"Oh, not in there!" cried Ingeborg. "We"re going to have tea in the garden. Robert, please tell her--"
But looking round for help she found Robert had gone, and there was the sound of a key being turned in a lock.
Frau Dremmel continued to enter the living-room. Before she could be stopped she had arranged herself firmly on its sofa.
"But tea," said Ingeborg, following her and gesticulating, "tea, you know. Out there--in the garden--"
She pointed to the door, and she pointed to the window. Frau Dremmel slowly took off her gloves and rolled them together, and undid her bonnet strings and looked at the door and at the window and back again at her daughter-in-law, but did not move. Then Ingeborg, making a great effort at gay cordiality and determined that when words failed affectionate actions should fill up the gaps, bent over the figure on the sofa and took its arm. "Won"t you come?" she said, adding a sentence she had taken special pains to get by heart, "_liebe Schwiegermutter_?"
And smilingly, but yet, when it came to touching her, rather gingerly, and certainly with her heart in her mouth, she gently pulled at her sleeve.
Frau Dremmel stared up at her without moving.
"_Liebe Schwiegermutter_--tea--garden--better," said Ingeborg, still smiling but now quite hot. She could not remember a single German word except _liebe Schwiegermutter_.
Frau Dremmel, urged and encouraged, was finally got out of the house and into the garden and along between the gooseberry bushes to where the tea-table stood and an armchair for her with a cushion on it. She went with plain reluctance. She did not cease to stare at her daughter-in-law. Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware of this, Ingeborg tried to hide them, but you cannot hide feet that are being walked on, and when she sat down to pour out the coffee she found her short skirt was incapable of hiding anything lower than above her ankles.
She grew nervous. She spilt the milk and dropped a spoon. Beside the rigid figure in the armchair she seemed and felt terribly fluid and uncontrolled. The cheek that was turned to her mother-in-law flushed hotly. She acutely knew her mother-in-law was observing this, and that made it hotter. If only, thought Ingeborg, she would look at something else or say something. Over the rim of her cup, however, Frau Dremmel"s eyes moved up and down and round and through the strange creature her son had married. The rest of her was almost wholly motionless. Ingeborg had nervously swallowed three cups of the black stuff before Frau Dremmel was half through one. At last a German word flashed into her mind and she flung herself on it. "_Schon--wunderschon_!" she cried, waving her hands comprehensively over all the scenery.
For an instant Frau Dremmel removed her eyes from her daughter-in-law"s warm and quivering body to follow her gesture, but seeing nothing soon got them back again. She made no comment on the scenery. Her face remained wholly impa.s.sive; and Ingeborg realized that the rye-field would be no use as a means of entertainment.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware of this, Ingeborg tried to hide them]
She could not again say _schon_, and the meal went on in silence. Frau Dremmel"s method of eating it was to begin a piece of each of the cakes and immediately leave it off. This afflicted Ingeborg, who had supposed them to be very lovely cakes. Frau Dremmel"s place at the table--she had pulled her chair close up to it--was asterisked with begun and abandoned cakes. On the other hand she ate many of the sandwiches, and they drew forth the only word she said to Ingeborg during the whole of tea.
"_Fleisch_," said Frau Dremmel, removing her eyes for one moment from Ingeborg to the sandwiches that were being offered her, and with a dingy, investigating forefinger lifting up that portion of each sandwich which may be described as its lid.
"_Ja, ja_," said Ingeborg responsively, delighted at this flicker of life.
It was, however, the only one. After it silence, complete and impenetrable, settled down on Frau Dremmel. She did not even speak to her son when half an hour later he came out in search of the coffee he had failed to find on his doormat. Her manners prevented her, in his house on this first visit after his marriage, from uttering the unmanageable truths that come so naturally from the mouths of neglected mothers; and except for those she had nothing to say to him. Herr Dremmel expected nothing. His deeply engaged thoughts left no room in him for anything but a primitive simplicity. He was hungry, and he ate; thirsty, and he drank. The silent figure at the table, of whose presence every nerve in Ingeborg"s body was conscious, produced no impression on him whatever.
"Robert--do tell your mother how I really _do_ want to talk to her if only I could," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together in her lap and tying and untying her handkerchief into knots. There were little beads on her upper lip. The rings of hair on her temples were quite damp.
He glanced at his mother, drawn up and taut in her chair, and immediately she turned her eyes on to him and stared back at him steadily.
"Little One," he said, "I have told you she is a simple woman, not used to or capable of wielding the weapons of social arts. Be simple, too, and all will be well."
"But I _am_ being simple," protested Ingeborg. "I"m dumb; I"m blank; what can I be simpler than that?"
