Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware of this, Ingeborg tried to hide them
She could not again sayschön, 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 reallydowant 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 Iambeing 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 impassive 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 glass 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 repetition 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 passage 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 herliebe Schwiegermutterover and over again. She stroked her sleeve, she patted her, she even laid her head on her lap.
But Frau Dremmel for the first time did not notice her. She was saying detached things into her handkerchief, and they were all for her son.
"A widow," wept Frau Dremmel. "A widow for ten years. When I think of your dear father. How much he thought of me. My first visit. My visit on your marriage. Treated as though I were anybody. Forced to drink coffee out of doors. Like a homeless animal. No sofa. No real table. Flocks of mosquitoes. No supper. No supper at all. Nothing prepared for me. For the mother. For your sainted father's wife. His cherished wife long before you were thought of. If it had not been for me you would not have been here at all. Nor she. And I am to go home unfed. Uncared for. Not even the least one has a right to expect given one. Not even what the poorest peasant has each night. Not even"—again she said the magic word—"Bratkartoffel—"
"There, there," said Ingeborg soothingly, stroking her anxiously—"there, there. Robert, whatis Bratkartoffel?"
"But never mind. Never mind," said Frau Dremmel, wiping her eyes only to weep afresh—"soon I shall be with him. With him again. With your dear father. And this—this is nothing, all nothing. It is only the will of God."
"There, there," said Ingeborg, anxiously stroking her.
It was not until some days later that she discovered the reason for her mother-in-law's tears.
She could get no information from Herr Dremmel. His thoughts were not to be pinned a minute to such a subject. He swept her questionings away with the wave of the arm of one who sweeps his surroundings clear of rubbish, and the most that could be extracted from him was a general observation as to the small amount of good to be obtained from proximities. But Ingeborg one afternoon, walking longer than usual, facing the hot sun and the flies and sand of the road beyond the village to see where it led to instead of, as she generally did, exploring footpaths in the forest, came after much heat and exertion to a thicket of trees that were not firs or pines but green cool things, oaks, and acacias and silver birches, and going through them along a grass-grown road fanning herself with her hat as she walked in the pleasant shade, found herself stopped by a white gate, a notice telling her she was not to advance further, and a garden. Beyond the flower beds and long untidy grass of this garden she saw a big steep-roofed house built high on a terrace. On the terrace a dog was lying panting, with its tongue out. Nothing else alive was in sight, and there were no sounds except the rustling of the leaves over her head and such faint chirping as birds make in July.
"Who lives in that big white house away over there?" she asked Herr Dremmel when next she saw him, which was not till that evening at supper; and she nodded her head, her hands being full of the coffee pot, in the direction of the north.
Herr Dremmel was ruffled. He had been plunged in parish affairs since breakfast, for it was the day appointed by him and recurring once a fortnight into which by skilful organizing he packed them all. The world in consequence on every second Tuesday appeared to him a place of folly. People were born and lived embedded in ancient folly. The folly of their parents, already stale when they got it, was handed down to them intact, not shot at all, thought Herr Dremmel on these alternate Tuesdays, with the smallest ray of perception of different and better things. The school children were still learning about Bismarck's birthday, the schoolmaster was still laboriously computing attendances and endeavouring to obey the difficult law which commanded him to cane the absent, the elders of the church were still refusing to repair the steeple in time, the confirmation class was still meeting explanations and exhortations with thick inattention, the ecclesiastical authorities were still demanding detailed reports of progress when there was not and could not be progress, couples were still forgetting marriage until the last hurried moment and then demanding it with insistent cries, infants were still being hastily christened before the same neglects that killed those other infants who else might have been their proud and happy grandparents carried them off, and peasants were still slinking away at the bare mention of intelligence and manure.
He was exceedingly ruffled; for while he had been wrestling with these various acquiescences and evasions his real work was lying neglected out there in the sun, in there in the laboratory, and a whole day of twelve precious hours was gone for ever; and when Ingeborg said, "Who lives in that big white house?" Herr Dremmel, with his wasted day behind him, and the continued brassiness of the heavens above him, and the persistence in that place of trees of mosquitoes, stared at her a moment and then said, bringing his hand down violently on the table, "Hell and Devils."
"Who?" said Ingeborg.
"We must call on them at once."
"What?"
"My patron. He will be incensed that I have not presented you sooner. I forgot him. That will be another day lost. These claims, these social claims—"
He got up and took some agitated steps about the table.
"No sooner," he said, frowning angrily at the path, "has one settled one thing than there appears another. To-day, all day the poor. To-morrow, all day the rich—"
"Do we call continuously all day?"
"—both equally obstinate, both equally encased from head to foot in the impenetrable thick armour of intellectual sloth. How," he inquired, turning to her with all the indignant wrath of the thwarted worker, "is a man to work if he lives in a constant social whirl?"
Ingeborg sat regarding him with astonishment. "He can't," she said. "But—do we whirl, Robert? Would one call what we do here whirling?"
"What? When my work has been neglected all day to-day on behalf of the poor and will be neglected all day to-morrow on behalf of the rich?"
"But why will it take us all day?"
"A man must prepare, he cannot call as he is. He must," said Herr Dremmel with irritable gloom, "wash." And he added with still greater irritation and gloom, "There has to be a clean shirt."
"But—" began Ingeborg.
He waved her into silence. "I do not like," he said, with a magnificent sweep of his arm, "clean shirts."
She stared at him with the parted lips of interest.
"I am not at home in them. I am not myself in a clean shirt for at least the first two hours."
"Don't let's call," said Ingeborg. "We're so happy as we are."
"Nay," said Herr Dremmel, immediately brought to reason by his wife's support of his unreason, "but we must call. There are duties no decent man neglects. And I am a decent man. I will send a messenger to inquire if our visit to-morrow will be acceptable. I will put on my shirt early in order to get used to it. And I will endeavour, by a persistent amiability so long as the visit lasts, to induce my patron to forget that I forgot him."
