The Pastor's Wife
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 21
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?”
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