He could no longer trail around his own garden without meeting an interlaced couple
Ingeborg, in fact, was pleased. She was more, she was extremely happy. Here she was suddenly no longer a disgraced and boycotted and wicked girl, but that strangely encouraging object, that odd restorer of faith in oneself, a Little Sugar Lamb. Thecosinessof being a Sugar Lamb! She had been so very miserable. She had dragged through such cold, anæmic days. She had had such a horrible holiday, forced upon her on the very scene of her activities, and had had it brought home to her so freezingly, so blightingly, that she had done too dreadful a thing to be allowed apparently ever again to associate with the decent. And Robert—she quickly began calling him that to herself under the influence of her family's methods of reclaiming her—had not written a single letter.
"But he came," said Herr Dremmel, for whose enlightenment she was picturing the week she had had.
And her father would not speak to her at all, would not look at her.
"Old sheep," said Herr Dremmel good-naturedly.
And Judith had seemed entirely horrified, and used to blush if she tried to speak to her.
"Foolish turkey," said Herr Dremmel placidly.
But now somehow it did seem as if she needn't have been quite so miserable, and might have had more faith.
"What ought the Little One to have had more of?" asked Herr Dremmel; for his thoughts had not much time to spare, and he profitably employed them while she talked in working out the probable results of, say, the treatment of three acres of sugar-beet with sulphate of potash, sulphate of ammonia, and nitrate of soda respectively, all of them receiving 400 lbs. of basic slag as well—would not sulphate of ammonia be more effective as a nitrogenous manure than nitrate of soda in the case of sugar-beets, whose roots grew smaller and nearer the surface than mangels? "That is what little women should constantly have more of," he said, breaking away from sugar-beets to a zestful embracing; for on this occasion they were under the pear-tree, a place she seldom went to because she had not yet acquired, in spite of his assurances that she undoubtedly would, any real enthusiasm for embracings, keeping by preference to the only immune place in the garden, which was the middle of the lawn.
"I wonder," she thought while it was being done, "if this will really grow on me...."
And, while it was still being done, "Mother must have been kissed, too, and she's still alive...."
And presently, while it was still being done, "But mother isn'tmuchalive—there's the sofa—perhaps that's why...."
Well, he loved her, somehow; she did not now care how. Whether it was a spiritual affection or one that would go on requiring at frequent intervals to enfold her capaciously did not matter any more, for it was a warm thing, a warm human thing, he was offering her, and she had been half-dead with cold. What did it matter if she herself was not in love? It was the dream of a schoolgirl to want to be in love. Life was not like that. Life was a thing full of friendliness and happy affection; and love, anyhow on the woman's side, was not a bit necessary. The Bishop would have been surprised if he had known how nearly she approached his ideal of womanhood. She was going to be so good, she said to herself and to Herr Dremmel, too, her heart full of gratitude and glad relief—oh, so good! She was never going to be dejected or beaten out of hope and courage again. She would work over there, work hard at all sorts of happy things in the parish, and among the poor and sick, and she would help Robert in his work if he would let her, and if he wouldn't then she'd help him when he had done—help him to play and rest. They would laugh together and talk together and walk together, and he would explain his experiments to her and teach her to understand. And the first thing she would do would be to learn German very thoroughly, so as to be able to write all his letters for him, and even his sermons if needs be, and save his precious time.
"Those," said Herr Dremmel, who in the lush meadows of dalliance had forgotten that what had first attracted him to her had been a certain bright baldness of brain, "would be pretty little nonsense sermons the small snail would produce."
"You'll see," said Ingeborg confidently; and she suddenly flung out her arms and turned her face up to the sun and the blue through the little leaves and all the light and promise of the world, and stretched herself in an immense contentment. "Oh," she sighed, "isn't it allgood—isn't it allgood—"
"It is," agreed Herr Dremmel. "But it is nothing to how good it will be presently, when we are surrounded by our dear children."
"Children?" said Ingeborg.
She dropped her arms and looked at him. She had not thought of children.
"Then, indeed, my little wife will not wish to write letters or compose sermons."
"Why?" said Ingeborg.
"Because you will be a happy mother."
