Pastor's Wife — 09 Section 09

The doctor said he would send some tins of patent food out by Johann on his return journey; if there should be much delay and the baby was noisy, said the doctor, a little water-- "Water!

My son fed on water?"

exclaimed Herr Dremmel.

"Heavens above us, what diet is this for a good German?

Tins and water in the place of blood and iron?"

The doctor shrugged his shoulder, and gently putting down Ingeborg's hand which he had been holding for a moment to see if he could quiet it, prepared to go away, saying he would also send out a nurse.

"Ahh," said Herr Dremmel, greatly relieved, "you know of a thoroughly healthy wet one?"

"Completely dry.

For Frau Pastor.

Impossible to leave her unnursed.

There will be bandages.

There must be punctuality and care"--he looked at Frau Dosch--"cleanliness, efficiency"--at each word he looked at Frau Dosch.

"I will come out to-morrow.

Perfectly normal, perfectly normal," he said, as he got into the carriage while Herr Dremmel stood ruefully on the doorstep.

The illness went its perfectly normal course.

A nurse came out from the principal Königsberg hospital and the disordered house at once became perfectly normal, too.

Ilse returned to her kitchen, the baby was appeased by its scientific diet, Ingeborg's bed grew smooth and spotless, her room was quiet, nobody knocked any more against the foot of the bed in passing or shook the floor and herself by heavy treading;

she was no longer tended with the same vigour that made the kitchen floor spotless and the pig happy; bandages, unguents, and disinfectants stood neatly in rows, clean white cloths covered the tables, the windows were wide open day and night, and lamps left off burning exactly where they shone into her eyes.

Everything was normal, including the behaviour of the abscess, which went its calm way, unhurried and undisturbed by anything the doctor tried to do to it, ripening, reaching its perfection, declining, in an order and obedience to causation that was beautiful for those capable of appreciating it.

Everything was normal except the inside of Ingeborg's mind.

There, in a black recess, crouched fear.

She suspected life.

She had lost, on that awful night and day and night again of birth, confidence in it.

She knew it now.

It was all death.

Death and cruelty.

Death and nameless horror.

Death pretending, death waiting, waiting to be cruel again, to get her again, and get her altogether next time.

What was this talk of life?

It was only just death.

The others didn't know.

She knew.

She had seen it and been with it.

She had been down into the valley of the shadow of it uncomforted.

Her eyes had been wide open while she went.

Each step of the way was cut into her memory.

They had let her miss nothing.

She knew.

Out there in the garden the rustling leaves looked gay, and the sun looked cheerful, and the flowers she had so confidently loved looked beautiful and kind.

They were death dressed up.

Oh, she was not to be taken in any more.

She knew the very sound of him.

Often, while she was in that fever, she had heard him coming across the yard, up the steps, along the passage, pausing just outside the door, going back each time, but only for a little while.

He would come again.

The horror of it.

The horror of living with that waiting.

The horror of knowing that love ended in this, that new life was only more death.

Fearfully she lay staring at the realities that she alone in that house could see.

And she could hear her heart beating--if only she needn't have to hear her heart beating--it beat in little irregular beats, little flutters, and then a pause--and then a sudden _ping_--oh, the weak, weak helplessness--nothing to hold on to anywhere in all the world--even the bed hadn't an underneath--she was always dropping downwards, downwards, through it, away....

Sometimes the nurse came and stood beside her, and with a big wholesome hand smoothed back the hair from her absorbed and frowning forehead.

"What are you thinking about?"

she would ask, bending down and smiling.

But Ingeborg never told.

To Herr Dremmel the nurse counselled patience.

He said he had been having it for ten months.

"You must have some more," said the nurse, "and it will come right."

And so it gradually did.

Slowly Ingeborg began to creep up the curve of life again.

It was a long and hesitating creeping, but there did come a time when there were definite and widening gaps in her vision of the realities.

The first day she had meat for dinner she lost sight of them for several hours.

The next day she had meat she shut her mouth.

The day after, a feeling of shame for her black thoughts crept into her mind and stayed there.

The day after that, when she not only had meat but began a new tonic, she asked for Robertlet and put her arms round him all by herself.