Herr Dremmel had for some time past been practising forgetting his patron. He had found this course, after divers differences of opinion, simplest and most convenient. The patron, Baron Glambeck of Glambeck, was a serious real Christian who believed that the poor should, like some vast pudding that will not otherwise turn out well, be constantly stirred up, and he was unable to approve of a pastor who except in church and on every alternate Tuesday forbore to stir. It was for this forbearance, however, that Herr Dremmel was popular in the parish. Before his time there had been a constant dribble of pastor all over it, making it never a moment safe from intrusion. Herr Pastor Dremmel might be fiery in the pulpit, but he was quite quiet out of it; he was like a good watchdog, savage in its kennel and indifferent when loose. Kökensee had as one man refused to support the patron when he had wished some time before to bring about Herr Dremmel's removal. Its pastor did not go from house to house giving advice. Its pastor was invisible and absorbed. These were great things in a clergyman, and should not lightly be let go. Nothing could be done in the face of the parish's opposition, and Kökensee kept its pastor; but Baron Glambeck ceased to patronise Divine Service in Kökensee, and until Herr Dremmel brought Ingeborg to make his wedding call he had had no word with him for three years.
The Dremmels had announced themselves for four o'clock, and when they drove up to the house along the shady grass road and through the white gate they were met on the steps of the terrace by a servant who, if he had been in Redchester, would have been Wilson. On the top of the steps stood Baron Glambeck, tightly buttoned-up in black, formal, grave. Further back, beneath the glass roof of the terrace, stood his wife, tightly buttoned-up in black, formal, grave. They were both, if Ingeborg had known it, extremely correct according to the standards of their part of the country. They were unadorned, smoothed out, black, she abundant in her smoothness, he spare in his; and they greeted Ingeborg with exactly the cordiality suitable to the reception of one's pastor's new wife, who ought to have been brought to call long ago but was not in any way responsible for those bygones which studded their memory so disagreeably in connection with her husband, a cordiality with the chill on. Dignity and coats of arms pervaded the place. Monograms with coronets were embroidered and painted on everything one sat on or touched. The antlers of deer shot by the Baron, with the dates and places of their shooting affixed to each, bristled thickly on the walls. They saw no servant who was not a man.
"Please take your hat off," said the Baroness in English, carefully keeping her voice slightly on the side of coldness.
Ingeborg was very nearly frightened.
She would have been quite frightened if she had been less well trained by the Bishop in unimportance. She had, however, owing to this training, left off being shy years before. She had so small an opinion of herself that there was no room in her at all for self-consciousness; and she arrived at the Glambecks' in her usual condition of excessive naturalness, ready to talk, ready to be pleased and interested.
But it was conveyed to her instantly on seeing the Baroness—there was an astonishment in the way she looked at her—that her clothes were not right. And just the request or suggestion or demand—she did not know which of these it really was—that she should take off her hat, made her realise she was on new ground, in places where the webs of strange customs were thick about her feet.
She was, for a moment, very nearly frightened.
"You will be more comfortable," said the Baroness, "without your hat."
She took it off obediently, glancing beneath her eyelashes, as she drew out the pins, at the Baroness's smooth black head and unwrinkled black body, perceiving with the clearness of a revelation that that was how she ought to look herself. Skimpier, of course, for the years had not yet had their will with her, but she ought to be a version of the effect done in lean. She resolved, in her thirst after fulfilled duty, to get a black dress and practise.
She thought it wisest not to think what her hair must be looking like when her hat was off, for she had not expected to be hatless, and well did she know it by nature for a straggler, a thing inclined to wander from the grasp of hairpins and go off on its own account into wantonings and rings which were all the more conspicuous because of their lurid approach in colouring to the beards of her ancestors—sun-kissed Scandinavians who walked the earth in their strength hung, according to the way the light took them, with beards that were either the colour of flames, or of apricots, or of honey. Well, if theywouldmake her take her hat off....
By the time she was on the sofa she was presently put on in the inner hall she had caught up with her usual condition of naturalness again, and sat on it interested and forgetful of self. The Baroness's eyes wandered over her, and they wandered over her with much the same quality in their look that had been in her mother-in-law's. And always when they got to her feet they lingered. Her skirt again reached only to her ankles. All her outdoor skirts did that. "But I can't helphavingfeet," thought Ingeborg, noticing this. They were small by nature, and the artful shoes of the London shoemaker who had shared in providing her and Judith's trousseau made them seem still smaller. She did not try to hide them as she had tried when Frau Dremmel stared. It was Frau Dremmel's heavy silence that had unnerved her. These people talked; and the Baroness's English was reassuringly good.
Nobody, the Baroness was thinking, and also simultaneously the Baron, who was fit to be a pastor's wife had feet like that—little, incapable feet. Nobody, indeed, who was a really nice woman had them. One left off having them when one was a child and never had them again. The errands of domesticity on which one ran, the perpetual up and down of stairs, the hours standing on the cold stone floor of servants' quarters seeing that one was not cheated, the innumerable honourable activities that beautified and dignified womanhood, necessitated large loose shoes. A true wife's feet should have room to spread and flatten. Feet were one of those numerous portions of the body that had been devised by an all-wise Creator for use and not show.
As for the rest of the Frau Pastor's appearance there were, it is true, some young ladies in the country who dressed rather like that in the summer, but they were ladies in the Glambeck set, ladies of family or married into family. That the person who had married one's pastor, a man whose father had been of such obscure beginnings, and indeed continuations, that even his having been dead ten years hardly made him respectable, should dress in this manner was a catastrophe. Already they had suffered too much from the conduct of their loose-talking, unchristian pastor; and now, instead of bringing a neat woman in black to be presented to them, a neat woman with a gold chain, perhaps, round her high black collar, it being a state occasion and she, after all, newly married—but only a very light chain, and inherited not bought—and a dress so sufficient that it reached beyond and enveloped anything she might possess in the way of wrist or ankle or throat, here was the most unsuitable wife he could have chosen—short, of course, of marrying among Jews. While as for her hair, when it came to her hair their thoughts ceased to formulate. That small and flattened and disordered head, like a boy's head run wild, like something on fire, which emerged when she took off her hat....
Coffee was served on the big table in front of the sofa. The Baroness sat beside Ingeborg, and the Baron and Herr Dremmel drew up chairs opposite. The coffee was good, and there was one excellent cake. No gooseberries, no flowers, no unwieldy sandwiches; just plainness and excellence.