"But don't happy mothers—"
"You will be entirely engaged in adoring your children. Nothing else in the world will interest you."
Ingeborg stood looking at him with a surprised face. "Oh?" she said. "Shall I?" Then she added, "But I've neverhadany children."
"It was not to be expected," said Herr Dremmel.
"Then how do you know nothing else in the world will interest me?"
"Foolish Little One," he said, taking her in his arms, his eyes moist with tenderness, for he knew that here against his breast he held in her slender youth the mother of all the Dremmels, and the knowledge profoundly moved him. "Foolish Little One, is not throughout all nature every mother solely preoccupied by interest in her young?"
"Is she?" said Ingeborg doubtfully, quite a number of remembered family snapshots dancing before her eyes. Still, she was very willing to believe.
She looked at him a moment thinking. "But—" she said, gently pushing herself a little way from him, both hands on his chest.
"But what then, small snail?"
"Wouldn't they be German children?"
"Undoubtedly," said Herr Dremmel proudly.
"All of them?"
"All of them?" he echoed.
"It wouldn't be like Roman Catholics and Protestants marrying, and half the children be German and half English?"
"Certainly not," said Herr Dremmel emphatically.
"But Robert—"
"Continue, little hare."
"What are German childrenlike?"
It was now Herr Dremmel's turn to say confidently, "You'll see."
A week later they were married; and the Bishop, inscrutably watching Ingeborg from the doorstep as she was being tucked by deft hands into the rugs of the car that was to take her to the station, observing how cushions were put in the right places at her back, how a footstool was carefully inserted under her feet, how her least movement was interpreted and instantly attended to, made his farewell remark to his daughter—the last remark, as it happened, that he ever did make to her.
"You will miss Wilson," he said; and re-entered the Palace a slightly comforted man.
She never saw him again.
On her honeymoon, which was only as long as it took to get from Redchester to Kökensee, except for a day in Holland where a brief and infinitely respectful visit, or rather waiting on, was made to the eminent De Vries, Ingeborg said to herself at frequent intervals as she had said to herself under the pear-tree in what now seemed a remote past, "Perhaps this will grow on me." But even before they reached Kökensee on the fourth day after their marriage she was deciding, though a little reluctantly for she had always heard them praised, that probably she had no gift for honeymoons.
Robert, luckily, was apparently liking his and was quite happy and placid and slept sonorously in the trains. The meals were invariably cheerful. From Bromberg on he woke up and became attentive to the country they were passing through; and once in his own part of the world he expanded into much talk, pointing out and explaining the distinctive features of the methods employed on the different farms along the line.
Ingeborg drank it in eagerly. She was zealous to learn; resolute to be a helpmeet. Had he not delivered her from the immense suffocation of Redchester? She was obsequious with gratitude. It was a country of an exhilarating spaciousness; no hedges, no shutting off of one field from another, no shutting off, indeed, of the sky itself or of the blue delicious distance by little interfering hills like those they had round Redchester. It was all one great sweep, one great roll of earth up to heaven and of heaven down to earth, fresh and free and with a quality in the air of clear bright hardness she thought adorable after the wadded effect of the climate at home. And once, when the train pulled up in the open, she could hear from far away up in the blue the cry of a hawk.
From Allenstein they went on by a light railway with toy carriages and a tiny engine through an infinity of rye-fields and seemingly uninhabited country to the nearest station to Kökensee, a place called Meuk, of some pretension to being a little town, with an enormous church rising out of its middle and containing, among other objects of interest, explained Herr Dremmel, his mother.
"Oh?" said Ingeborg, surprised. "Have you got one?" For he somehow produced a completely motherless impression.
"Invariably, my treasure," said Herr Dremmel with patience, "do people have mothers."
"Yes," she said, reaching down his hat for him and putting it carefully on his head, "but then they say so."
"Perhaps. Sooner or later. I well remember, however, informing you that my father was dead. From that it was possible to reason that my mother was not. She is a simple woman. No longer young. We will visit her on our way through the town."
Outside the station a high vehicle drawn by two long-tailed horses, one of which reached a head and neck further than the other, so that when you looked at them sideways and could not see that they both began at the same place it seemed to be perpetually winning a race, was in readiness to take them to Kökensee.