Then the nurse slipped out and called Herr Dremmel; and he, hurrying in and finding her propped on pillows, holding his baby and smiling down at him just as he had pictured she would, went down once more on his knees beside the bed and took the whole group, mother, baby, and pillows, into his arms, and quite frankly and openly cried for joy.

"Little sheep ...

little sheep,..."

he kept on saying.

And Ingeborg, having reached that point in convalescence where one never misses a chance of crying, at once cried, too; and Robertlet beginning to cry, the nurse, who laughed, broke up the group.

After that things grew better every day.

Ingeborg visibly improved;

every hour almost it was possible to see some new step made back to her original self.

She clung to the nurse, who stayed on long after the carrying into the next room stage had been passed and who did not leave her till she was walking about quite gaily in the garden and beginning to do the things with Robertlet that she had planned she would.

She seemed, after the long months of ugliness, to be prettier than before.

She was so glad, so grateful, to be back again, and her gladness lit her up.

It was so wonderful to be back in the bright world of free movement, to be presently going to punt, and presently be off for a day in the forests, to be able to arrange, to be in clear possession of her time and her body.

The deliciousness of health, the happiness of being just normal made her radiant.

The September that year was one of ripe days and glowing calms.

Neither Herr Dremmel nor Ingeborg had ever been quite so happy.

He loved her as warmly as before their marriage.

He found himself noticing things like the fine texture of her skin, and observing how pretty the back of her neck was and the way her hair behaved just at that point.

She was the brightest adornment and finish to a man's house, he said to himself, independently busy with her baby and her housekeeping, not worrying him, not having to be thought about in his laboratory when he wished to work, absorbed in womanly interests, cheerful, affectionate, careful of her child.

It was delightful to have her sit on his knee again, delightful to hear her talk the sweet and sometimes even amusing nonsense with which her head seemed full, delightful to see her sudden solemnity when there was anything to be done for the personal comfort of Robertlet.

"Aren't we _happy_," said Ingeborg one evening when they were strolling after supper along the path through the rye-field, all the old fearlessness and confidence in life surging in her again.

"Did you ever _know_ anything like it?"

"It is you, my little sun among sheep," said Herr Dremmel, standing still to kiss her as energetically as though he had been beneath the pear-tree in the Bishop's garden, "it is all you."

"And presently," she said, "I'm going to do such things--Robert, such things.

First, I'm going to be a proper pastor's wife at last and turn to in the village thoroughly.

And besides that I'm going to--" She stopped and flung out her hands with a familiar gesture.

"Well, little hare?"

"Oh, I don't know--but it's fun being alive, isn't it?

I feel as if I'd only got to stretch up my hands to all those stars and catch as many of them as I want to."

And hardly had the nurse left and the household had returned to its normal arrangements, and the parlour was no longer disfigured by Herr Dremmel's temporary bed, and life was clear again, and all one had to do was to go ahead praising the dear God who had made it so spacious and so kind, than she began to have her second child.

PART III CHAPTER XXI

There was a little bay about five minutes' paddle down the lake round a corner made by the jutting out of reeds.

You took your punt round the end of an arm of reeds, and you found a small beach of fine shells, an oak-tree with half-bared roots overhanging one side of it, and a fringe of coarse grass along the top.

On this you sat and listened to the faint wash of the water at your feet and watched the sun flashing off the wings of innumerable gulls.

You couldn't see Kökensee and Kökensee couldn't see you, and you clasped your hands round your knees and thought.

Behind you were the rye-fields.

Opposite you was the forest.

It was a place of gentleness, of fair afternoon light, of bland colours--silvers, and blues, and the pale gold that reeds take on in October.

Ingeborg did not bring Robertlet to this place.

She decided, after four months' close association with him had cleared her mind of misconceptions, that he was too young.

She would not admit, with all her dreams about what she was going to do with him still vivid in her memory, that she preferred to be alone.

She would not admit that she did anything but love him ardently.

He was so good.

He never cried.

Nor did he ever do what she supposed must be the converse of crying, crow.

He neither cried nor crowed.

He neither complained nor applauded.

He ate with appetite and he slept with punctuality.

He grew big and round while you looked at him.

Who would not esteem him?