The two men talked to each other, not to the women, the Baron stiffly and on his guard, Herr Dremmel taking immense pains to be amiable and not offend. Between them hung the memories of altercations. Between them also hung the knowledge of the three years during which the Baron and his wife, as a result of the last and hottest difference of opinion, had attended Divine Service in a church that did not belong to them. They had altogether cut Kökensee. For three years their private gallery in the church in which their ancestors had once a fortnight feared God had been a place where mice enjoyed themselves. Its chairs were covered with dust; its hymn-books, growing brown, still lay open at the place the Glambecks had praised God out of last. Such a withdrawal of approval would have made any other pastor's life a thing of chill and bleakness; Herr Dremmel hardly observed it. He had no vanities. He was pleased that the rival pastor should be gratified. He cared nothing for comment, and had no eye for shrugs and smiles. His eyes, his thoughts, were wanted for his work; and he found it a relief, a release from at least one interruption, when his patron took to leaving him frigidly alone.
Indeed, when he drove up to the Glambecks' house and remembered he had not had to go there for three peaceful years he felt really grateful, and he showed his gratitude by performing immense feats of social pleasantness during the visit. He agreed gigantically with everything the Baron said. Whatever subject was touched upon—-very cautiously, for the Baron mistrusted all subjects with Herr Dremmel—he instantly dragged it off the dangerous shoals of the immediate and close up to a cosmic height and distance, a height and distance so enormous that even what the Kaiser said last became a negligible tinkling and Conscience and Dogma quavered off into silence; and he explained to the Baron, who guardedly said "Perhaps," that though people's opinions might and did vary seen near, if one spread them out wide enough, pushed them back far enough, took them up high enough, bored them down deep enough, got them away from detail and loose from foregrounds, one would come at last to the great Mother Opinion of them all, in whose huge lap men curled themselves up contentedly like the happy identities they indeed were and went, after kissing each other, in placidest agreement to sleep.
"Perhaps," said the Baron.
Personalities, immediate interests, duties, daily life, were swamped in the vast seas in which, with politeness but determination, Herr Dremmel took the Baron swimming. One only needed, he repeated, warm with the wish to keep in roomy regions, to trace back any two opinions, however bitterly different they now were, far enough to get at last to the point where they sweetly kissed.
"Perhaps," said the Baron.
"One only needed—" went on Herr Dremmel, making all-embracing movements with his arms.
But the Baron cleared his throat and began to enumerate contrary facts.
Herr Dremmel agreed at once that he was right just there, and pushed the point of kissing back a little further.
The Baron went after him with more facts.
Herr Dremmel again agreed, and went back further. In this way they came at last to the Garden of Eden, beyond which the Baron refused to budge, alleging that further back than that no Christian could go; and even in that he repudiated the kiss. He was convinced, though he concealed it, that at no period of human thought could his and Herr Dremmel's opinions, for example, have kissed.
But it was an amiable view, and Herr Dremmel was extremely polite and was bent evidently on peace, and the Baron, recognising this, became less distrustful. He even contributed a thought of his own at last, after having been negatively occupied in dissecting Herr Dremmel's, and said that in his opinion it was details that made life difficult.
The Baroness, who loved him and overheard him, was anxious he should have more coffee with plenty of milk in it after this.
"Men," she explained to Ingeborg in careful English as she poured it out, "need much nourishment because of all this head-work."
"I suppose they do," said Ingeborg.
"When I was first married I remember it was my chief pride and joy that at last I had some one of my very own to nourish."
"Oh?" said Ingeborg.
"It is an instinct," said the Baroness, who had the air of administering a lesson, "in a true woman. She wishes to nourish. And naturally the joy of nourishing two is double the joy of nourishing one."
"I suppose it is," said Ingeborg, who did not quite follow.
"When my first-born—"
"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg, glad to understand.
"When my first-born was laid in my arms I cannot express, Frau Pastor, what happiness I had in being given yet another human being to nourish."
"I suppose it was delightful," said Ingeborg, politely sympathetic.
The Baroness's eyes drooped a moment inquiringly from Ingeborg's face to her body.
"For six years," she went on, after a pause, "I had fresh reason for happiness regularly at Christmas."
"I suppose you have the loveliest Christmases here," said Ingeborg. "Like the ones in books. With trees."
"Trees? Naturally we have trees. But I had babies as well. Every Christmas for six years regularly my Christmas present to my dear husband was able to be a baby."
"What?" said Ingeborg, opening her eyes. "A fresh one?"
"Naturally it was fresh. One does not have the same baby twice."
"No, of course not. But—how did you hide it till Christmas day?"
"It could not, naturally," said the Baroness stiffly, "be as much a surprise as a present that was not a baby would have been, but it was for all practical purposes hidden till Christmas. On that day it was born."
"Oh, but I think that was very wonderful," said Ingeborg, genuinely pleased by such neatness. She leaned forward in her enthusiasm and clasped her hands about her knees.
"Yes," said the Baroness, relaxing a little before this flattering appreciation. "Yes. It was. Some people would call it chance. But we, as Christians, knew it was heaven."
"But howpunctual," said Ingeborg admiringly, "howtidy!"
"Yes, yes," mused the Baroness, relaxing still more in the warm moisture of remembrance, "they were happy times. Happy, happy times. One's little ones coming and going—"
"Oh? Did they go as well as come?" asked Ingeborg, lowering her voice to condolence.
"About one's knees, I mean, and the house."
"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg, relieved.
"Every year the Christmas candles shining down on an addition to our treasures. Every year the gifts of past Christmases gathered about the tree again, bigger and stronger instead of being lost or broken as they would have been if they had been any other kind of gift."
"But what happened when there weren't any more to give?"
"Then I gave my husband cigar-cases."
"Oh."
"After all, most women have to do that all their lives. I did not grumble. When heaven ceased to provide me with a present for him, I knew how to bow my head and went and bought one. There are excellent cigar-cases at Wertheim's in Königsberg if you wish to give one to Herr Pastor next Christmas. They do not come unsewn at the corners by July or August in the way those one buys in other shops do. Ah, yes. Happy years. Happy, happy years. First the six years of great joy collecting my family, and then the years of happiness bringing it up. Of course you are fond of children?"
