The indifference that could sleep while her outraged husband was looking for her revolted him. Without making any further attempt to wake her he turned on his heel, and slamming the door behind him went downstairs again.
"That is thieves at last," remarked Ditti, who had been expecting them for years, brought out of her dreams—good dreams—by the noise of the door.
"Yes," said Robertlet, also roused from dreams that did him credit.
"We must now get under the clothes," said Ditti, who had settled long ago what would be the right thing to do.
"Yes," said Robertlet.
"You needn't," said Ingeborg out of the darkness—they both started, they had forgotten she was there—"it was only Papa."
But the thought of Papa coming up to their room and banging the door in the middle of the night filled them in its strangeness with an even greater uneasiness; they would have preferred thieves; and after some preliminary lying quiet and being good they one after the other withdrew as silently as possible beneath the comfort of the clothes, where they waited in neat patience for the next thing Papa might do until, stifled but uncomplaining, they once more fell asleep.
There followed some days of strain in the Kökensee parsonage.
Herr Dremmel retired into an extremity of silence, made no allusion to these regrettable incidents, became at meals a mere figure behind a newspaper, and at other times was not there at all.
He had decided that he would not waste his energies in anger. At the earliest opportunity he would drive in to Meuk, call on the doctor, and after explaining the effect of Zoppot, a place which was to have cured her, on his wife, request him now to prescribe a cure for the cure. It was Ingeborg's business to come to her husband and ask for forgiveness, and he would give her these few days in which to do it. If she did not he would know, after consultation with the doctor, what course to take—whether of severity, or whether, setting aside his manhood, it was not rather an occasion on which one ought to coax. He was, after all, too humane to resort without medical sanction to scenes. Perhaps what she needed was only a corrective to Zoppot. There was such a thing as excess of salubriousness.
Having made up his mind, he found himself calmer, able to work again in the knowledge that in a few days he would be clear, with the aid of the doctor, as to what should be done; and Ingeborg had nothing to complain of except that he would not speak. Several times she tried to reopen the so hastily closed subject, but got no further in the face of his monumental silence than "But, Robert—"
She took the children for outings in the forest, and while they did not chatter merrily together and did not play at games she thought over all the ways that were really tactful of luring him to reasonable discussion. She knew she had made a lamentable first appearance in therôleof a retiring mother, but how difficult it was when you felt overwhelmingly to talk objectively. And then there were tears. A woman cried, and what a handicap that was. Before the first semicolon in any vital discourse with one's husband was reached one was dissolved in tears, thought Ingeborg, ashamed and resentful; and Robert grew so calm and patient, so disconcertingly calm and patient when faced by crying; he sat there like some large god, untouched by human distress, waiting for the return of reason. It is true he cried, too, sometimes, but only about odd things like Christmas Eves and sons if they were sufficiently new born—things that came under the category surely of cheerful, at most of cheerfully touching; but he never cried about these great important issues, these questions on which all one's happiness hung. Life would run more easily, she thought, if husbands and wives had the same taste in tears.
Four days after her return home she asked him to forgive her.
It was at the end of supper, and he had just removed his book from the supporting loaf and was getting up to go when she ran across to him with the quickness of despair and laid hold of him by both his sleeves and said, "Forgive me."
He looked down at her with a gleam in his eye; he would not have to go to Meuk after all.
"Do," she begged. "Robert! Do! You know I love you. I'm so miserable to have hurt you. Do let's be friends. Won't we?"
"Friends?" echoed Herr Dremmel, drawing back. "Is that all you have to say to me?"
"Oh, do be friends! I can't bear this."
"Ingeborg," he said with the severity of disappointment, pulling his sleeves out of her hands and going to the door, "have you then not yet discovered that a true husband and wife can never be friends?"
"Oh, but how dreadful!" said Ingeborg, dropping her hands by her side and staring after him as he went out.
Toward the end of the week, when her unassisted meditations continued to produce no suggestions of any use for removing the stain that undoubtedly rested on her, she thought she would go in to Meuk and seek the counsel of the doctor. He had always been good to her, kind and understanding. She would go to him more in the spirit of one who goes to a priest than to a doctor, and inquire of him earnestly what she should do to be saved.
She found the position at home unendurable. If the doctor told her that it was her duty to go on having children, and that it was mere chance the two last had been born dead, she would resume her career. It was a miserable career—a terrible, maimed thing—but less miserable than doubt as to whether one were not being wicked and Robert was being utterly right. Not for nothing was she the daughter of a bishop, and had enjoyed for twenty-two years the privileges of a Christian home. Also she well knew that the public opinion of Kökensee and Glambeck would be against her in this matter of rebellion, and she felt too weak to stand up alone against these big things. She had never been able to hold out long against prolonged disapproval; nor had she ever been able to endure that people round her should not be happy. By the end of the week she was so wretched and so full of doubts that she decided to put her trust in Meuk and abide by the decision of its doctor; and so it happened that she set out on the five-mile walk to it on the same day on which Herr Dremmel drove there.
He had driven off in the middle of the morning with sandwiches for himself and the coachman in the direction of the experiment ground, telling her he would not be in till the evening, so she seized the favourable opportunity and, also armed with sandwiches, started soon after twelve o'clock for Meuk. The doctor's consulting hour was, she knew, from two to three, and if she were there punctually at two she could talk to him, have her fate decided, and be home again by four.
She walked along the edge of the harvested rye-fields eating her sandwiches as she went, and refusing to think for this brief hour and a half of the difficulties of life. Her mind was weary of them. She would put them away from her for this one walk. It was the brightest of August middays. The world seemed filled with every element of happiness. Some people, probably friends of the Glambecks, were shooting partridges over the stubble. The lupin fields were in their full glory, and their peculiar orange scent met her all along the way. There was a mile of sandy track to be waded through, and then came four good miles of hard white highroad between reddening mountain ashes to Meuk. Walking in that clear fresh warmth, so bright with colour, so sweet with scents, she could not but begin gradually to glow, and by the time she arrived at the doctor's house, however wan her spirits might be, the rest of her was so rosy that the servant who opened the door tried to head her off from the waiting-room to the other end of the passage, persuaded that what she had come for could not be the doctor, but an animated call on the doctor's wife. She entered the waiting-room, a dingy place, with much the effect of a shaft of light piercing through a fog; and there, sitting at the table, turning over the fingered and aged piles of illustrated weeklies, she found Herr Dremmel. For a moment they stared at each other.
There was no one else there. Through folding-doors could be heard the murmur of a patient consulting in the next room. Meuk was not usually a sick place, and nine times out of ten the doctor read his newspaper undisturbed from two to three; this was the tenth time, and though it had only just struck two a patient was with him already.
Herr Dremmel and Ingeborg stared at each other for a moment without speaking. Then he said, suddenly angered by the realisation that she had come in to Meuk without asking him if she might, "You did not tell me you were coming here."