"This," said Herr Dremmel, introducing it with a wave of the hand, "is my carriage. And this," he continued, similarly introducing the driver, "is my faithful servant Johann. He has been with me now nearly a year."
Ingeborg shook Johann's hand, when he had carefully clambered down over the sacks of kainit that filled the front part of the carriage, very politely. "Do they all stay as long as that?" she murmured to Herr Dremmel.
"All? There is but my widow, and she is adjusting her feathers for flight. She will wing her way to some other bachelor nest as soon as my Little One has been inducted."
"But does she like that?" asked Ingeborg. For she had acquired a habit, due to much repetition of the Litany, of regarding widowers as brittle, needing special care. There was an instant's vision before her eyes of this one flapping blackly athwart the fields of East Prussia, turned out, desolate and oppressed, and with perhaps some cackling trail of curses stridulously marking her course.
"No doubt she will feel it. She, too, has been very faithful. She has been with me now nearly eight months. But if it were less she would still feel it. Widows," he continued abstractedly, peering among the sacks of kainit in search of some Chilisaltpetre that was not there, "are in a constant condition of feeling."
Johann explained—he was a shabby man, grown grey and frayed, Ingeborg supposed, in service—that the previous stuff did not seem to have caught its train, and Herr Dremmel went off to make anxious inquiries of the stationmaster while Ingeborg stood smiling with an excessive friendliness at Johann to make up for her want of words, and wondering how her luggage would get on to a carriage already so much occupied by sacks.
In the end most of it did not and was left at the station till some future time, and clutching her dressing-bag with one hand and the iron rail of the carriage with the other she was rattled away over the enormous cobbles of Meuk with a great cracking of Johann's whip and barking of dogs and kickings of the horses, whose tails were long and kept on getting over the reins. The planks of the carriage's bottom heaved and yawned beneath her feet. The horses shied in and out of the gutters. Her hat wanted to blow off, and she did not dare let either of her hands go free to hold it. She bent her head to try to keep it on. Her skin pricked and tingled from the shaking. She had an impression of red houses flush with the street, railless dwellings giving straight on to it; of a small shop or two; of people stopping to stare; of straw and paper and dust dancing together in the wind.
Herr Dremmel chose these flustered moments to expand conversationally, and raising his voice above the tumult explained in shouts that the three sacks in front were not so much sacks as mysterious stomachs filled with the future. She strained to catch what he said, but only heard a word now and then when she bumped against him—"divine maws—richly furnished banquet—potential energy—" She found it difficult to answer with any sort of connected intelligence, more especially because he kept on breaking off to lean forward and hit the horse-flies that alighted on the back of Johann's neck. When he did this Johann started and the horses kicked.
"Faithful servant"—he shouted in her ear—"nearly a year—must not be stung—"
It was a disorganized and breathless Ingeborg trying to rub things out of her eyes who found herself finally in the passage of the elder Frau Dremmel's house.
The door stood ajar, and her husband pushed it open and called loudly on his mother to appear. "She lurks, she lurks," he said, impatiently looking at his watch; and redoubled his cries.
"Does she expect us?" asked Ingeborg at last, who was trying to pin up her loosened hair.
"She is a simple woman," he said, "consequently she never expects anything." And he pulled open a door out of which came nothing but darkness and a great cold smell.
"That is not my mother," he said, shutting it again.
"Does she know we're coming home to-day?" asked Ingeborg, a doubt beginning to take hold of her.
"She is a simple woman. Consequently she never knows anything. Mother! Mother!"
"Does she know you're married?" asked Ingeborg, the doubt growing bigger.
"She is a simple woman. Consequently—" He broke off and stared down at her, reflecting. "Is it possible that I forgot to tell her?" he said.
It evidently was possible, for at that moment Frau Dremmel came slowly up some steps at the end of the passage from a lower region, and perceiving her son and a strange young woman stood still and said nothing whatever.
"Mother, this is my wife," said Herr Dremmel, taking Ingeborg's hand and leading her to the motionless figure.
"Ach," said Frau Dremmel, without moving.
"Kiss her, Little One," directed Herr Dremmel.