"I've never had any."
"Naturally you have not," said the Baroness, stiffening again.
"So I don't know," said Ingeborg.
"But every true woman loves little children," said the Baroness.
"But they must bethere," said Ingeborg.
"One has God-implanted instincts," said the Baroness.
"But one mustseesomething to practise them on," said Ingeborg.
"A true woman is all love," said the Baroness, in a voice that sounded very like scolding.
"I suppose she is," said Ingeborg, who felt that she never could have met one. She had a vision of something altogether soft and squelchy and humid and at the same time wonderful. "Are any of your children at home?" she asked, thinking she would like to test her instincts on the younger Glambecks.
"They are grown up and gone. Out into the world. Some far away in other countries. Ah, yes. One is lonely—" The Baroness became loftily plaintive. "It is the lot of parents. Lonely, lonely. I had five daughters. It was a great relief to get them all married. There was naturally the danger where there were so many of some of them staying with us always."
"But then you wouldn't have been lonely," said Ingeborg.
"But then, Frau Pastor, they would not have been married."
"No. And then," said Ingeborg, interested, "you wouldn't have been able tofeellonely."
The Baroness gazed at her.
"These things arenice, you know," said Ingeborg, leaning forward again in her interest. "One doeslikeit somehow—being sad, you know, and thinking how lonely one is. Of course it's much more delicious to be happy, but not being happy has its jollinesses. There's a perfume...." She sought about in her mind—"It's like a wet day. It looks gloomy and miserable compared to what yesterday was like, but thereisan enjoyment. And things"—she hesitated, groping—"things seem to grow. Different ones. Yet they're beautiful, too."
But the Baroness, who did not follow and did not want to, for it was not her business to listen to her pastor's wife, drooped an inquiring eye again over Ingeborg's body and cut her tendency to talk more than was becoming in her position short by remarking that she was still very thin.
When they had sat there till the coffee was cold Ingeborg, in a pause of the talk, got up to go.
The three others stared at her without moving. Even her own Robert stared uncomprehending. It seemed a lame thing to have to explain that she was now going home, but that was what she did at last murmur down to the motionless and surprised Baroness.
"Are you not feeling well?" inquired the Baroness.
"What is it, Ingeborg?" asked Herr Dremmel.
The Baron went over to a window and opened it. "A little faint, no doubt," he said, adding something about young wives.
The Baroness asked her if she would like to lie down.
Herr Dremmel became alert and interested. "What is it, Little One?" he asked again, getting up.
"I think it would be good if the Frau Pastor rested a little before supper," said the Baroness, getting up, too.
"Certainly," said Herr Dremmel, quite eagerly, and with a funny expression on his face.
Ingeborg gazed from one to the other.
"But, Robert," she said, wondering why he looked like that, "oughtn't we to go home?"
"Dear Frau Pastor," said the Baroness quite warmly, "you will feel better presently. Believe me. There is an hour still before supper. Come with me, and you shall lie down and rest."
"But Robert—" said Ingeborg, astonished.
She was, however, taken away—it seemed a sort of sweeping of her away—through glass doors, down a carpetless varnished passage into a spare bedroom, and commanded to put herself on the high white bed with her head a little lower than her feet.
"But," she said, "why?"
"You will be better by supper-time. Oh, I know all these things," said the Baroness, who was opening windows and had grown suddenly friendly. "Do you feel sick?"
"Sick?"
She wondered whether the amount of cake she had eaten had appeared excessive. She had had two pieces. Perhaps there was a rigid local custom prescribing only one. She felt again that she was in a net of customs, with nobody to explain. The Baroness seemed quite disappointed when she assured her she did not feel sick at all. Ought guests to feel sick? Was it a subtle way of drawing attention to the irresistibleness of the host's food? It then occurred to her that it might very possibly be the custom in these country places to put callers to bed for an hour in the middle of their call, and that her omission to put her mother-in-law there was one of the causes of her tears. Next to going home as quickly as one did in England she felt going to bed was altogether the best thing.
This thought, that it must be the custom, made her instantly pliable. With every gesture of politeness she hastened to clamber up on to the billows of feathers and white quilt. There was a smell of naphthalin as she sank downwards, a smell of careful warfare carried on incessantly with moth.
The Baroness came away from letting in floods of air, and looked at her. "I am sure," she said, "you do feel sick."
"I think I do—a little," said Ingeborg, anxious to give every satisfaction.
It was evidently the right thing to say, for her hostess's face lit up. She went out of the room quickly and came back with some Eau de Cologne and a fan.
Ingeborg watched her with bright alert eyes over the edge of a billow of feathers while she fetched a little table and brought it to the bed and arranged these things on it.
How odd it was, she thought, greatly interested. Was the Baron simultaneously putting Robert to bed in some other room? She felt she had grown suddenly popular, that she was doing all the right things at last. Contrasted with its loftiness during the first part of the call the Baroness's manner was quite human and warm. She put the table close to her side, and told her the best thing she could do, quite the best thing, would be to try and sleep a little; if she wanted anything she was to ring, and the maid Tina would appear.
"Ah, yes," she said in conclusion, standing for a moment looking down at her and heaving a great sigh that seemed to Ingeborg somehow to be pleasurable, "ah, yes. When one has said A, dear Frau Pastor, one must say B. Ah, yes."
And she went out again on tip-toe, softly closing the door and leaving Ingeborg in a state of extreme and active interest and interrogation. "When one has said A one must say B...." Why must one? And what was B? What, indeed, if you came to that, was A?
She listened a moment, raised on her elbow, her bright head more ruffled than ever after its descent into the billows, then she slid down on to the slippery floor and ran across in her stockings to one of the big open windows.
It looked on to a tangle of garden, a sort of wilderness of lilac bushes and syringa and neglected roses and rough grass and hemlock at the back of the house. There was nobody anywhere to be seen, and she got up on to the sill and sat there in great enjoyment, swinging her feet, for it all smelt very sweet at the end of the long hot day, till she thought the hour, the blessed hour, must be nearly over. Then she stole back and rearranged herself carefully on the bed.
"But this istheway of paying calls," she thought, pulling the quilt up tidily under her chin and waiting for what would be done to her next.