"No," said Ingeborg.
"Why have you come?"
She sat down as inconspicuously as she could on the edge of a chair in a corner and clung to her umbrella. It was the awkwardest thing meeting Robert there.
"I—I just thought I would," she murmured.
"You do not look ill. You were not ill this morning."
"It's—psychological," murmured Ingeborg unnerved, and laying hold of the first word that darted into her undisciplined brain.
"Psycho—?"
"Areyouill, Robert?" she asked, suddenly anxious. "Why haveyoucome?"
"My dear wife, that is my affair," said Herr Dremmel, who was particularly annoyed and puzzled by her presence.
"Oh," murmured Ingeborg. She had never yet heard herself called his dear wife, and felt the immensity of her relegation to her proper place.
He fluttered the pages of theFliegende Blätter; she held on tighter to what seemed to be her only friend, her umbrella.
"Did you walk?" he asked presently, letting off the question at her like a gun.
"Yes—oh, yes," said Ingeborg, with hasty meekness.
What had she come for? thought Herr Dremmel, fluttering the pages faster. Ridiculous to pretend she needed a doctor. She looked, sitting there with her unusual pink cheeks, like a flourishing sixteen—at most eighteen.
What had he come for? thought Ingeborg, wishing life would not deal so upsettingly in coincidences, and keeping her eyes carefully on the carpet. Then a swift fear jumped at her heart—suppose he were ill? Suppose he had begun to have one of those large, determined, obscure diseases that seem to mow down men and make the world so much a place of widows? She had observed that for one widower in Kökensee and the surrounding district there were ten widows. The women appeared to ail through life, constantly being smitten down by one thing after the other, but at least they stayed alive; while the men, who went year by year out robustly to work, died after a single smiting. "Perhaps it's want of practice in being smitten," she thought; and looked anxiously under her eyelashes at Robert, struggling with a desire to go over and implore him to tell her what was the matter. In another moment she would have gone, driven across by her impulses, if the folding-doors had not been thrown open and the doctor appeared bowing.
"Darf ich bitten?" said the doctor to Herr Dremmel, not perceiving Ingeborg, who was shuttered out of sight by the one half of the door he had opened. "Ah—it is the Herr Pastor," he added less officially on recognising him, and advanced holding out his hand. "I hope, my friend, there is nothing wrong with you?"
Herr Dremmel did not answer, but seizing his hat made a movement of a forestalling character towards the consulting room; and the doctor turning to follow him beheld Ingeborg in her corner behind the door.
"Ah—the Frau Pastor," he said, bowing again and again advancing with an extended hand. "Which," he added, looking from one to the other, "is the patient?"
But Herr Dremmel's back, disappearing with determination into the next room, suggested an acute need of assistance not visible in his wife's retiring attitude.
"You'll tell me thetruthabout him, won't you?" she whispered, anxiously. "You won't hide things from me?"
The doctor looked grave. "Is it so serious?" he asked; and hurried after Herr Dremmel and shut the door.
Ingeborg sat and waited for what seemed a long time. She heard much murmuring, and often both voices murmured together, which puzzled her. Sometimes, indeed, they ceased to be murmurs and rose to a point at which they became distinct—"You forget I am a Christian pastor," she heard Robert say—but they dropped again, though never into a pause, never into those moments of silence during which Robert might be guessed to be putting out his tongue or having suspect portions of his person prodded. She sat there worried and anxious, all her own affairs forgotten in this fear of something amiss with him; and when at last the door opened again and both men came out she got up eagerly and said, "Well?"
Herr Dremmel was looking very solemn; more entirely solemn than she had ever seen him; almost as though he had already attained to that crown of a man's career, that final touch of all, that last gift to the world, a widow and orphans. The doctor's face was a careful blank.
"Well?" said Ingeborg again, greatly alarmed.
"Does the Frau Pastor also wish to consult me?" asked the doctor.
"Yes. I did. But it doesn't really matter now. Robert—"
Herr Dremmel was putting on his hat very firmly and going towards the outer door without saying good-bye to the doctor. "I will wait for you outside and drive you home, Ingeborg," he said, not looking round.
She stared after him. "Is he very ill?" she asked, turning to the doctor.
"No."
"No?"
"No," said the doctor, with a stress on it.
"But—"
"And you look very well, too. Pray, keep so. It is not necessary, judging from your appearance, to consult me further. I will conduct you to your carriage."
"But—" said Ingeborg, who found herself being offered an arm and led ceremoniously after Robert.
"Take your tonic, be much in the sun, and alter nothing in your present mode of life," said the doctor.
"But Robert—"
"The Herr Pastor enjoys excellent health, and will throw himself with more zeal than ever into his work."
"Then why—"
"And the Frau Pastor will do her duty."
"Yes."
She stopped and faced him. "Yes," she said, "I'm going to, but—what is my duty?"
"My dear Frau Pastor, there is only one left. You have discharged all the others. Your one duty now is to keep well in body and mind, provide your two children with a capable mother, and your husband with a companion possessed of the intelligent amiability that springs from good health."
"But Robert—?"
"He has been consulting me about you. I will not allow you to turn him, who deserves so well of fate, into that unhappy object, a widower."
"Oh? So really—?"
He opened the front door. "Yes," he said, "really."
And he handed her up into the seat next to Herr Dremmel and waved them off on their homeward journey with friendly gestures.
And Ingeborg, now aware that the real cause of Robert's preternatural gloom was the dread of losing her, not the dread of leaving her, was deeply touched and full of a desire to express her appreciation. She slid her hand through his arm and spent the time between Meuk and Kökensee earnestly endeavouring to reassure him. He was not, after all, she eagerly explained, going to be a widower.
He bore her comforting in silence.
Being a wise man, Herr Dremmel lost no time in fidgeting or lamenting over the inevitable, but having heard the doctor's summing up, which was expressed in the one firm word repeated over and over again like a series of blows,ausgeschlossen, he ruled Ingeborg out of his thoughts as a wife and proceeded to train himself to contemplate her as a sister.