She did esteem him--more highly perhaps than she had ever esteemed anybody; but the ardent love she had been told a mother felt for her first-born was a thing about which she had to keep on saying to herself, "Of course."

He was a grave baby; and she did her best by cheery gesticulations and encouraging, humorous sounds, to accustom him to mirth, but her efforts were fruitless.

Then one day as she was bending over him trying to extract a smile by an elaborate tickling of his naked ribs she caught his eye, and instantly she jerked back and stared down at him in dismay, for she had had the sudden horrid conviction that what she was tickling was her mother-in-law.

That was the first time she noticed it, but the resemblance was unmistakable, was, when you had once seen it, overwhelming.

There was no trace, now that she tremblingly examined him, of either Robert or herself; and as for her own family, what had become of all that very real beauty, the beauty of the Bishop, the dazzlingness of Judith, and the sweet regularities of her mother?

Robertlet was as much like Frau Dremmel as he might have been if Frau Dremmel had herself produced him in some miraculous manner entirely unassisted.

The resemblance was flagrant.

It grew with every bottle.

He had the same steady eyes.

He had the same prolonged silences.

His nose was a copy.

His head, hairless, was more like Frau Dremmel's, thought Ingeborg, than Frau Dremmel's could ever have possibly been, and if ever his hair grew, she said to herself gazing at him wide-eyed, it would undoubtedly do it from the beginning in a knob.

Gradually as the days passed and the likeness appeared more and more she came, when she tubbed him and powdered his many creases, to have a sensation of infinite indiscretion; and she announced to Herr Dremmel, who did not understand, that Robertlet's first word would certainly be _Bratkartoffel_.

"Why?"

asked Herr Dremmel, from the other side of a wall of thinking.

"You'll see if it isn't," nodded Ingeborg, with a perturbed face.

But Robertlet's first word, and for a long time his only one, was _Nein_.

His next, which did not join it till some months later, was _Adieu_, which is the German for good-bye and which he said whenever anybody arrived.

"He isn't very _hospitable_," thought Ingeborg; and remembered with a chill that not once since her marriage had her mother-in-law invited her to her house in Meuk.

But she made excuses for him immediately.

"Everybody," she said to herself, "feels a little stiff at first."

To this beautiful corner of the lake, for it was very beautiful those delicate autumn afternoons, she went during Robertlet's dinner sleep to do what she called think things out; and she sat on the little shells with her hands round her knees, staring across the quiet water at the line of pale reeds along the other shore, doing it.

Presently, however, she perceived that her thinking was more a general discomfort of the mind punctuated irregularly by flashes than anything that could honestly be called clear.

Things would not be thought out--at least they would not be thought out by her; and she was feeling sick again; and how, she asked herself, can people who are busy being sick be anything _but_ sick?

Besides, things wouldn't bear thinking out.

Her eyes grew bright with fear when one of those flashes lit up what was once more ahead of her.

It was like a scarlet spear of terror suddenly leaping at her heart....

No, thought Ingeborg, turning quickly away all cold and trembling, better not think; better just sit in the sun and wonder what Robertlet would look like later on if he persisted in being exactly like Frau Dremmel and yet in due season had to go into trousers, and what would happen if the next one were like Frau Dremmel, too, and whether she would presently be teaching a row of little mothers-in-law its infant hymns.

The thought of Frau Dremmel become plural, diminished into socks and pinafores, standing neatly at her knee being taught to lisp in numbers, seized her with laughter.

She laughed and laughed; and only stopped when she discovered that what she was really doing was crying.

"Perhaps it's talking I want more than thinking," she said to Herr Dremmel at last, returning from one of these barren expeditions in search of understanding.

She said it a little timidly, for she was already less to him than she had been in that brief interval of health, and knew that with every month she would be less and less.

It was odd how sure of him she was when she was not going to have a baby, of what an easy confidence in his love, and how he seemed to slip away from her when she was.

Already, though she had only just begun, he was miles away from the loving mood in which he folded her in his arms and called her his little sheep.

Herr Dremmel, who was supping, and was not in possession of the context, recommended thinking.

He added after a pause that only a woman would have suggested a distinction.