They did not get away till nine o'clock.
There was supper at seven, an elaborate meal, and they sat over it an hour and a half. Then came more coffee, served on the terrace by servants in white cotton gloves, and half an hour later, just before they left, tea and sandwiches and cakes and fruit and beer.
Ingeborg was now quite clear about the reason for her mother-in-law's tears. She saw very vividly how dreadful her behaviour must have seemed. That groaning supper-table, that piling up as the end of the visit drew near of more food and more and more, and the refreshment of bed in the middle....
"I shall invite her all over again," she said suddenly, determined to make amends.
When she said this the carriage had finally detached them from sight and sound of the now quite cordial Glambecks, and was heaving through the sand of the dark wooded road beyond their gate.
"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down. He had got his arm round her, and at the bigger joltings tightened his hold and lifted her a little. His voice was tender, and when he bent down there was an enveloping smell of cigars and wine, mixed with the india-rubber of his mackintosh.
Ingeborg knew that for some reason she could not discover she had made herself popular. There was the distinct consciousness of having suddenly, half way through the visit, become a success. And she was still going on being a success, she felt. But why? Robert was extraordinarily attentive. Too attentive, really, for oh, what a wonderful night of stars and warm scents it was, once they were in the open—what a night, what a marvel of a night! And when he bent over her it was blotted out. Dear Robert. She did love him. But away there on that low meadow, far away over there where a white mist lay on the swampy places and the leaves of the flags that grew along the ditch stood up like silver spears in the moonlight, one could imagine the damp cool fragrance rising up as one's feet stirred the grass, the perfect solitariness and the perfect silence. Except for the bittern. There was a bittern, she had discovered, in those swamps. If she were over there now, lying quite quiet on the higher ground by the ditch, quite quiet and alone, she would hear him presently, solemnly booming.
"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down across the whole of the Milky Way and every single one of all the multitude of scents the night was softly throwing against her face.
He kissed her very kindly and at unusual length. It lasted so long that she missed the smell of an entire clover field.
"Your mother," said Ingeborg, when she again emerged.
"Heavens and earth!" said Herr Dremmel.
"I know now what I did—or rather didn't do. I know now why she kept on sayingBratkartoffel. Oh, Robert, she must have beenhurt. She must have thought I didn't care a bit. And I did so want her to be happy. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you what, little sheep?"
"About there having to be supper, and about her having to go to bed."
"To bed?"
"Did the Baron put you?"
"Put me?"
"To bed?"
Herr Dremmel bent down again and looked a little anxiously at as much of her face as he could see in the moonlight. It seemed normal; not in the least flushed or feverish. He touched her cheek with his finger. It was cool.
"Little One," he said, "what is this talk of beds?"
"Only that it would save rather a lot of awful things happening if you would just give me anideabeforehand of what is expected. It wouldn't take a minute. I wouldn't disturb you at your work for anything, but at some odd time—breakfast, for instance, or while you're shaving—if you'dsayabout beds and things like that. One couldn't guess it, you know. In Redchester one didn't do it, you see. And it's such a really beautiful arrangement. Oh"—she suddenly flung her arms round him and held him tight—"Iamglad I married one of you!"
"One of me?"
Herr Dremmel again peered anxiously at her face.
"One of you wonderful people—you magnificent, spacious people. In Redchester we got rid of difficulties by running away. You face them and overcome them. There isn't much doubt, is there, which is the finer?"
He transferred his cigar to the hand that was round her shoulder and spread his right one largely over her forehead. It was quite cool.
"Who," went on Ingeborg enthusiastically, jerking her head away from his hand, "would have a custom that makes calls last five hours without rebelling? You are too splendidly disciplined to rebel. You don't. You just set about finding some way of making the calls endurable, and you hit on thenicestway. I loved that hour in bed. If only I'd known that the other day when your mother came! The relief of it...."
"But my mother—" began Herr Dremmel in a puzzled voice. Then he added with a touch of severity, "Your remarks, my treasure, are not in your usual taste. You forget my mother is a widow."
"Oh? Don't widows?"
"Do not widows what?"
"Go to bed?"
"Now kindly tell me," he said, with an impatience he concealed beneath calm, for he had heard that a husband who wishes to become successfully a father has to accommodate himself to many moods, "what it is you are really talking about."
"Why, about your not explaining things to me in time."
"What things?"
"About your mother having to go to bed."
"Why should my mother have to go to bed?"
"Oh, Robert—because it's the custom."
"It is not. Why do you suppose it is the custom?"
"What? When I've just been put there? And you saw me go?"
"Ingeborg—"
"Oh, don't call me Ingeborg—"
"Ingeborg, this is levity. I am prepared for much accommodating of myself to whims in regard to food and kindred matters, but am I to endure levity for nine months?"
She stared at him.
"You went to bed because you were ill," he said.
"I wasn't," she said indignantly. Did he, too, think she did not know how to control herself in the presence of cake?
"What? You were not?"
There was a note of such sharp disappointment in his voice that in her turn she peered at his face.
"Now kindly tell me, Robert," she said, giving his sleeve a slight pull, "what it is you arereallytalking about."
"You did not feel faint? You feel quite well? You do not feel ill after all?"
Again the note of astonished disappointment.
"But why should I feel ill?"
"Then why did you ask to be taken home almost before we had arrived?"
For the first time she heard anger in his voice, anger and a great aggrievedness.
"Almost before we'd arrived? We'd been there hours. You hadn'ttoldme a call meant supper."
"Almighty Heaven," he cried, "am I to dwell on every detail of life? Am I personally to conduct you over each of the inches of your steps? Do you regard me as an elementary school? Can you not imagine? Can you not calculate probabilities? Can you not construct some searchlight of inference of your own, and illuminate with it the outline of at least the next few hours?"
She gazed at him a moment in astonishment.
"Well," she said.
If her father had asked her only one of these questions in that sort of voice she would have been without an answer, beaten down and crushed. But Robert had not had the steady continuous frightening of her from babyhood. He could not hold over her, like an awful rod, that she owed her very existence to him. He could not claim perpetual gratitude for this remote tremendous gift, bestowed on her in the days of her unconsciousness. He was a kindly stranger appointed by the Church to walk hand in hand with her along the path of grown-up life. He had admired her, and kissed her, and quite often during their engagement had abased himself at her feet. Also she had seen him at moments such as shaving.