After a short period of solemnity, for he was not sure whether the training would not be tormenting and grievously interfere with his work, he became serene again, for to his satisfaction he found it easy. The annoyance of having supposed his wife to be undutiful, the pain of having believed her to be deliberately hurting him, was removed. He was faced by a simple fact that had nothing to do with personalities. It was unfortunate that he should have married some one who was so very, he could not help thinking, easily killed, but on the other hand he was less dependent on domestic joys than most members of that peculiarly dependent profession, the Church, for he had his brains. He was surprised how easy, once he recognised its inevitability, the readjustment of the relationship was, how easily and comfortably he forgot. She seemed to drop off him like a leaf off a tree in autumn, a light thing whose detachment from the great remaining strength, the reaching down and reaching up, was not felt. His mind became fitted with wife-tight compartments. He ceased, he who had feared these things might come to be an obsession, so much as to see that she was pretty, that she was soft, that she was sweet. Just as when first he met her he had been pleased and interested to find he could fall in love so now he was pleased and interested to find, when it was a matter of reason and necessity, he could fall out again. He was, it seemed, master of himself. Passions were his servants, and came only as it were when he rang the bell. All one had to do then was not to ring the bell. With satisfaction he observed that in a crisis of the emotions (he supposed one might fairly call it that) the training he had bestowed on his reason, the attention he had given it from his youth up, was bearing fruit not only abundant but ripe. Ingeborg was transformed in his eyes with gratifying rapidity into a sister—a gentle maiden sister who on the demise of his wife had taken over the housekeeping; and when in the evenings he bade her a kind good-night he found himself doing it quite naturally on her forehead. He did not tell her she had become a sister; he merely rearranged his life on these new lines; and he did, as the doctor had predicted, throw himself into his work with more zeal than ever, and very soon was once again being pervaded by the blessed calms, the serenities, the unequalled harmonies that are the portion of him who diligently does what he is interested in.
But Ingeborg, who had neglected her reason in her youth and whose mind consequently was strictly undisciplined, spent the first few weeks of being a sister in a condition of what can only be described as fluffing about. She took hold of an end of life here that seemed to be sticking out and tugged it, and of an end of life there that seemed to be sticking out and tugged it, and looked at them inquiringly and let them go again. She did not quite know, so rich in liberty had she suddenly become, where to begin. There were so many ends to life, and she was so free to choose that she blinked a little. Here were her days, swept out and empty for her at last. Here she was able to say magnificently, "Next month I'll do this or that," sure of her months, sure of their being arrangeable things, flexible to her will, not each just a great black leaden weight holding her pinned down more and more heavily to a sofa. And not only could she say confidently what she would do next month, but also, and this small thing like many other small things of the sort seemed curiously new and delightful, she could say confidently what she would wear. All those dreary tea-gowns in which she had trailed through the seven years of her marriage, dark garments whose sole function was to hide, were given to Ilse, her first servant, who had married poverty and who frugally turned them into trousers of assorted shapes for her husband, embittering him permanently; and from long-forgotten cupboards she got out small neat frocks again, portions of her unworn tremendous trousseau, short things, washable and tidy, and was refreshed into respect for herself as a decent human being by the mere putting of them on.
Her days at first held any number of these new sensations or rather recognitions of sensations that used in her girlhood to be a matter of course, but now were seen to be extraordinarily precious. She spilt over like a brimming chalice of gratefulness for the great common things of life—sleep, hunger, power to move about, freedom from fear, freedom from pain. Her returning health ran through her veins like some exquisite delicate wine. She was now thirty, and had never felt so young. Wonderful to wake up in the morning to another day of being well. Wonderful being allowed to be alive in a world so utterly beautiful, so full of opportunity. She had all the thankfulness, the tender giving of herself up confidently to joy of the convalescent. She was happy just to sit on fine mornings on the doorstep in the sun drinking things in. Robertlet and Ditti had never been so much kissed; Rosa and the cook had never been asked so often after their ailing mothers; Kökensee had never been so near having a series of entertainments arranged for it. The very cat was stroked with a fresh sense of fellowship, the very watchdog, at one time suspected of surliness, was loved anew; and when she passed through the yard she did not fail to pause and gaze with a sunny determined kindness at the pig.
But though she passionately wanted to make everybody and everything happy in return for Robert's goodness to her, in return for the kind way she thought he was accepting her decision and not once after that first outbreak reproaching her, she had been anchored too long to one definite behaviour not to feel a little unsteady when first let loose. She hovered uncertainly round the edges of life, fingering them, trying to feel the point where she could best catch hold and climb into its fulness again.
It was oddly difficult.
Was it that she had been out of things for so many years? Had she then become a specialist? As the weeks passed and the first sheer delight in just being well was blunted by repetition, she began to be puzzled. Everything began to puzzle her—herself, Robert, the children, the servants. Robert puzzled her extremely. Whenever before she had been happy, a cheerful singing thing, he had loved her. She knew he had. She had only to be in a gay mood, in the mood that recklessly didn't mind whether he liked it or not but sat on his knee and insisted on his listening while she talked, half in earnest and half amused, about the bigger, vaguer, windier aspects of life, for him to come up out of the depths of his meditations and laugh and pet her. Now nothing fetched him up. He was quite unresponsive. He seemed beyond her reach, in some strange retreat where she could not get at him. She had never felt so far away from him. He was not angry evidently; he was quite kind. She could not guess that this steady unenthusiastic kindness was the natural expression of a fraternal regard.
"But he doesloveme," she said to herself, altogether unaware of the smallness of the place in the world occupied by negative persons like sisters—"he doesloveme."
She said it several times a day, hugging it to herself as the weeks went on in much the same way that a coachman, growing cold on his box, hugs his chest, not having anything else to hug, at intervals to keep his circulation going; and particularly she said it on her way up to the attic after the administration of the good-night kiss.
In spite of this assurance, she found herself presently beginning to hesitate before she spoke to him or touched him, wondering whether he would like it. She tried to shake off these increasing timidities, and once or twice intrepidly stroked his hair; but his head, bent over his dinner or his book, seemed unconscious that she was doing it, and she felt unable to go on.
"But he doesloveme," she said to herself.
It was not long before she perceived definitely that she had ceased to amuse him, and the moment she discovered this she ceased to be amusing: her gaiety went out like a light.
"But he doesloveme," she still said to herself.
He called her Ingeborg regularly, never wife or Little One, and it soon came to be unthinkable that she should ever have been his treasure, snail, or sheep. He did it, however, quite kindly, with no trace of the rebuke it used invariably to contain.
"But he doesloveme," she still said to herself.
Puzzled, she racked her brain to think of ways to please him, and tried to make his house as comfortably perfect for him as possible, performing every duty she could find or invent with a thoroughness that by eleven o'clock in the morning had exhausted the supply. Herr Dremmel, however, was not accessible by ways of order and good food; he had never noticed their absence, and he did not now notice their presence. She saw after a while herself that his sum of happiness was not in the least increased by them. How could she make him happy, then? What could she do to make his life the brightest serene thing?
It was a shock to her, an immense and shattering surprise, the day she realised that all this time he was, in fact, being happy. She walked in the garden long that day, staring hard at this new perception, pondering, astonished.
"But he doesl—" she began; and stopped.