Ingeborg did not make the obvious reply, but said she thought if she might talk to somebody, to Robert, for instance, and with her hand in his, rather _tight_ in his while she talked, so that she might feel safe, feel not quite so loose and unheld together in an enormous, awful world-- Herr Dremmel looked at his watch and said perhaps he would have time to hold her hand next week.

A few days later she said, equally without supplying him with the context, "It's blessing disguising itself, that's what it is."

Herr Dremmel, who again was supping, said nothing, preferring to wait.

"Blessing only pretending to be cruelty.

Not really cruelty at all."

Herr Dremmel still preferred to wait.

"I thought at first it was cruelty," she said, "but now I think perhaps--perhaps it's blessing."

"What did you think was cruelty, Ingeborg?"

asked Herr Dremmel, who disliked the repetition of such a word.

"Having this next baby so quickly--without time to forget."

Her eyes grew bright.

"Cruelty, Ingeborg?"

Herr Dremmel said one did not, when one was a pastor's wife, call Providence names.

"That's what I'm saying," she said.

"I thought at first it was cruel, but now I see it's really ever so much better not to waste time between one's children, and then be well for the rest of one's days.

It--it will make the contrast afterwards, when one has done with pain, so splendid."

She looked at him and pressed her hands together.

Vivid recollections lit her eyes.

"But I'd give up these splendid contrasts very _willingly_," she whispered, her face gone suddenly terror-stricken.

Herr Dremmel said that family life had always been praised not only for its beauty but for its necessity as the foundation of the State.

"You told me," said Ingeborg, who had a trick which good men sometimes found irritating of remembering everything they had ever said, "the foundation of the State was manure."

Herr Dremmel said so it was.

And so was family life.

He would not, he informed her, quibble over terms.

What he wished to make clear was that there could not be family life without a family to have it in.

"And don't you call you and me and Robertlet a family?"

she asked.

"One child?"

said Herr Dremmel.

"You would limit the family to one child?

That is a highly unchristian line of conduct."

"But the Christian lines of conduct seem to _hurt_ so," murmured Ingeborg.

"Oh, I know there have to be brothers and sisters," she added quickly before he could speak, "and it _is_ best to get it over and have done with it.

It's only when I'm--it's only sometimes that I think Robertlet would have been enough family till--till I'd had time to forget--" Again the light of terror came into her eyes.

She knew it was there.

She looked down at her plate to hide it.

Twice after that she came back from her thinking down by the lake and attempted to talk to him about questions of life and death.

Herr Dremmel was bored by questions of life and death unless they were his own ones.

He met them, however, patiently.

She arrived panting, for it was uphill back to the house, desperately needing her vision rubbed a little clearer against his so that she might reach out to reassurance and courage, and he took on an air of patience almost before she had begun.

In the presence of that premature resignation she faltered off into silence.

Also what she had wanted to say got tangled into the silliest sentences--she heard them being silly as they came out.

No wonder he looked resigned.

She could have wept with chagrin at her inarticulateness, her want of real education, her incapacity for getting her thoughts torn away from their confusion and safely landed into speech.

And there stood Robert, waiting, with that air of patience....

But how odd it was, the difference between his talk before she was going to have a baby and his silence--surely resigned silence--when she was!

She wished she knew more about husbands.

She wished that during the years at home instead of writing all those diocesan letters she had ripely reflected on the Conjugalities.

As the days went by her need of somebody to talk to, her dread of being alone with her imagination and its flashes, became altogether intolerable.

She went at last, driven by panic, to the village mothers, asking anxious questions about how they had felt, how they had managed, going round on days when she was better to the cottages where families were longest.

But nothing came of this; the attitude everywhere was a dull acceptance, a shrug of the shoulder, a tiredness.

Then she sought out the postman's wife, who looked particularly motherly and bright, and found that she was childless.

Then she met the forester one day in the woods, and was so far gone in need that she almost began to ask him her anxious questions, for he looked more motherly even than the postman's wife.

Then she thought of Baroness Glambeck, who before Robertlet's birth had been helpful in practical ways--would she not be helpful now in these spiritual stresses?

--and she walked over there with difficulty one afternoon in November through the deep wet sand, approaching her as one naked soul delivered by its urgencies from the web of reticence and convention approaches another.