"I believe," she said after another astonished pause, "that you're scolding me. And you're scolding me because you're angry with me, and you're angry with me—Robert, is it possible you're angry with me because I'mnotill?"
He threw away his cigar and seized her in his arms and began to whisper voluminously into her ear.
"What?" she kept on saying. "What? You're tickling me—what? I can't hear—"
But she did in the end hear, and drew herself a little back from him to look at him with a new interest. It seemed the oddest thing that he, so busy, so nearly always somewhere else in thought, so deeply and frequently absent from the surface of life, so entirely occupied by his work that often he could hardly remember he had a wife, should want to have yet another object of the kind added unto him, a child; and that she who lived altogether on the surface, who knew, as it were, the very taste of each of the day's minutes and possessed them all, who never lost consciousness of the present and never for an instant let go of her awareness of the visible and the now, should be without any such desire.
"But," she said, "we're so happy. We're so happy as we are."
"It is nothing compared to what we would be."
"But I haven't even begun to get used tothishappiness yet—to the one I've got."
"You will infinitely prefer the one that is yet to come."
"But Robert—don't rush me along. Don't let us rush past what we've got. Let us love all this thoroughly first—"
He looked at her very gravely. "We have now been married two months," he said. "I become anxious. To-night—I cannot tell you how glad I was. And then—it was nothing after all."
She gazed at him with a feeling of a new incumbency. He had said the last words in a voice she did not know, with a catch in it.
"Robert—" she said quickly, putting out her hand and touching his with a little soft stroking movement.
She wished above all things to make him perfectly happy. Always she had loved making people happy. And she was so grateful to him, so grateful for the freedom she had got through him, that just her gratitude even if she had not loved him would have made her try to do and be everything he wished. But she did love him. She certainly loved him. And here was something he seemed to want beyond everything, and that she alone could provide him with.
He turned his head away; and as he did this did she see something actually glistening in his eyes, glistening like something wet?
In an instant she had put her arms round him. "Of course I do—of course I want one," she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his mackintosh, "some—heaps—of course we'll have them—everybody has them—of course I'll soon begin—don't mind my not having been ill to-night—I'm so sorry—Iwillbe ill—dear Robert—I didn't know I had to be ill—but I will be soon—I'm sure I will be—I—I feel quite likesoonbeing ill now—"
He patted her face, his face still turned away. "Good little wife," he said; "good little wife."
She felt nearer to him than she had ever felt, so close in understanding and sympathy. She had seen tears, a man's tears. Of what tremendous depths of feeling were they not the signal? The sentence,A strong man's tears, floated up from somewhere and hung about her mind. She pressed him to her in a passion of desire to make him altogether happy, to protect him from feeling too much. She held him like that, her cheek against his arm, rubbing it up and down every now and then to show how well she understood, till they got home. When he lifted her down from the carriage at their door she slipped her hand round the back of his neck and kept it there a moment with the tenderest lingering touch.
"Dear Robert," she whispered, her lips on his ear while he lifted her down; and implicit in the words was the mother-assurance, the yearning mother-promise, "Oh, little thing, little man thing, I'll takecareof you."
She hung about the parlour and the passage while he went, as he said, for a moment into his laboratory for a final look round, waiting for him in a strangely warmed exalted state, entirely at one with him, suddenly very intimate, sure that after letting her see things so sacred as tears he would only want to spend the rest of the evening with her, being comforted and reassured, held close to her heart, talking sweetly with her in the quiet dark garden.
But there were six saucerfuls of differently treated last year's rye ready on the laboratory table for counting and weighing. Herr Dremmel beheld them, and forgot the world. He began to count and weigh. He continued to count and weigh. He ended by counting and weighing them all; and it was dawn before, satisfied and consoled for his lost afternoon, it occurred to him that perhaps it might be bedtime.
The winter came before Ingeborg, after many false alarms due to her extreme eagerness to give Robert the happiness he wanted, was able to assure him with certainty that he would presently become a father. "And I," she said, looking at him with a kind of surprised awe now that it had really come upon her, "I suppose I will be a mother."
Herr Dremmel remarked with dryness that he supposed in that case she would, and refused to become enthusiastic until there was more certainty.
He had been disappointed during the summer so often. Her zeal to meet his wishes made her pounce upon the slightest little feeling of not being well and run triumphantly to his laboratory, daring its locked door, defying its sacredness, to tell him the great news. She would stand there radiantly saying things that sounded like paraphrases of the Scripture, and almost the first German she really learned and used was the German so familiar in every household for being of Good Hope, for being in Blessed Circumstance.
For some time Herr Dremmel greeted these tidings with emotion and excitement; but as the summer went on, he had become so incredulous that she fainted twice in December before he was convinced. Then, indeed, for nearly a whole day his joy was touching. One cannot, however, keep up such joy, and Ingeborg found that things after this brief upheaval of emotion settled back again into how they were before, except that she felt extraordinarily and persistently ill.
Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick. The summer that year in East Prussia had been a long drought, a long bath of sunshine, and Ingeborg lived out in it in an ecstasy of freedom. Her body, light and perfectly balanced, did wonders of exploration in the mighty forests that began at the north of the Kökensee lake and went on without stopping to the sea. She would get Robert's dinner ready for him early, and then put some bread and butter and a cucumber into a knapsack with her German grammar, and paddle the punt down the lake, tie it up where the trees began, and start. Nothing seemed to tire her. She would walk for miles along the endless forest tracks, just as much suited to her environment, just as harmonious and as much a creature of air and sunshine as the white butterflies that fluttered among the enormous pine trunks. Every now and then, for sheer delight in these things, she would throw herself down on the springy delicious carpet of whortleberries and lie still watching the blue-green tops of the pine-trees delicately swaying backwards and forwards far away over her head against the serene northern sky. They made a gentle sighing noise in the wind. It was the only sound, except the occasional cry of a woodpecker or the cry, immensely distant, of a hawk.