"Then all is well. Give me coffee."
He ate and drank in silence, and got up to go away again.
Frau Dremmel looked at him and said something.
"Is it the carriage?" asked Ingeborg.
"She wants to go indoors," said Herr Dremmel.
"Indoors?"
"She says she does not like mosquitoes."
He went away into the house. There was nothing for it but to follow. As they reached the back door the church clock struck five, but Ingeborg, glancing at her mother-in-law"s impa.s.sive face, saw this sound meant nothing to her. She followed her into the living-room and watched her helplessly as she arranged herself once more on the sofa.
When the clock struck half-past five she was still on it. She seemed to be waiting. For what was she waiting? Ingeborg asked herself, whose handkerchief was now rubbed into a hard ball between her nervous hands.
Impossible either to move her or communicate with her. Rigidly she sat, her eyes examining the room and each object in it but yet not for an instant missing the least of her daughter-in-law"s movements. Ingeborg seized her dictionary and grammar and made a final effort to build a bridge out of them across which their souls might even now go out to meet each other, but Frau Dremmel did not seem to understand the nature of her efforts, and only stared with a deepened blankness when Ingeborg read her out a sentence from the grammar that dealt with weather they were not that day having.
What was she waiting for? Seven o"clock struck, and still she waited.
The clock in the room ticked through the minutes, and every half hour they could hear the church clock striking. Ingeborg brought her a footstool; brought her a cushion; brought her, in extremity, a gla.s.s of water; began to sew at a torn duster; left off sewing at it; fluttered nervously among the pages of her grammar; pored in her dictionary; and always Frau Dremmel watched her. She found herself struggling against a tendency to think of her mother-in-law as It. At seven she heard Ilse go home singing--happy Ilse, able to go away. Soon afterwards she finally faltered into immobility, giving up, sitting now quite still herself in her chair, the flush faded from her cheek, pale and crumpled. It was her and Robert"s supper-time. Soon it would be their bedtime. Quite soon it would be to-morrow. And then it would be next week. And then there would be winter coming on.... Was this visit never to end?
At eight it at last became plain to her that what Frau Dremmel was waiting for must be supper. This was terrible, for there was none. At least, there was only that repet.i.tion of tea and breakfast that made her and Robert"s lives so wholesome. She had calculated the visit on the basis of tea only, and had prepared only and elaborately for that. For half an hour she sat on and hoped she was mistaken. She did not know that in East Prussia if you are invited to tea you also stay to supper.
But at half-past eight she realised that there was nothing for it but to go and fetch it in.
When the ruins of the same meal that had been offered her once already were produced a second time and set out clumsily on the unaccustomed living-room table among the pushed-aside Merediths and Kiplings, the bones of this skeleton being slowly put together under her very eyes, and Ingeborg at last by ceasing to go in and out fetching things and sinking into a chair indicated that that was all, Frau Dremmel, after waiting a little longer, opened her mouth and startled her daughter-in-law by speech.
"_Bratkartoffel_," said Frau Dremmel.
Ingeborg sat up quickly. After the hours of silence it was uncanny.
"_Bratkartoffel_," said Frau Dremmel again.
"Did you--did you speak?" said Ingeborg, staring at her.
"_Bratkartoffel_," said Frau Dremmel a third time.
Ingeborg jumped up and ran across the pa.s.sage to the laboratory door.
"Robert--Robert," she cried, twisting the handle, "come--come quickly--your mother--she"s talking, she"s saying things--" There was the same excitement and wonder in her voice as there is in that of a parent whose baby has suddenly and for the first time said Papa.
Herr Dremmel came out at once. From the sound of her he felt something must have happened.
She seized him and pulled him into the living-room. "Now--listen," she said, holding him there facing the sofa.
Herr Dremmel looked perplexed. "What is it, Little One?" he asked.
"Listen--she"ll say it again soon," said Ingeborg eagerly.
"What is it, mother?" he asked in German.
Frau Dremmel, without moving her head, ran her eyes over the table.
"Are there not even--not even--" she began, but stopped. She was evidently combating an emotion.
"Thunder of heaven," said Herr Dremmel, looking from one woman to the other, "what is it?"
But Frau Dremmel was not able, after the hours of waiting for a supper that seemed to her in every detail a studied insult on her daughter-in-law"s part, to bear harshness from her son. Drawing out a handkerchief that had no end and that reached to her eyes while yet remaining in her pocket, she began to cry.
Ingeborg was appalled. She ran to her, and, kneeling down, begged her in English to tell her what was the matter. She called her _liebe Schwiegermutter_ over and over again. She stroked her sleeve, she patted her, she even laid her head on her lap.