Did he? What was the good of saying he did if he didn't? Was everything with him, and perhaps with other husbands—she knew so little about husbands—bound up with parenthood? Was it true, what he said to her the day she begged him to be friends, that a husband and wife could never be friends? She felt so entirely able to love Robert, to love him tenderly and deeply, without perpetually being somebody's mother. Perhaps wives could be friends and husbands couldn't. She wished she knew more about these things. She felt she did not rightly understand; and suspected, walking up and down the damp October garden, that being a bishop's daughter was an inefficient preparation for being anybody's wife. It kept one's mind muffled. You were brought up not to look. If you wanted to see you had to be furtive and peep at life over the edge, as it were, of your Prayer-book, which made you feel wicked and didn't give you any sort of a view. All bishops' daughters, she said to herself walking fast, for her thoughts became tumultuous on this subject, ought to be maiden ladies; or, if they couldn't manage that as St. Paul would say, they should at least only marry more bishops. Not curates, not vicars, not mysterious elusivenesses like German pastors, but bishops. People they were used to. People they understood. Continuations. Second volumes. Sequels. Aprons. Curates might have convulsive moments that would worry souls blanched white by the keeping out of the light, souls like celery, no whiter than anybody else's if left properly to themselves, but blanched by a continual banking up round them of episcopal mould; and even a vicar might conceivably sometimes be headlong; while as for a German pastor.... She flung out her hands.
Well, Robert was not headlong. No one could accuse him of anything but the most steady sequence in his steps. But he was, she thought, not having the clue to Herr Dremmel's conduct, incomprehensible. With the simple faith of women, that faith that holds out against so many enlightenments and whose artless mainspring is vanity, she had believed quite firmly that every sweet and admiring assurance he had ever given her would go on changelessly and indefinitely holding good, she had believed she knew and understood him better than he did himself, and that at any time she wanted to she had only to reach out her hand to be able to help herself to more of his love. This faith in herself and in her power, if she really wished, to charm him, she called having faith in him. It took six weeks of steadily continued mild indifference on Herr Dremmel's part, of placid imperviousness to all approaches of an affectionate nature, of the most obvious keen relish in his work, keener than he had yet shown, to reveal the truth at last to her; and greatly was she astonished. He was happy, and he was happy without her! "And that," said Ingeborg, unable to resist the conclusion pressed upon her, "isn't love."
She stopped a moment beneath the gently dripping trees and took off her knitted cap and shook it dry, for she had inadvertently brushed against an overhanging branch on which last summer's leaves still wetly clung.
She pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed her cap thoughtfully. It had been raining all the morning, and now late in the afternoon the garden was a quiet grey place of fallen leaves and gathering dusk and occasional small shakings of wet off the trees when a silent bird perched on the sodden branches. Some drops fell on her bare head while she was drying her cap. She put up her hand mechanically and rubbed them off. She stood wiping her cap long after it was dry, absorbed in thought.
"I don't know what it is," she said presently, half aloud, "but I do know what it isn't."
She put on her cap again, pulling it over her ears with both hands and much care, and staring while she did it at a slug in the path in front of her.
"And what it isn't," she said after another interval, shaking her head and screwing up her face into an expression of profoundest negation, "is love."
"Well," she added, deeply astonished.
Then, with a flash of insight, "It's because he works."
Then, with a quick desire to cover up the wound to her vanity, "If he didn't get lost in his work he'drememberhe loves me—it's only that heforgets."
Then, with a white flare of candour, "He's a bigger thing than I am."
Then, with the old eagerness to help, "So it's my business to see that he can be big in happy peace."
Then, remembrance smiting her with its flat, cold hand, "But heishappy."
Then, "So where do I come in?"
Then, with a great, frank acceptance of the truth, "I don't come in."
Then, swept by swift, indignant honesty, "Why should Iwantto come in? What is all this coming in? Oh"—she stamped her foot—"the simple fact, the naked fact when I've pulled all the silly clothes off, is that I only want him to be happy if it's I who make him happy, and I'm nothing but a—I'm just a—" She twisted round on her heels, her arms flung out, in search of the exact raw word—"I'm nothing but just a common tyrant."
At tea-time her condition can best, though yet imperfectly, be described as chastened.
Nevertheless, though she tried to face it squarely and help herself by indignation at her own selfish vanity, she felt a great emptiness round her, a great chill.
It was impossible to get used all at once to this new knowledge, so astonishing after seven years of conviction that one was loved, and so astonishing when one remembered that as recently as August—one could positively count the days—just coming home again after an absence had drawn forth from Robert any number of manifestations of it. It had the suddenness and completeness of the switching off of light. A second before, one was illuminated; another second, and one was groping in the dark. For she did grope. She was groping for reasons. It seemed for a long time so incredible that her entire importance and interest as a human being should depend on whether she was or was not what he called a true wife that she preferred to go on groping rather than take hold of this as an explanation.
She had been so sure of Robert. She had been so familiar with him and unafraid. When she thought of her days at home, of her abject fear of her father, of her insignificance, she felt that Robert's love and admiration had lifted her up from being a creeping thing to being a creature with quite bright brave wings. He had come suddenly into her life and told her she was asüsses Kleines: and behold she became asüsses Kleines. And now he didn't think her even that any more; he had dropped her again, and she was already falling back into the old state of timidity towards the man in the house.
She turned to the children and the housekeeping and to a search for something she could do in the parish, so that at least while she was making efforts to clear her confusion about Robert she might not be wasting time. If she was no use to him she might be of use to the less independent. She was entirely humble at this moment, and would have thanked a dog if it had been so kind as to allow her to persuade it to wag its tail. It had always been her hope throughout each of her illnesses that presently when that one was over she would get up and begin to do good, and now here she was, finally up, with two children who had not yet had much mother, two servants whose lives might perhaps be made more interesting, a whole field outside her gates for practise in deeds of mercy, and enormous tracts of time on her hands. All she had to do was to begin.
But it was rather like an over-delayed resurrection. Things had filled up. Everybody seemed used to being left alone, and such a thing as district-visiting, so familiar to a person bred in Redchester, was unknown in East Prussia. The wife of a country pastor had as many duties in her own house as one woman could perform in a day, and nobody expected to see her going about into other houses consoling and alleviating. Also, the peasants thought, why should one be consoled and alleviated? The social difference between the peasant and the pastor was so small and rested so often only on education that it would have appeared equally natural, if the thing could from any point of view have been made natural, for the wife of the peasant to go and console and alleviate the parsonage. Who wanted sympathy in Kökensee? Certainly not the men, and the women were too busy with family cares, those many crushing cares that yet kept them interested and alive, to have time for consolations. And those with most cares, most children who died, most internal complaints, most gloom and weariness, achieved just because of these things almost as much distinction and popularity in the village as those with most money. Ingeborg herself was popular so long as her children were drowned out of punts, or died of mumps, or were stillborn; but now that nothing happened to her and she went about, after having had six of them, still straight and slender, Kökensee regarded her coldly and with distrust. Doing nothing for anybody on a sofa in an untidy black tea-gown she had been respected. Trim and anxious to be of use she was disapproved of.