But nothing could be less naked that day than the Baroness's soul.

It was dressed even to gloves and a bonnet.

It had no urgencies; and Hildebrand von Glambeck was there, the only son in the family of six, the member of it who had married most money, and his mother was proudly pouring out coffee for him in festal silk.

It was entirely contrary to custom for one's pastor's wife to walk in without having first inquired whether her visit would be acceptable; and when the Baroness perceived the sandy and disordered figure coming towards her down the long room she was not only annoyed but dismayed.

She had not seen this dearest of her children for six months, and it was the first opportunity she had had since his arrival the evening before of being alone with him, for he had brought a friend with him from Berlin, and not till after luncheon had the friend, who painted, been satisfactorily disposed of out of doors in the park, where he announced his intention of staying as long as the sun stayed on a certain beech-tree.

She wanted to ask her boy questions.

She had sent the Baron out riding round his farms so as to be able to ask questions.

She wanted to know about his life in Berlin, to her so remote and so full of drawbacks that yet glittered, a high, dangerous, less truly aristocratic life than this of lofty stagnation in God's provinces, but shone upon after all by the presence of her Emperor and King.

In her heart she believed that the Almighty had also some years ago, probably about the time of her marriage when she, too, retired into them, withdrawn into the provinces, and there particularly presided over those best of the Fatherland's nobles who stayed with a pure persistency in the places where they happened to have been born.

On His departure for the country, the Baroness decided, He had handed over Berlin and Potsdam to the care of the First of His children, her Emperor and King; and so it was that the provinces were higher and more truly aristocratic than Berlin and Potsdam, and so it was that Berlin and Potsdam nevertheless ran them very close.

And now, just as she had so cleverly contrived this hour with Hildebrand for getting at all those intimate details of his life that a mother loves but does not care to talk about before her husband, this hour for hearing about his children, his meals, his money, his dear wife's success in society and appearances, thanks to her having married into the nobility, at Court, his own health, his indigestion--that ancient tormentor of his peace, _armer Junge_--and whether he had seen or heard anything of poor Emmi, his eldest sister, who had miserably married six thousand marks a year and lived impossibly at Spandau and could not be got to admit she did not like it--just as she was going to be satisfied on all these points came that eccentric and pushing Frau Pastor and spoilt it all.

Also Hildebrand was in the very middle of one of those sad stories of scandal that one wishes one had not to listen to but naturally wants to hear the end of.

So great was the Baroness's disappointment that she found it impossible to stop herself from affecting inability to recognise the Frau Pastor till she was actually touching the coffee table.

"Ah," she then said, not getting up but slowly putting out her hand to take the hand that was being offered, and staring as though she were trying to remember where and when she had seen her before, "Ah--Frau Pastor?

This is indeed an honour."

"Present me, mamma," said Hildebrand, who had got on to his feet the instant Ingeborg appeared in the doorway.

The ceremony performed he sank again into his chair and did nothing more at all, being waited on by his mother and leaving it to her to see that the visitor was given cream and sugar and cake, until the moment arrived when Ingeborg, made abundantly and elaborately aware that she was interrupting, prepared crest-fallen to go away again.

Then once more he started up, alert and with his heels together.

"Well, and what did her husband do?"

asked the Baroness, turning again to Hildebrand as soon as Ingeborg had been got quiet on a chair with coffee, determined to hear the end of the story.

"My dear mother," said Hildebrand, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears, "what could he do?"

"He shot her?"

"Of course."

"Naturally," said the Baroness, nodding approval.

"Was she killed?"

"No. Badly wounded.

But it was enough.

His honour was avenged."

"And she will not," said the Baroness grimly, "begin these tricks again."

Ingeborg roused herself with an effort to say something.

She was extraordinarily disappointed and unnerved by not finding the Baroness alone.

"Why did he shoot her?"

she asked.

It seemed to her in her tiredness so very energetic of him to have shot her.

The Baroness turned a cold eye on her.

"Because, Frau Pastor," she said, "she was his sinning wife."

"Oh," said Ingeborg; and added an inquiry, in a nervous desire to make for a brief space agreeable small talk before going away again, whether in Germany they always shot each other when they sinned.

