Then they took to being born dead; two of them in succession did this; and it was after the second had done it that Ingeborg reached her lowest ebb of vitality and could hardly be got to say a sentence that did not include heaven.

  When she had been up and dressed two months and still lay about on sofas being religious, Herr Dremmel, who was patient but slowly becoming conscious that there was an atmosphere of chapelle ardente about his parlour on his coming into it with the innocent briskness of a good man to his supper, thought perhaps the Meuk doctor, who by now was a familiar feature in his life, had better come over and advise; and so it was that Ingeborg went to Zoppot, that bracing and beautiful seaside resort near Danzig, leaving her home for the first time since her marriage, going indeed with as much unwillingness as so will-less a person could possess, but sent off regardless of her moist opposition by the doctor, who would not even allow her to take Robertlet and Ditti with her.

  She went in the care of the nurse who had helped her after Robertlet’s birth, and she was to stay there all June and all July, and all August and September as well if necessary.

  “But what will they do without me?” she kept on feebly asking. “And my duties — how can I leave everything?”

  Tears poured down her face at her departure. She gave keepsakes to both the servants. She sent for the sexton, with whom she had latterly grown friendly, and tried to speak but could not. She folded the impassive Robertlet and Ditti to her heart so many times that they were stirred to something almost approaching activity and resistance.

  “Your prayers — you won’t forget what Mummy taught you?” she wept, as though she were taking leave of them for ever.

  “Dear Robert,” she sobbed, clinging to him with her cheek against his on the platform at Meuk where he saw her off, “do forgive me if I’ve been a bad wife to you. I have tried. You won’t forget — will you — ever — that I did try?”

  The nurse gave her a spoonful of Brand’s Meat Jelly. The journey was a journey of jelly combating grief. All the way each relapse into woe was instantly interrupted by jelly; and it was not till the evening, when they reached the little pension on the sands which was to be their home for two months, and Ingeborg going to the open window gave a quick cry as the full freshness and saltness and heaving glancing beauty burst upon her, that the nurse threw the rest of the tin away and put her trust altogether in the sea.

  Herr Dremmel returned to his wifeless home in a meditative frame of mind. As he jolted along in the same carriage, only grown more shaky, in which he had brought his bride back seven years before, he indulged, first, in a brief wonder at the ups and downs of women; from this he passed to a consideration of the superior reliability of chemicals; from this, again, he proceeded to reflect that, nevertheless, a man’s life should be decorated at the edges, and that the most satisfactory decoration was a wife and family. Ingeborg, in spite of her ups and downs, had been a good wife to him, and he did not regret having attached her to his edges, but then he also had done his part and been a good husband to her. Few marriages, he thought, could have been so harmonious and successful as theirs. He loved her as an honest man should love his wife — at judicious intervals. Always he had affection for her, and liked being
with her when she was feeling well. Her money — every wife should have a little — had helped him much, indeed had made most of the successes that had rewarded his labours possible, and she had given him a child a year, which was, he was aware, the maximum output and rendered him civically satisfactory. That these children should, four of them, not have succeeded in staying alive, and that the two who had should bear so striking a resemblance to his mother, a person he knew for unintelligent, were misfortunes, but one did not dwell on misfortunes; one turned one’s back on them and went away and worked. The central fact of life, its core of splendour, he said to himself as, arrived at home, he hung up his hat in the passage and prepared to plunge with renewed appetite into his laboratory, was work; but, he added as he passed the open door of the sitting-room, and was reminded by its untidiness of domesticities, since one had to withdraw occasionally from the heat of that great middle light and refresh oneself in something cooler, one needed a place of relaxation where the interest was more attenuated, a ring of relative tepidity round the bright centre of one’s life, and this ring was excellently supplied by the object commonly called the family circle. The harder he worked, the more hotly he pursued knowledge, the more urgent was a man’s need for intervals of tepidity. One sought out one’s little wife and rested one’s brain; one took one’s son on one’s knee; one pulled, perhaps, the plait of one’s daughter.

  Life for Herr Dremmel was both great and simple. During the seven years of his marriage it had become continually more so. There were times he could remember previous to that event when he had lost sight of this truth in a confused hankering, periods during which he had hankered persistently, moments that astonished him afterwards to call to mind when, the lilacs being out in the garden and the young corn of the fields asprout in the warm spring sun, his laboratory, that place of hopes and visions, had incredibly appeared to him to be mere bones. Marriage had banished these distortions of perception, and he had lived seven years in the full magnificent consciousness of the greatness and simplicity of life. He was armoured by his singleness of purpose. He never came out of his armour and was petty. Not once, while Ingeborg in a distant corner of the house was fearing that she had hurt him, or offended him, or had made him think she did not love him, had he been hurt or offended or thinking anything of the sort. He was absorbed in great things, great interests, great values. There was no room in his thoughts for meditations on minor concerns. The days were not wide enough for the bigness they had to hold, and it never would have occurred to him to devote any portion of their already limited space to inquiring if he had been hurt. His interested eyes, carefully examining and comparing and criticising phenomena, had no time for introspection. As the years passed and successes followed upon his patience, his absorption and subjugation by his work became increasingly profound; for a man has but a handful of years, and cannot during that brief span live too inquisitively. Herr Dremmel was wringing more out of Nature, who only asks to be forced to tell, each year. He was accumulating experiences and knowledge of an interest and value so great that everything else was trivial beside them. The passing day was forgotten in the interest of the day that was to come. The future was what his brain was perpetually concerned with, and an eye ranging with growing keenness over a growingly splendid and detailed vision cannot observe, it would be an interruption, a waste to observe, the fluctuations in the moods of, for instance, a family or a parish.