When she went round to try to interest the women in the getting up of little gatherings that were to brighten the parish once a fortnight during the winter months, they shook their heads over their washtubs and told each other after she had gone that it was because she kept two servants.Hausfrauswho did not do their own work, they said, shaking their heads with manyja, ja's, were sure to get into mischief. All they asked of the pastor's wife was that she should attend to her own business and let them attend to theirs. They did not walk into her living-room; why should she walk into theirs? They did not want to brighten her winter; why should she want to brighten theirs? She should take example from her husband, they said, who never visited anybody. But a Frau who kept two servants and who after six children still wore skirts shorter than a Confirmation candidate's—ja, ja, das kommt davon.
And things had filled up at home. Rosa and the cook had been used so long to managing alone, and were so completely obsessed by the idea that the Frau Pastor was half dead and that her one real function was to lie down, that they regarded her suddenly frequent appearances in the kitchen with the uneasiness and discomfort with which they would have regarded the appearances of a ghost. No more than if she had been a ghost did they know what to do with her. She did not seem real, separated from her bedroom and her beef-tea. They could not work with her. She would make them jump when, on looking up, they saw her in their midst, having come in unheard with her strange lightness of movement. Their nerves were shaken when they discovered her on her knees in odd corners of the house doing things with dusters. To see her prodding potatoes over the fire, and weighing meat, and approaching onions familiarly made them creep.
It was like some dreadful miracle.
It was like, said Rosa, whispering, being obliged to cook dinners and make beds with the help of—side by side with—
"With what then?" cried the cook, pretending courage but catching fear from Rosa's face.
"Mit einem Lazarus," whispered Rosa, behind her hand.
The cook shrieked.
They did not, however, give notice, being good girls and prepared to bear much, till they saw their names in red ink in one of the squares ruled on a sheet of paper the Frau Pastor pinned up on the sitting-room wall above her writing-table.
For a day or two they were filled with nameless horror because the ink was red. Then, when they discovered what the numbers against the square, 3—4, meant, the horror was swept away in indignation, for it was the hour in the afternoon in which they usually mended or knitted and gossiped together, and it appeared that the Frau Pastor intended to come and sit with them during this hour and read aloud.
"Nice books are so—so nice," said Ingeborg, explaining her idea. "Don't you think you'll like nice books?"
She faltered a little, because of the expression on their faces.
"There is the pig," said the cook desperately.
"The pig?"
"It has to be fed between three and four."
"Oh, but we're not going to mind things likepigs!" said Ingeborg with a slightly laboured brightness.
The next day they gave notice.
But the plan pinned up in the parlour had nothing, except during this one hour, to do with Rosa and the cook; it had been drawn up solely on behalf of Robertlet and Ditti.
Ingeborg had pored over it for days, making careful squares with a ruler and doing all the principal words in red ink, her hair touzled by the stresses of thinking out, and her cheeks flushed. The winter was upon them, and already rain and gales made being out of doors impossible except for one daily courageous trudge after dinner with the children in waterproofs and goloshes, and she thought that with a little arranging she might shorten and brighten the long months to the spring. The children were so passive. They seemed hardly conscious, she thought, of the world round them. Wouldn't they enjoy themselves more if they could be taught to look at things? Their resemblance to the elder Frau Dremmel was remarkable, it is true, but of course only superficial. Why they were apathetic was because they had had so little mother in their lives. She had only been able to teach them their prayers and their grace, and beyond that had had to leave them to God. Now, however, she could take over her charge again, and teach them things that would make them lissom, quick, interested, and gay.
What would make Robertlet and Ditti lissom, quick, interested, and gay? She pored profoundly over this question, and was steeped in red ink and with the end of her pen bitten off and the floor white with torn-up plans before she had answered it.
At the end of the winter she thought she could not have answered it right. There was something wrong with education. The children had been immensely patient. They had borne immensely with their mother. Yet by the end of a whole winter's application of the plan they knew only how cats and dogs were spelt, and the sole wonder that they felt after six months' parental effort to stir them to that important preliminary to knowledge was a dim surprise that such familiar beasts should need spelling.
It was very unfortunate, but they could not be got, for instance, to like the heavenly bodies. Useless for their mother to press them upon their notice on clear evenings when all the sky was a-blink. From first to last they saw nothing in the sunsets that lit the white winter world into a vast cave of colour except a sign that it must be tea-time. Not once could they be induced to shudder at the thought, on great starry nights, of infinite space. They were unmoved by the information that they were being hurled at an incredible speed through it; and they didn't mind the moon being all those miles away. In the dancing class it was Ingeborg who danced. In the gymnastic class it was she who grew lissom. TheEnglish and German Chatting, owing to an absence in Robertlet and Ditti of any of the ingredients of chat, was a monologue; and for the course onIntroductions to Insects Collected in the Houseit was Ingeborg who caught the flies.
They were, however, very good. Nothing to which they were subjected altered that. When their mother in spite of discouragements went on bravely, so did they. When out of doors she snowballed them they stood patiently till she had done. She showed them how to make a snow man, and they did not complain. She gave them little sledges at Christmas, and explained the emotions to be extracted from these objects by sliding on them swiftly down slopes, and they bore her no ill-will when, having slid, they fell off, but quietly preferred the level garden paths and drew each other in turn on one sledge up and down them, while their mother on the other sledge did the sorts of things they had come to expect from mothers, and kept on disappearing over the brink of the slope to the frozen lake head first and face downward.
"It's verydifficult," thought Ingeborg sometimes, as the winter dragged on.
There she was, heavy with facts about flies and stars and distances extracted in the evenings during her preparation hours from the "Encyclopædia Britannica" which had been procured from London for the purpose—the parsonage groaned beneath it—and longing to unload them, and she was not able to because the two vessels which ought to have received them were fitted so impenetrably with lids.
They seemed to grow, if anything, more lidded. Quieter and quieter. The hour at the end of the day, marked on the plan Lap, an hour she had thought might easily become beautiful, something her children would remember years hence, which was to have been all white intimacy, with kisses and talks about angels and the best and quickest ways of getting to heaven while Robertlet sat in the lap on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Ditti sat in it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (there being scarcity in laps), was from the beginning an hour of semi-somnolence for the children, of staring sleepily into the glow of the stove, resting while they waited for what their mother would do or say next.
Ingeborg was inclined to be disheartened at this hour. It was the last one of the children's day, and the day had been long. There was the firelight, the mother's lap and knee, the mother herself ready to kiss and be confided in and more than ready to confide in her turn those discoveries she had made in the regions of science, and nothing happened. Robertlet and Ditti either stared fixedly at the glow from the open stove door or at Ingeborg herself; but whichever they stared at they did it in silence.
"What are you thinking of?" she would ask them sometimes, disturbing their dreamless dream, their happy freedom from thought. And then together they would answer, "Nothing."
"No, but tell me really—you can'treallythink of nothing. It's impossible. Nothing is"—she floundered—"is alwayssomething—."