"Yes, yes," said Ingeborg, blushing a vivid red and going a convulsive step nearer.
Frau Dremmel was regarding her with sombre, unblinking eyes, eyes that had the blankness of pebbles. From her waist downwards she wore a big dark-blue apron. She was entirely undecorated. Her black dress ended at the neck abruptly in its own binding and a hook and eye. Her hair was drawn back into the smallest of knobs. Ingeborg felt suddenly that she herself was a thing of fal-lals—a showy thing, bedizened with a white collar and a hat she had till then considered neat, but that she now knew for a monstrous piece of frippery crushed on to insufficiently pinned-up hair.
"You are married to her?" asked the elder Frau Dremmel, turning her pebble eyes slowly from one to the other.
"Undoubtedly," said Herr Dremmel; and to Ingeborg, in English, "Kiss her, Little One, and we will go on home."
He himself put his arm round his mother's shoulder and gave her a hasty kiss.
"My wife is English," he said. "She does not yet either speak or understand our tongue. Kiss her, mother, and we will go on home."
But it did not seem possible to get the two women to kiss. Ingeborg went another shy step nearer. Frau Dremmel remained immobile.
"This," said Frau Dremmel, moving her slow eyes over Ingeborg and then fixing them on her son, "is a pastor's wife?"
'You are married to her?' asked the elder Frau Dremmel, turning her pebble eyes slowly from one to the other
"Undoubtedly. I regret I omitted to tell you, mother, but one does occasionally omit." And, in English to Ingeborg, "She is a simple woman. Consequently—"
"But I heard," said Frau Dremmel. "Through your housekeeper. And others. Thus I heard. Of my only son's marriage. I a widow."
Ingeborg, not understanding, stood smiling nervously. She thought on such an occasion somebody ought to smile, but she did not like doing it. The immobility of Frau Dremmel, who moved nothing but her eyes, the dank bare passage, the rush of cold smell that had escaped out of the one door in it, the bleak air of poverty about her mother-in-law—poverty in some strange way regarding itself as virtuous for no reason except that it was poor—did not make her smiling easy. But she was a bride; just coming home; just being introduced to her husband's people. Somebody, she felt, on such an occasion must smile, and, trained as she had been by her father to do the things no one else wanted to do, she provided all the smiling for the home-coming entirely herself.
"Please, Robert, tell your mother how sorry I am I can't talk," she said. "Do tell her I wish I weren't so dumb."
"How much has she?" Frau Dremmel was asking across this speech.
"Enough, enough," said her son, putting on his hat and making movements of departure.
"Ah. I am not to know. More secrets. It is all to go in further unchristian tampering with God's harvests."
Herr Dremmel bestowed a second abstracted kiss somewhere on his mother's head. He had not listened to anything she said for a quarter of a century.
"Nothing for the mother," she went on. "No, no. The mother is only a widow. She is of no account. Yet your sainted father—"
"Farewell, and God be with you," said Herr Dremmel, departing down the passage and forgetting in his hurry to get his bride home as quickly as possible to take her with him.
For a moment she was left alone confronting her new relation. She made a great plunge into filialness and, swiftly blushing, picked up her mother-in-law's passive hand.
She had meant to kiss it, but looking into her eyes she found kissing finally impossible. She shyly murmured an English leave-taking and got herself, infinitely awkwardly, out of the house.
"One has to have them," was Herr Dremmel's only comment.
Kökensee lay three miles along the highroad between Meuk and Wiesenhausen, and they could see the spire of its little church over the fields on the left the whole way. The road, made with as few curves as possible, undulated gently up and down between rye-fields. It was carefully planted on each side with mountain ashes, on that day in full flower, and was white and hard as though there had been no rain for a long while. The wind blew gaily over the rye; the sky was flecked with small white clouds. Ingeborg could see for miles. And there were dark lines of forest, and flashes of yellow where the broom grew, and shining bits of water, and larks quivering out joy, and everywhere on the higher places busy windmills, and the whole world seemed to laugh and flutter and sing.
"It's beautiful—oh, beautiful!" she said.
