The Pastor's Wife Part 29

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, m.u.f.fled--"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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed, 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 b.u.t.tered 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_.

He had taken up the piece to show her she was mistaken, and had shaken the plate and made all the pieces on it spring about, and she had watched him and then begun over again to behave as if she could not lift one.

Then she dropped her hands down on to the sheet and looked up at him and began to whisper something else. "_Heavy_," she whispered, but not, he was glad to say, without at least some sort of a slight smile indicating her awareness that she was conducting herself childishly, and Ilse, coming in, had taken the bread and fed her as if it were she who were the baby and not his son.

Herr Dremmel, therefore, was both puzzled and worried. He was still more puzzled and worried when, on the very day week after the birth, Ilse came to him and said that Frau Pastor was shaking her bed about and that she feared if she did not soon stop the bed, which was enfeebled as Herr Pastor knew by having two mended legs among its four, might break. She had reminded Frau Pastor of this, but she did not seem to care and continued to shake it.

"The good bed," said Ilse, "the excellent bed. The best we have in the house. Would Herr Pastor step across?"

Herr Pastor stepped across, and found Ingeborg s.h.i.+vering with such astonis.h.i.+ng energy that the bed did, as Ilse had described, rattle threateningly.

In reply to his questions Ilse told him, for Ingeborg was too busy shaking to explain, that nothing had happened except that Frau Pastor said she was thirsty and would like a gla.s.s of cold water, and she had fetched it fresh from the pump and Frau Pastor had asked to be held up to drink it and had drunk it all at one draught and immediately fallen back and begun this shaking.

"Ingeborg, what is this?" said Herr Dremmel with a show of severity, for he had heard severity acted as a sedative on those who, for instance, shake.

When, however, Ingeborg, instead of replying like a reasonable being, continued to shake and seem unaware of his presence, and when on touching her he found that in spite of the s.h.i.+vering she was extremely hot, he sent Johann for Frau Dosch, who on seeing her could only suggest that Johann should drive on into Meuk and bring out the doctor.

And so it was that Ingeborg, coming suddenly out of a thin, high confusion in which she seemed to have been hurrying since the world began, found it was night, for lamps were alight, and people--many people--were round her bed, and one was a man she did not know with a short black beard. But she did know him. It was the doctor. It flashed across her instantly. Then she had really got to being in extremity.

That woman had said so, that big woman who used to come and see her in the garden long ago. And Ilse--that was Ilse at the foot of the bed crying. When one was in extremity Ilse did cry. She found herself stroking the doctor's beard and begging him not to let go of her. She was reminded that it was unusual to stroke the doctor's beard by his drawing back, but she thought it silly not to let one's beard be stroked if somebody wanted to. She heard herself saying, "Don't let go of me--please--don't let go of me--please--" but it seemed that he could not hold her, for she was caught away almost immediately again into that thin, hot, hurrying confusion, high up in the treble, high up at the very top, where all the violins were insisting together over and over again on one thin, quivering, anxious note....

"It is impossible," said the doctor, a Jew from Konigsberg, lately married and set up at Menk, looking at Frau Dosch, "that this should have happened."

And he proceeded to explain to Herr Dremmel that the child in future would have to seek its nourishment in tins.

"What?" exclaimed Herr Dremmel.

"Tins," said the doctor.

"Tins? For my son? When there are cows in the world? Cows, which at least more closely resemble mothers than tins?"

"Tins," repeated the doctor firmly. "Herr Pastor, cows have moods just as frequently as women. They are fed unwisely, and behold immediately a mood. Not having the gift of tongues they cannot convey their mood by speech, and baffled at one end they fall back upon the other and express their malignancies in milk."