Nobody but herself seemed to use the forests. It was the rarest thing that she met a woodman, or children picking whortleberries. When she did she was much stared at. The forests were quite out of the beat of tourists or foreigners, and the indigenous ladies were too properly occupied by indoor duties to wander, even if they liked forests, away from their home anchorage; and for those whose business sent them into these lonely places to come across somebody belonging to the class that can have dinner every day regularly in a house if it likes and to the sex that ought to be there cooking, it was an amazement.
The young lady, however, seemed so happy that they all smiled at her when she looked at them. They supposed she must be some one grown white in a town, and come to stay the summer weeks with one of the Crown foresters. That would explain her detachment from duty, her knapsack, and the colour of her skin. Anyhow, just her passing made their dull day interesting; and they would watch her glinting in and out of the trees till at last, hardly distinguishable from one of the white butterflies, the distance took her.
When she was quite hot she would sit down in a carefully chosen spot where, if possible, a deciduous tree, a maple or a bird cherry, splashed its vivid green exquisitely against the peculiar misty bloom of pink and grey that hung about the pine trunks, a tree that looked quite little down among these giants, hardly as if it reached to their knees, and yet when she stood under it it was almost as big as the lime-trees in the Kökensee garden. She did not sit in its shade; she went some distance away where she could look at it quivering in the light, and leaning her back against a pine-tree she would eat her bread and cucumber and feel utterly filled with the love and glory of God.
Impossible to reason about this feeling. It was there. It seemed in that summer to go with her where-ever she went and whatever she did. She walked in blessing. It was in the light, she thought, looking round her, the wonderful light, the soft radiance of the forest; it was in the air, warm and fresh, scented and pungent; it was in the feel of the pine needles and the dry crisp last year's cones she crushed as she went along; it was in the cushions of moss so green and cool that she stopped to pat them, or in the hot lichen that came off in flakes when her feet brushed a root; it was in being young and healthy and having had one's dinner and sitting quiet and getting rested and knowing the hours ahead were roomy; it was in all these things, everywhere and in everything. She would pick up her German grammar in a quick desire to do something in return, something that gave her real trouble—shall one not say somehow Thank you?—and she engulfed huge tracts of it on these expeditions, learning pages of it by heart and repeating them aloud to the pine-trees and the woodpeckers.
When the sun began to go down she set out for home, sometimes losing her way for quite a long while, and then she would hurry because of Robert's supper, and then she would get very hot; and the combined heat and hurry and cucumber, to which presently was added fatigue, would end in one of those triumphal appearances later on in his laboratory to which he was growing so much accustomed.
In January, when she was just a sick thing, she thought of these days as something too beautiful to have really happened.
There was from the first no shyness about her on the subject of babies. She had not considered it during her life at home, for babies were never mentioned at the Palace—of course, she thought, remembering this omission, because there were none, and it would be as meaningless to talk about babies when there were none as it would be in Kökensee to talk about bishops when there were none. She arrived, therefore, at Kökensee with her mind a blank from prejudice, and finding the atmosphere thick with babies immediately with her usual uninquiring pliability adopted the prevailing attitude and was not shy either.
The neighbourhood did not wait till they were born to talk about its own children. It did not think of its children as unmentionable until they had been baptised into decency by birth. They were important things, the most important of all in the life of the women, and it was natural to discuss them thoroughly. The childless woman was a pitied creature. The woman who had most children was proudest. She might be poor and tormented by them, but it was something she possessed more of than her neighbours. Ilse had early inquired which room would be the nursery. That obvious pattern of respectability, Baroness Glambeck, talked of births with a detail and interest only second to that with which she talked of deaths. It seemed to her a most proper topic of conversation with any young married woman; and on her returning the Dremmel call a fortnight after it had been made she was quite taken aback and annoyed to find it had become irrelevant owing to Ingeborg's being perfectly well.
Indeed, this failure of Ingeborg's entirely spoilt the visit. The Baroness, who had arrived friendly, withdrew into frost with the manner of one who felt she had been thawed on the last occasion on false pretences. Impossible to meet one's pastor's wife—and such an odd-looking and free-mannered one, too—with any familiarity except on the Christian footing of impending birth or death. A pastor's wife belonged to the class one is only really pleasant with in suffering or guilt. Offended, yet forced to continue the call, the Baroness confined such conversation as she made to questions that had a flavour of hostility: where was it possible to get such shoes, and did the Frau Pastor think toes so narrow good for the circulation and the housework?
Ingeborg could not believe this was the motherly lady who had fussed round her bed that day at Glambeck. She felt set away at a great distance from her, on the other side of a gulf. For the first time it was borne in upon her that her marriage made a difference to her socially, that here in Germany the gulf was a wide one. She was a pastor's wife; and when asked about her family, which happened early and searchingly in the call, could only give an impression of more pastors.
"Ah, that is the same as what we call superintendent," said the Baroness, nodding several times slowly on learning that Ingeborg's father was a bishop; and after a series of questions as to the Frau Pastor's sister's marriage nodded her head slowly several times again, and informed Ingeborg that what her sister had married was a schoolmaster. "Like Herr Schultz," said the Baroness—Herr Schultz being the village schoolmaster.
There was a photograph of Judith on the table that caught and kept the Baroness's eye and also, in an even greater but more careful degree, the Baron's. It was Judith dressed in evening beauty, bare-necked, perfect.
Ingeborg took it up with a natural pride in having such a lovely thing for her very own sister and handed it to the Baroness.
"Here she is," said Ingeborg, full of natural pride.
The Baroness stared in real consternation.
"What?" she said. "This is a schoolmaster's wife? This is our pastor's sister-in-law? I had thought—"
She broke off, and with a firm gesture put the photograph on the table again and said she could not stay to supper.
Since then there had been no intercourse with Glambeck, and the Baroness did not know of the satisfactory turn things had taken at the parsonage till on Christmas Eve, from her gallery in church to which she and the Baron had decided to return on the greater festivals as a mark of their awareness that Herr Dremmel desired to make amends, she beheld during the drawn-out verses of the chorale Ingeborg drop sideways on the seat in her pew below and remain motionless and bunched up, her hymn-book pushed crooked on the desk in front of her, and her attitude one of complete indifference to appearances.
The Baroness did not nudge the Baron, because in her position one does not nudge, but her instinct was all for nudging.