But the next time she asked the same question they answered with one voice just as before, "Nothing."
Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were having too much mother. This also happened in the hour called Lap.
"A mother," she reflected, both her arms round her children according to plan, "must often be rather a nuisance."
She looked down with a new sympathy at Ditti's head reposing, also according to plan, on her shoulder.
"Especially if she's a devoted mother."
She laid her cheek on the black smooth hair, parted and pigtailed and as unlike Robert's fair furry stuff or her own as it was like the elder Frau Dremmel's.
"A devoted mother," continued Ingeborg to herself, her eyes on the glowing heart of the stove and her cheek on Ditti's head, "is one who gives up all her time to trying to make her children different."
"I'ma devoted mother," she added, after a pause in which she had faced her conscience.
"How dreadful!" she thought.
She began to kiss Ditti's head very softly.
"How, too, dreadful to be in the power of somebody different; of somebody quick if you're not quick, or dull if you're not dull, and anyhow so old, so very old compared to you, and have to be made like her! How would I like being in my mother-in-law's power, with years and years for her to work at forcing me to be what she'd think I ought to be? And what she'd think I ought to be would be herself, what she tries to be. Of course. You can't think outside yourself."
She drew the children tighter. "Youpoorlittle things!" she exclaimed aloud, suddenly overcome by the vision of what it must be like to have to put up with a person so fundamentally alien through a whole winter; and she kissed them one after the other, holding their faces close to hers with her hands against their cheeks in a passion of apology.
Even to that exclamation, a quite new one in a quite new voice, they said nothing, but waited patiently for what would no doubt happen next.
What happened next was that they went to school.
Just as Ingeborg was beginning to ask herself rather shy questions—for she was very full of respects—about the value of education and the claims of free development, the State stepped in and swept Robertlet and Ditti away from her into its competent keeping. In an instant, so it seemed to her afterward when in the empty house she had nothing to do but put away their traces, she was bereft.
"You never told methisis what happens to mothers," she said to Herr Dremmel the day the brief order from the Chief Inspector of Schools arrived.
Herr Dremmel, who was annoyed that he should have forgotten his parental and civic duties, and still more annoyed, it being April and his fields needing much attention as a new-born infant, or a young woman one wishes, impelled by amorous motives, to marry, that there should be parental and civic duties to forget, was short with her.
"Every German of six has to be educated," he said.
"But theyarebeing educated," said Ingeborg, her mind weighted with all she herself had learned.
He waved her aside.
"But, Robert—my children—surely there's some way of educating them besides sending them away from me?"
He continued to wave her aside.
There was no doubt about it: the children had to go, and they went.
Of the alternatives, their being taught at home by a person with Government certificates, or attending the village school, Herr Dremmel would not hear. He was having differences of a personal nature with the village schoolmaster, who refused with a steadiness that annoyed Herr Dremmel to recognise that he was aSchafskopf, while Herr Dremmel held, and patiently explained, that a person who is born aSchafskopfshould be simple and frank about it, and not persist in behaving as if he were not one; and as for a teacher in the house, that was altogether impossible, because there was no room.
"There's the laboratory," said Ingeborg recklessly, to whom anything seemed better than letting her children go.
"The lab—?"
"Only to sleep in," she eagerly explained, "just sleep in, you know. The teacher needn't be there at all in the daytime, for instance."
"Ingeborg—" began Herr Dremmel; then he thought better of it, and merely held out his cup for more tea. Women were really much to be pitied. Their entire inability to reach even an elementary conception of values...
The children went to school in Meuk. They lodged with their grandmother, and were to come home on those vague Sundays when the weather was good and Herr Dremmel did not require the horses. Ingeborg could not believe in such a complete sweep out of her life. She loved Robertlet and Ditti with an extreme and odd tenderness. There was self-reproach in it, a passionate desire to protect. It was the love sometimes found in those who have to do all the loving by themselves. It was an acute and quivering thing. After her experiences in the winter she had doubts whether education at present was what they wanted. It was not school they wanted, she thought, but to run wild. She knew it would have been perhaps difficult to get them to run in this manner, but thought if she had had them a little longer and had thoroughly revised her plan, purging it of science and filling them up instead with different forms of wildness, she might eventually have induced them to. There could have been a carefully graduated course in wildness, she thought, beginning quietly with weeding paths, and going on by steps of ever-increasing abandonment to tree-climbing, bird-nesting, and midnight raids on apples.
And while she wandered about the deserted garden and was desolate, Robertlet and Ditti, safe in their grandmother's house, were having the most beautiful dumplings every day for dinner that seemed to fit into each part of them as warmly and neatly as though they were bits of their own bodies come back, after having been artificially separated, to fill them with a delicious hot contentment, and their grandmother was saying to them at regular intervals with a raised forefinger: "My children, never forget that you are Germans."
There was now nothing left for Ingeborg but, as she told Herr Dremmel the first Sunday Robertlet and Ditti had been coming home and then for some obscure reason did not come, thrusting the information tactlessly at tea-time between his attention and his book, her own inside.
"After all," she said, as usual quite suddenly, breaking a valuable silence, "there's still me."
Herr Dremmel said nothing, for it was one of those statements of fact that luckily do not require an answer.
"Nobody," said Ingeborg, throwing her head back a little, "can take that away."
Herr Dremmel said nothing to that either, chiefly because he did not want to. He had no time nor desire to guess at meanings which were, no doubt, after all not there.
"Whatever happens," she said, "I've still got my own inside."
"Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "I will not ask you what you mean in case you should tell me."
There was a drought going on, and Herr Dremmel, who justly prided himself on his sweetness of temper, was not as patient as usual; so Ingeborg, silenced, went into the garden where the drought was making the world glow and shimmer, and reflected that on the object she called her inside alone now depended her happiness.
It was useless to depend on others; it was useless to depend, as she had done in her ridiculous vanity, on others depending on her. After all, each year had a May in it and the birds sang. She would send away the extra servant and do the work herself, as she used to at first. She would begin again to develop her intelligence, and write that evening to London for theSpectator. Something, she remembered, had warmed and quickened her all those years ago after her meeting with Ingram—was it theSpectator? She would make plans. She would draw up plans in red ink. There were a thousand things she might study. There were languages.
She walked up and down the garden. If she let herself be beaten back this time into neglect of herself and indifference she would be done for. There was no one to save her. She would lapse and lapse; and not into fatnesses and peace like other women in Germany lopped of their children, and of a class above the class that stood at that instrument of salvation, its own washtub, not into afternoon slumbers and benevolences of a woolly nature that kept one's hand knitting while one's brains went to sleep till presently one was dead, but into something fretful and nipped, with a little shrivelled, skinny, steadily dwindling mind.
