Part 25

“Carry the chairs out of the bedroom.”

“Set the table.”

And, finally, the Frau sent her into the next room to keep the baby quiet.

There was a little piece of candle burning in the enamel bracket. As she walked up and down she saw her great big shadow on the wall like a grown-up person with a grown-up baby. Whatever would it look like when she carried two babies so!

“Ts—ts—ts! Once upon a time she was walking along a little white road, with oh! such great big black trees on either side.”

“Here you!” called the Frau’s voice, “bring me my new jacket from behind the door.” And as she took it into the warm room one of the women said, “She looks like an owl. Such children are seldom right in their heads.”

“Why don’t you keep that baby quiet?” said the Man, who had just drunk enough beer to make him feel very brave and master of his house.

“If you don’t keep that baby quiet you’ll know why later on.”

They burst out laughing as she stumbled back into the bedroom.

“I don’t believe Holy Mary could keep him quiet,” she murmured. “Did Jesus cry like this when He was little? If I was not so tired perhaps I could do it; but the baby just knows that I want to go to sleep. And there is going to be another one.”

She flung the baby on the bed, and stood looking at him with terror.

From the next room there came the jingle of glasses and the warm sound of laughter.

And she suddenly had a beautiful marvellous idea.

She laughed for the first time that day, and clapped her hands.

“Ts—ts—ts!” she said, “lie there, silly one; you will go to sleep. You’ll not cry any more or wake up in the night. Funny, little, ugly baby.”

He opened his eyes, and shrieked loudly at the sight of the Child-Who-Was-Tired. From the next room she heard the Frau call out to her.

“One moment—he is almost asleep,” she cried.

And then gently, smiling, on tiptoe, she brought the pink bolster from the Frau’s bed and covered the baby’s face with it, pressed with all her might as he struggled, “like a duck with its head off, wriggling”, she thought.

She heaved a long sigh, then fell back on to the floor, and was walking along a little white road with tall black trees on either side, a little road that led to nowhere, and where nobody walked at all—nobody at all.

THE ADVANCED LADY

“Do you think we might ask her to come with us,” said Fräulein Elsa, retying her pink sash ribbon before my mirror. “You know, although she is so intellectual, I cannot help feeling convinced that she has some secret sorrow. And Lisa told me this morning, as she was turning out my room, that she remains hours and hours by herself, writing; in fact Lisa says she is writing a book! I suppose that is why she never cares to mingle with us, and has so little time for her husband and the child.”

“Well, you ask her,” said I. “I have never spoken to the lady.”

Elsa blushed faintly. “I have only spoken to her once,” she confessed. “I took her a bunch of wild flowers, to her room, and she came to the door in a white gown, with her hair loose. Never shall I forget that moment. She just took the flowers, and I heard her—because the door was not quite properly shut—I heard her, as I walked down the passage, saying ‘Purity, fragrance, the fragrance of purity and the purity of fragrance!’ It was wonderful!”

At that moment Frau Kellermann knocked at the door.

“Are you ready?” she said, coming into the room and nodding to us very genially. “The gentlemen are waiting on the steps, and I have asked the Advanced Lady to come with us.”

“Na, how extraordinary!” cried Elsa. “But this moment the gnädige Frau and I were debating whether—”

“Yes, I met her coming out of her room and she said she was charmed with the idea. Like all of us, she has never been to Schlingen. She is downstairs now, talking to Herr Erchardt. I think we shall have a delightful afternoon.”

“Is Fritzi waiting too?” asked Elsa.