"Not each other," said the Baroness severely.

"At least, not if it is a husband and his wife.

He alone shoots."

"Oh," said Ingeborg, considering this.

She was sitting inertly on her chair, holding her cup of coffee slanting, too much dejected to drink it.

"And then does that make her love him again?"

she asked, in her small tired voice.

The Baroness did not answer.

"Only blood," said Hildebrand, "can wipe out a husband's dishonour."

"How _nasty_!"

said Ingeborg dejectedly.

Life seemed all blood.

She drooped over her cup, thinking of the cruelty with which things were apparently packed.

The Baroness and Hildebrand, after a pregnant silence, turned from her and began to talk of somebody they called poor Emmi.

Ingeborg sat alone with her cup, wondering how she could get away before she began to cry.

Dreadful how easily she cried now.

She must buy some more handkerchiefs.

They seemed lately to be always at the wash.

She roused herself again.

She really must say something.

As her way was when confused and unnerved, she caught at the first thing she found tumbling about in her mind.

"Why was Emmi poor?"

she asked in her small tired voice.

There was another pregnant silence.

To shorten it Ingeborg asked whether Emmi was the wife who had been shot--"The sinning one," she explained as nobody answered.

The silence became awful.

She looked up, startled by it.

From the expression on their faces and the general feel of things she thought that perhaps they wouldn't mind if she went home now.

She got up, dropping the spoon out of her saucer.

"I--think I must be going," she said.

"It's a long way home."

"It seems hardly worth while to have come," said the Baroness with extraordinary chill.

To which Ingeborg, absorbed in the failure of her effort to find help and comfort, answered droopingly "No." Outside the sun had just dropped behind the forest line, and she would have to walk fast if she wanted to be home before dark.

The mist was already rising over the meadows beyond the trees of the garden and beginning to mix with the rose and lilac of the sky.

The sandy avenue she had come along on that hot July day when first she discovered Glambeck lay at her feet in the still beauty of the last of its dresses for the year, very delicate, very transparent already, the leaves of the beeches almost all on the ground, making of the road a ribbon of light.

A November smell of dampness and of peat smoke from cottage chimneys filled the air.

There was a brooding peace over the world, as though in every house, in every family, brotherly love must needs in such gentleness continue.

She went carefully down the steps, for her body was already growing cumbersome, and along the golden way of the avenue.

She tried not to cry, not to smudge the beautiful evening with her own disappointments.

How foolish she had been to suppose that because she wanted to talk Baroness Glambeck would want to listen!

Moods did not coincide so conveniently.

She walked along, diligently stopping any stray tear with her handkerchief before it could disgrace her by coming out on to her cheeks.

Presently Baroness Glambeck might passionately want to listen--it was quite conceivable--and she herself would not in the least want to talk.

How foolish it all was!

One had to stand on one's own feet.

It was no good going about calling out for help.

It was less than no good crying.

Some day, if she continued intrepidly in this career of maternity which seemed to be marked out for her, she, too, would be happily pouring out coffee for a grown-up and successful man-child, all her impatiences and pangs long since forgotten.

You clearly couldn't have a grown-up man-child to love and be proud of if you hadn't begun him in time, he had at some period or other to be begun.

And he had to be begun in time, else one might easily be too old for acute appreciation.

She went as quickly as she could down the avenue, thinking on large valiant lines and underneath her thinking feeling altogether forsaken.

It must be nice, a warm thing to live where one's friends and relatives were within reach, where one could, for instance, when one felt extra lonely go and have tea with one's mother....

A man carrying what seemed to be a great deal of something indefinite was coming down the avenue towards her.

She looked at him vaguely, absorbed in her thoughts.

It was not the Baron, and except for him she knew nobody.

She was within a yard or two of him when a quantity of sheets of paper, long slender brushes, odd articles she did not recognise, suddenly seemed to burst out from his person and scatter themselves over the beech-leaves on the ground.

"Oh, damn!"

said the man, making efforts to catch them.

Ingeborg, always eager to help, began clumsily to pick up those nearest her.

He had a camp-stool on one arm, and what appeared to be a mackintosh, and was altogether greatly hampered.