Her eyes grew very wide at this dreadful picture. Now was the moment, she thought, turning away from it quickly, now that there had come this pause in her life, to go over to England for a visit and see her relations and talk and come back refreshed to a new chapter of existence in Kökensee. She had not been out of Kökensee, except to Zoppot, since her marriage, and her throat tightened at the thought of England. But the Bishop had never forgiven her marriage; and her having had six children had also, it seemed from her mother's letters when there used to be letters, made an unfavourable impression on him. It had, in fact, upset him. He had considered such conduct too distinctively German to be passed over; and when she added to the error in taste of having had them the further error or rather negligence—it must have been criminal, thought the Bishop—of not being able to keep them alive, the Palace, after having four times with an increasing severity condoled, withdrew into a disapproval so profound that it could only express itself adequately by silence.
And a stay with Judith was out of the question. One had for a stay with Judith to have clothes, and she had no clothes; at least, none newer than eight years old—her immense unworn trousseau dogged her through the years—for Judith gave many parties at the Master's Lodge, brilliant gatherings, her mother called them in her rare letters, where London, come down on purpose and expressed in Prime and other ministers as well as in the fine flower of the aristocracy and a few selected fragrances from the world of literature and art—once her mother wrote that Ingram, the great painter, had been at the last party, and was so much enslaved by Judith's loveliness that he had asked as a favour to be allowed to paint her—sat at Judith's feet.
No; England was not for her. Her place was in Kökensee, and her business now was to do what her governesses used to call improve her mind. Perhaps if she improved it enough Robert would talk to her again sometimes, and this time not on the Little Treasure basis but on the solid one of intellectual companionship. Might she not end by being a real helpmeet to him? Somebody who would gradually learn to be quiet and analytical and artful with grains?
She went indoors and wrote then and there to London, renewing the long-ended subscriptions to theTimes,Spectator,Clarion,Hibbert's Journal, and the rest. She asked for a catalogue of the newest publications that were not novels—her determination was too serious just then for novels—ordered Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," for she felt she would like to have some principles, especially first ones, and said she would be glad of any little hint the news-agent could give her as to what he thought a married lady ought to know; and she spent the rest of the evening and the two following days laying the foundations of intellectual companionship by looking up the articleManurein the "Encyclopædia Britannica" and paraphrasing it into conversational observations that sounded to her so clever when she tried them on Herr Dremmel three days later at tea-time that she was astonished herself.
She was still more astonished when Herr Dremmel, having listened, remarked that her facts were wrong.
"But they can'tpossibly—" she began; then broke off, feeling the awkwardness of a position in which one was unable to argue without at once revealing the "Encyclopædia."
This was in May. By the end of the following May Ingeborg had read so much that she felt quite uncomfortable.
It had been a fine confused reading, in which Ruskin jostled Mr. Roger Fry and Shelley lingered, as it were, in the lap of Mr. Masefield. The news-agent, who must have lived chiefly a great many years before, steadily sent her mid, early, and pre-Victorian literature; and she, ordering on her own account books advertised in the weekly papers, found herself as a result one day in the placid arms of the Lake Poets, and the next being disciplined by Mr. Marinetti, one day ambling unconcernedly with Lamb, and the next caught in the exquisite intricacies of Mr. Henry James. She read books of travel, she learned poetry by heart, she grew skilful at combining her studies with her cooking; and propping up Keats on the dresser could run to him for a fresh line in the very middle of the pudding almost without the pudding minding. And since she loved to hear the beautiful words she learned aloud, and the kitchen was full of a pleasant buzzing, a murmurous sound of sonnets as well as flies, to which the servant got used in time.
But though she set about this new life with solemnity—for was she not a lopped and lonely woman whose husband had left off loving her and whose children had been taken away?—cheerfulness kept on creeping in. The chief obstacle to any sort of continued gloom was that there was a morning to every day. Also she had enthusiasms, those most uplifting and outlifting from oneself of spiritual attitudes, and developed a pretty talent for tingling. She would tingle on the least provocation, with joy over a poem, with admiration over the description of a picture, and thrilled and quivered with response to tales of Beauty—of the beauty of the cathedrals in France, miracles of coloured glass held together delicately by stone, blown together, she could only think from the descriptions, in their exquisite fragility by the breath of God rather than built up slowly by men's hands; of the beauty of places, the lagoons round Venice at sunrise, the desert toward evening; of the beauty of love, faithful, splendid, equal love; of all the beauty men made with their hands, little spuddy things running over dead stuff, blocks of stone, bits of glass and canvas, fashioning and fashioning till at last there was the vision, pulled out of a brain and caught forever into the glory of line and colour. She longed to talk about the wonderful and stirring and vivid things life outside Kökensee seemed to flash with. What must it be like to talk to people who knew and had seen? What could it be like to see for oneself, to travel, to go to France and its cathedrals, to go to Italy in the spring-time when the jewels of the world could be looked at in a setting of clear skies and generous flowers? Or in autumn, when Kökensee was grey and tortured with rainstorms, to go away there into serenity, to where the sun burned the chestnuts golden all day long and the air smelt of ripened grapes?
And she had only seen the Rigi.
Well, that was something; and it seemed somehow appropriate for a pastor's wife. She turned again to her books. What she had was very good; and she had found an old woman in the village who did not mind being comforted, so that added to everything else was now the joy of gratitude.
It seemed, indeed, that she was to have a run of joys that spring, for besides these came suddenly yet another, the joy so long dreamed of of having some one to talk to. And such a some one, thought Ingeborg, entirely dazzled by her good fortune—for it was Ingram.
She was paddling the punt as usual down the lake one afternoon, a pile of books at her feet, when, passing the end of the arm of reeds that stretched out round her hidden bay, she perceived that her little beach was not empty; and pausing astonished with her paddle arrested in the air to look, she recognized in the middle of a confusion of objects strewn round him that no doubt had to do with painting, sitting with his elbows on his drawn-up knees and his chin in his hand, Ingram.
He was doing nothing: just staring. She came from behind the arm of reeds, half drifting along noiselessly out towards the middle of the lake, straight across his line of sight.
For an instant he stared motionless, while she, holding her paddle out of the water, stared equally motionless at him. Then he seized his sketching book and began furiously to draw. She was out in the sun and had no hat on. Her hair was the strangest colour against the background of water and sky, more like a larch in autumn than anything he could think of. She seemed the vividest thing, suddenly cleaving the pallors and uncertainties of reeds and water and flecked northern sky.
"Don't move," he shouted in what he supposed was German, sketching violently.
"So it's you?" she called back in English, and her voice sang.
"Yes, it's me all right," he said, his pencil flying.
He did not recognise her. He had seen too many people in seven years to keep the foggy figure of that distant November evening in his mind.
"I'm coming in," she called, digging her paddle into the water.
"Sit still!" he shouted.
"But I want to talk."
"Sitstill!"