Herr Dremmel could not see what had happened, custom concealing him during the singing in a wooden box at the foot of the pulpit where he was busy imagining agricultural experiments. Till he came out the singing went on; and suppose, thought the Baroness, he were to forget to come out? Once he had forgotten, she had heard, and had stayed in his box, having very unfortunately been visited there by a revelation concerning potash that caught him up into oblivion for the best part of an hour, during which the chorale was gone through with an increasing faintness fifteen times. She knew about the hour, but did not know it was potash. Suppose he once again fell into a meditation? There was no verger, beadle, pew-opener, or official person of any sort to take action. The congregation would do nothing that was outside the customary and the prescribed. There was no female relative such as the Frau Pastor would have had staying with her over Christmas if she had been what she ought to have been, and what every other pastor's wife so felicitously was, a German. And for her herself to descend and help in the eyes of all Kökensee would have been too great a condescension, besides involving her in difficulties with the wife of the forester, and the wife of the Glambeck schoolmaster, who was also the postman, both of whom were of the same social standing as the younger Frau Dremmel and would jealously resent the least mark of what they would interpret as special favour.
Herr Dremmel, however, came out punctually and went up into the pulpit and opened his well-worn manuscript and read out the well-known text, and the congregation sat as nearly thrilled as it could be waiting for the moment when his eye would fall on to his own pew and what was in it. Would he interrupt the service to go down and carry his wife out? Would the congregation have to wait till he came back again, or would it be allowed to disperse to its Christmas trees and rejoicings?
Herr Dremmel read on and on, expounding the innocent Christmas story, describing its white accessories of flocks and angels and virgins and stars with the thunderous vehemence near scolding that had become a habit with him when he preached. His text wasPeace on earth, goodwill among men, and from custom he hit his desk with his clenched fist while he read it out and hurled it at his congregation as if it were a threat.
He did not look in his wife's direction. He was not thinking of her at all. He wondered a little at the stillness and attention of his listeners. Nobody coughed. Nobody shuffled. The school children hung over the edge of the organ loft, motionless and intent. Baron Glambeck remained awake.
At the end of the service Herr Dremmel had to stay according to custom in his wooden box till every one had gone, and it was not till he came out of that to go through the church to its only door that he perceived Ingeborg. For a moment he thought she was waiting for him in an attitude of inappropriately childish laxity, and he was about to rebuke her when it flashed upon him that she had fainted, that it was the second time in ten days, and that he was indeed and without any doubt at last the happiest of men.
In spite of the bitter wind that was raking the churchyard every person who had been inside the church was waiting outside to see the pastor come out. The Glambecks and elders of the church would have waited in any case on Christmas Eve to wish him the compliments of the season and receive his in return, but on this occasion they waited with pleasure as well as patience, and the rest of the congregation waited, too.
They were rewarded by seeing him presently appear in the doorway in his gown and bands carrying the bundle that was the still unconscious Frau Pastor as if she were a baby, his face illuminated with joy and pride. It was as entertaining as a funeral. Double congratulations were poured upon him, double and treble handshakes of the hand he protruded for the purpose from beneath Ingeborg's relaxed body, and his spectacles as he responded were misty, to the immense gratification of the crowd, with happy tears.
This was the first popular thing Ingeborg had done since her arrival. She could not if she had planned it out with all her care and wits have achieved anything more dramatically ingratiating. The day was the most appropriate day in the whole year. It had been well worth waiting, thought her overjoyed Robert, in order to receive such a Christmas gift. The Baroness, who with the Baron was most cordial, felt flattered, as if—only of course less perfectly, for she herself had produced her children in actual time for the tree—her example had been taken to heart and followed. The village was deeply gratified to see an unconscious Frau Pastor carried through its midst, and her limp body had all the prestige of a corpse. Everybody was moved and pleased; and when Ingeborg, after much persuasion, woke up to the world again on the sofa of the parsonage parlour it was to live through the happiest day she had yet had in her life, the day of Robert's greatest joy in her and devotion and care and pride and petting.
Once more and for this day she outstripped the fertilizers in interest, and the laboratory was a place forgotten. She was pampered. She lay on the sofa, feeling quite well again, but staying obediently on it because he told her to and she loved him to care, watching him with happy eyes as he tremendously hovered. He finished the arranging of the tree for her and fixed the candles on it, interrupting himself every now and then to come and kiss her hands and pat her. Beams seemed to proceed from him and penetrate into the remotest corners. In a land where all homes were glowing that Christmas night this little home glowed the brightest. The candles of the tree shone down on Ingeborg curled up in the sofa corner, talking and laughing gaily, but with an infinitely proud and solemn gladness in her heart that at last he believed, that at last she was fairly started on the road of the Higher Duty, that at last she was going to be able to do something back, something in return for all this happiness that had come to her through and because of him.
Ilse was called in, and came very rosy and shining from careful washing to be given her presents. There were surprises for Ingeborg—she had to shut her eyes while they were arranged—that touched and astonished her, so totally blind had Robert seemed to be for weeks past to anything outside his work—a pot of hyacinths twisted about with pink crinkly paper and satin bows that he must have got with immense difficulty and elaborate precautions to prevent her seeing it, a volume of Heine's poetry, a pair of fur gloves, a silver curb bracelet, and a smiling pig of marzipan with a label round its neck,Ich bringe Glück. She, not realising what a German Christmas meant, had only a cigar-case for him; and when, her lap full of his presents and her wrist decorated with the bracelet in which he showed an honest pride, carefully explaining the trick of its fastening and assuring her it was real silver and that little women, he well knew, liked being hung with these barbaric splendours, she put her arm round his neck and apologised for her dreadful ignorance of custom and want of imagination and solitary, unsurprising, miserable cigar-case—when she did this, with her cheek laid on his furry head, he drew her very close to him and blessed her, blessed her his little wife and that greatest of gifts that she was bringing him.
Both of them had wet eyes when this blessing, solemnly administered and received, was over. It was done in the presence of Ilse, who looked on benevolently and at the end came and shook their hands and joined to her thanks for what she had been given her congratulations on the happy event of the coming summer.
"July," said Ilse, after a moment's reflection. "We must furnish that room," she added.