The Pastor's Wife
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 12
On her honeymoon, which was only as long as it took to get from Redchester to Kökensee, except for a day in Holland where a brief and infinitely respectful visit, or rather waiting on, was made to the eminent De Vries, Ingeborg said to herself at frequent intervals as she had said to herself under the pear-tree in what now seemed a remote past, “Perhaps this will grow on me.” But even before they reached Kökensee on the fourth day after their marriage she was deciding, though a little reluctantly for she had always heard them praised, that probably she had no gift for honeymoons.
Robert, luckily, was apparently liking his and was quite happy and placid and slept sonorously in the trains. The meals were invariably cheerful. From Bromberg on he woke up and became attentive to the country they were passing through; and once in his own part of the world he expanded into much talk, pointing out and explaining the distinctive features of the methods employed on the different farms along the line.
Ingeborg drank it in eagerly. She was zealous to learn; resolute to be a helpmeet. Had he not delivered her from the immense suffocation of Redchester? She was obsequious with gratitude. It was a country of an exhilarating spaciousness; no hedges, no shutting off of one field from another, no shutting off, indeed, of the sky itself or of the blue delicious distance by little interfering hills like those they had round Redchester. It was all one great sweep, one great roll of earth up to heaven and of heaven down to earth, fresh and free and with a quality in the air of clear bright hardness she thought adorable after the wadded effect of the climate at home. And once, when the train pulled up in the open, she could hear from far away up in the blue the cry of a hawk.
From Allenstein they went on by a light railway with toy carriages and a tiny engine through an infinity of rye-fields and seemingly uninhabited country to the nearest station to Kökensee, a place called Meuk, of some pretension to being a little town, with an enormous church rising out of its middle and containing, among other objects of interest, explained Herr Dremmel, his mother.
“Oh?” said Ingeborg, surprised. “Have you got one?” For he somehow produced a completely motherless impression.
“Invariably, my treasure,” said Herr Dremmel with patience, “do people have mothers.”
“Yes,” she said, reaching down his hat for him and putting it carefully on his head, “but then they say so.”
“Perhaps. Sooner or later. I well remember, however, informing you that my father was dead. From that it was possible to reason that my mother was not. She is a simple woman. No longer young. We will visit her on our way through the town.”
Outside the station a high vehicle drawn by two long-tailed horses, one of which reached a head and neck further than the other, so that when you looked at them sideways and could not see that they both began at the same place it seemed to be perpetually winning a race, was in readiness to take them to Kökensee.
“This,” said Herr Dremmel, introducing it with a wave of the hand, “is my carriage. And this,” he continued, similarly introducing the driver, “is my faithful servant Johann. He has been with me now nearly a year.”
Ingeborg shook Johann’s hand, when he had carefully clambered down over the sacks of kainit that filled the front part of the carriage, very politely. “Do they all stay as long as that?” she murmured to Herr Dremmel.
“All? There is but my widow, and she is adjusting her feathers for flight. She will wing her way to some other bachelor nest as soon as my Little One has been inducted.”
“But does she like that?” asked Ingeborg. For she had acquired a habit, due to much repetition of the Litany, of regarding widowers as brittle, needing special care. There was an instant’s vision before her eyes of this one flapping blackly athwart the fields of East Prussia, turned out, desolate and oppressed, and with perhaps some cackling trail of curses stridulously marking her course.
“No doubt she will feel it. She, too, has been very faithful. She has been with me now nearly eight months. But if it were less she would still feel it. Widows,” he continued abstractedly, peering among the sacks of kainit in search of some Chilisaltpetre that was not there, “are in a constant condition of feeling.”
Johann explained—he was a shabby man, grown grey and frayed, Ingeborg supposed, in service—that the previous stuff did not seem to have caught its train, and Herr Dremmel went off to make anxious inquiries of the stationmaster while Ingeborg stood smiling with an excessive friendliness at Johann to make up for her want of words, and wondering how her luggage would get on to a carriage already so much occupied by sacks.
In the end most of it did not and was left at the station till some future time, and clutching her dressing-bag with one hand and the iron rail of the carriage with the other she was rattled away over the enormous cobbles of Meuk with a great cracking of Johann’s whip and barking of dogs and kickings of the horses, whose tails were long and kept on getting over the reins. The planks of the carriage’s bottom heaved and yawned beneath her feet. The horses shied in and out of the gutters. Her hat wanted to blow off, and she did not dare let either of her hands go free to hold it. She bent her head to try to keep it on. Her skin pricked and tingled from the shaking. She had an impression of red houses flush with the street, railless dwellings giving straight on to it; of a small shop or two; of people stopping to stare; of straw and paper and dust dancing together in the wind.
Herr Dremmel chose these flustered moments to expand conversationally, and raising his voice above the tumult explained in shouts that the three sacks in front were not so much sacks as mysterious stomachs filled with the future. She strained to catch what he said, but only heard a word now and then when she bumped against him—”divine maws—richly furnished banquet—potential energy—” She found it difficult to answer with any sort of connected intelligence, more especially because he kept on breaking off to lean forward and hit the horse-flies that alighted on the back of Johann’s neck. When he did this Johann started and the horses kicked.
“Faithful servant”—he shouted in her ear—”nearly a year—must not be stung—”
It was a disorganized and breathless Ingeborg trying to rub things out of her eyes who found herself finally in the passage of the elder Frau Dremmel’s house.
The door stood ajar, and her husband pushed it open and called loudly on his mother to appear. “She lurks, she lurks,” he said, impatiently looking at his watch; and redoubled his cries.
“Does she expect us?” asked Ingeborg at last, who was trying to pin up her loosened hair.
“She is a simple woman,” he said, “consequently she never expects anything.” And he pulled open a door out of which came nothing but darkness and a great cold smell.
“That is not my mother,” he said, shutting it again.
“Does she know we’re coming home to-day?” asked Ingeborg, a doubt beginning to take hold of her.
“She is a simple woman. Consequently she never knows anything. Mother! Mother!”
“Does she know you’re married?” asked Ingeborg, the doubt growing bigger.
“She is a simple woman. Consequently—” He broke off and stared down at her, reflecting. “Is it possible that I forgot to tell her?” he said.
It evidently was possible, for at that moment Frau Dremmel came slowly up some steps at the end of the passage from a lower region, and perceiving her son and a strange young woman stood still and said nothing whatever.
“Mother, this is my wife,” said Herr Dremmel, taking Ingeborg’s hand and leading her to the motionless figure.
“Ach,” said Frau Dremmel, without moving.
“Kiss her, Little One,” directed Herr Dremmel.
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