She sat still, watching him, unable to believe her good fortune. If he were only here again for a single day and she could only talk to him for a single hour, what a refreshment, what a delight: to talk in English; to talk to some one who had painted Judith; to talk to some one so wonderful; to talk atall! She was as little shy as a person stranded on a desert island would be of anybody, kings included, who should appear after years on the solitary beach.
"Well?" she called, after sitting patiently for what she felt must be half an hour but which was five minutes.
He did not answer, absorbed in what he was doing.
She waited for what seemed another half-hour, and then turned the punt in the direction of the shore.
"I'm coming in," she called; and as he did not answer she paddled towards the bay.
He stared at her, his head a little on one side, as she came close. "What are you going to do?" he asked, seeing she was manoeuvring the punt into the corner under the oak-tree.
"Land," said Ingeborg.
He got up and caught hold of the chain fastened to the punt's nose and dragged it up the beach.
"How do you do?" she said, jumping out and holding out her hand. "Mr. Ingram," she added, looking up at him, her face quite solemn with pleasure.
"Well, now, but who on earth are you?" he asked, shaking her hand and staring. Her clothes, now that she was standing up, were the oddest things, recalling back numbers ofPunch. "You're not staying at the Glambecks', and except for the Glambecks there isn't anywhere to stay."
"But I told you I was the pastor's wife."
"You did?"
"Last time. Well, and I still am."
"But when was last time?"
"Don't you remember? You were staying with the Glambecks then, too."
"But I haven't stayed with the Glambecks for an eternity. At least ten years."
"Seven," said Ingeborg. "Seven and a half. It was in November."
"But you must have been in pinafores."
"And you walked down the avenue with me. Don't you remember?"
"No," said Ingram, staring at her.
"And you scolded me because I couldn't walk as fast as you did. Don't you remember?"
"No," said Ingram.
"And you said I'd run to seed if I wasn't careful. Don't you remember?"
"No," said Ingram.
"And I had on my grey coat and skirt. Don't you remember?"
"No, no, no," said Ingram, smiting his forehead, "and I don't believe a word of it. You're just making it up. Look here," he said, clearing away his things to make room for her, "sit down and let us talk. Are you real?"
"Yes, and I live at Kökensee, just round the corner behind the reeds. But I told you that before," said Ingeborg.
"You do live?" he said, pushing his things aside. "You're not just a flame-headed little dream that will presently disappear again?"
"My name's Dremmel. Frau Dremmel. But I told you that before, too."
"The things a man forgets!" he exclaimed, spreading a silk handkerchief over the coarse grass. "There! Sit on that."
"You're laughing at me," she said, sitting down, "and I don't mind a bit. I'm much too glad to see you."
"If I laugh it's with pleasure," he said, staring at the effect of her against the pale green of the reeds—where had he seen just that before, that Scandinavian colouring, that burning sort of brightness in the hair? "It's so amusing of you to be Frau anything."
She smiled at him with the frankness of a pleased boy.
"You're verynice, you know," he said, smiling back.
"You didn't think so last time. You called me your dear lady, and asked me if I never read."
"Well, and didn't you?" he said, sitting down, too, but a little way off so that he could get her effect better.
"Yes, do sit down. Then I shan't be so dreadfully afraid you're going."
"Why, but I've only just found you."
"But last time you disappeared almost at once into the fog, and you'd only just found me then," she said, her hands clasped round her knees, her face the face of the entirely happy.
"After all I seem to have made some progress in seven years," he said. "I apparently couldn't see then."
"No, it was me. I was very invisible—"
"Invisible?"
"Oh, moth-eaten, dilapidated, dun-coloured. And I'd been crying."
"You? Look here, nobody with your kind of colouring should ever cry. It's a sin. It would be most distressing, seriously, if you were ever less white than you are at this moment."
"See how nice it is not to be a painter," said Ingeborg. "I don't mind a bit if you're white or not so long as it's you."
"But why should you like it to be me?" asked Ingram, to whom flattery, used as he was to it, was very pleasant, and feeling the comfort of the cat who is being gently tickled behind the ear.
"Because," said Ingeborg earnestly, "you're somebody wonderful."
"Oh, but you'll make me purr," he said.
"And I see your name in the papers at least once a week," she said.
"Oh, the glory!"
"And Berlin's got two of your pictures. Bought for the nation."
"Yes, it has. And haggled till it got them a dead bargain."
"And you've painted my sister."
"What?" he said quickly, staring at her again. "Why, of course. That's it. That's who you remind me of. The amazing Judith."
"Are you such friends?" she asked, surprised.
"Oh, well, then, the wife of the Master of Ananias. Let us give her her honours. She's the most entirely beautiful woman I've seen. But—"
"But what?"
"Oh, well. I did a very good portrait of her. The old boy didn't like it."
"What old boy?"
"The Master. He tried to stop my showing it. And so did the other old boy."
"What other old boy?"
"The Bishop."
"But if it was so good?"
"It was. It was exact. It was the living woman. It was a portrait of sheer, exquisite flesh."
"Well, then," said Ingeborg.
"Oh, but you know bishops—" He shrugged his shoulders. "Italy's got it now. It's at Venice. The State bought it. You must go and see it next time you're there."
"I will," she laughed, "the very next time." And her laugh was the laugh of joyful amusement itself.
Ingram was now forty three or four, and leaner than ever. His high shoulders were narrow, his thin neck came a long way out of his collar at the back and was partly hidden in front by his short red beard. His hair, darker than his beard, was plastered down neatly. He had very light, piercing eyes, and a nose that Ingeborg liked. She liked everything. She liked his tweed clothes, and his big thin hands—the wonderful hands that did the wonderful pictures—and his long thin nimble legs. She liked the way he fidgeted, and the quickness of his movements. And she glowed with pride to think she was sitting with a man who was mentioned in the papers at least once a week and whose pictures were bought by States, and she glowed with happiness because he did not this time seem anxious to go back to the Glambecks' at once; but most of all she glowed with the heavenliness, the absolute heavenliness of being talked to.
"And you're her sister," he said, staring at her. "Now that really is astonishing."
"But everybody can't be beautiful."
"A sister of hers here, tucked away in this desert. Itisa desert, you know. I've come to it because I wanted a desert—one does sometimes after too much of the opposite. But I go away again, and you live in it. What have you been doing all these years, since I was here last?"
"Oh, I've—been busy."
"But not here? Not all the time here?"
"Yes, all of it."
"What, not away at all?"
"I went to Zoppot once."
"Zoppot? Where's Zoppot? I never heard of Zoppot. I don't believe Zoppot's any good. Do you mean to say you've not been to a town, to a place where people say things and hear things and rub themselves alive against each other, since last I was here?"
"Well, but pastors' wives don't rub."
"But it's incredible! It's like death. Why didn't you?"
"Because I couldn't."
"As though it weren't possible to tear oneself free at least every now and then."
"You wait till you're a pastor's wife."