"Beautiful? I tell you what is beautiful, Little One—the fat red soil of your girlhood's home. The fat red soil and the steady drip, drip of the heavens."
And he bent forward and inquired of Johann when it had rained last, and became very gloomy on hearing that it was three weeks ago, and said things to himself in German. They seemed to be unpastoral things, for Ingeborg saw Johann's ears lifted up by what was evidently, in the front of his face, being a grin.
A weather-beaten sign-post with one bent arm pointed crookedly down a field-track at right angles to the road, and with a lurch and a heave they tilted round the corner. There was an immediate ceasing of sound. She could now hear all sorts of little birds singing besides larks—chaffinches, tits, yellow-hammers, black-caps. The carriage ploughed along slowly through the deep sand between rye that grew more reluctantly every yard. The horses were completely sobered and covered with sweat. Before them on an upward slope was Kökensee, one long straggling street of low cottages lying up against the sunset, its church behind it, and near the church two linden trees which were the trees, she knew for she had often made him tell her, in front of her home.
Ingeborg felt a quick tug at her heart. Here was the place containing all her future. There was nothing left to her to feel, she supposed, that she would not feel here. The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness. Exulting bits out of the Prayer-book, the book she knew altogether best, sang in her ears—Lift up your hearts.... We lift them up unto the Lord our God.... Oh, the beautiful words, the beautiful world, the wonder and the radiance of life!
"When the Devil," said Herr Dremmel, who had been scanning the crops on either side of the track with deepening depression, "took our Saviour up on to a high place to tempt him with the offer of the kingdoms of the earth, he was careful to hide Kökensee by keeping his tail spread out over it, it was so ugly and so undesirable."
"Oh—the Devil," said Ingeborg, shrugging her shoulder in a splendid contempt, her face still shining with what she had been thinking.
She turned to him and laughed. "You can't expectdevilsto know what's what," she said, slipping her hand through his arm and throwing up her head in a kind of proud glee.
He smiled down at her. "Little treasure," he said, for a moment becoming conscious that this was a very bright thing he had got and was bringing home with him.
The carriage was hauled up through an opening between two cottages out of the sand on to the stones of the village street by a supreme last effort of the horses, and was dragged in great bumps across various defects through an open gate on the opposite side.
There was a yard with sheds, a plough, a manure heap, some geese, some hens, a pig, the two linden trees, and in between the linden trees behind wire netting a one-storied house like a venerable bungalow, which Herr Dremmel, on their drawing up in front of it, introduced to her.
"My house," he said, with a wave of the hand.
There followed a time of surprising happiness for Ingeborg. It was the happiness of the child escaped from its lessons and picnicking gloriously in freedom and unrebukedness. The widow, it is true, slightly smudged the brightness of the beginning by, as it were, dying hard. Her body clung to life—the life she had known, she lamented, for eight long months. She was the last, she explained, of the Herr Pastor's widows, who reached back in a rusty row to the days when he first came, elastic with youth, to cure the souls of Kökensee, and as she had stayed the longest it was clear she must be the best. She remained at the parsonage, dingily persistent, for several days on the pretext of initiating Ingeborg into the ways of the house; and each time Herr Dremmel, who seemed a little shy of embarking on controversy with her, mentioned trains, she burst in his presence into prayer and implored aloud on his behalf that he might never know what it was to be a widow. She did ultimately, however, become dislodged, and once she was gone there was nothing but contentment.
Ingeborg was young enough to think the almost servantless housekeeping a thing of charm and humour. Herr Dremmel was of the easiest unconcern as to what or when or if he ate. It was early summer, and there was only delight in getting up at dawn and pottering about the brick-floored kitchen before the daily servant came—a girl known to Kökensee as Müller's Ilse—and heating water, and making coffee, and preparing a very clean little breakfast-table somewhere in the garden, and decorating it with freshly picked flowers, and putting the butter on young leaves, and arranging the jar of honey so that a shaft of sunlight between the branches shone straight through it turning it into a miracle of golden light. It was the sort of breakfast-table one reads about in story books; and on its fragility Herr Dremmel would presently descend like some great geological catastrophe, and the whole in a few convulsed moments would be just crumbs and coffee stains. Then he would put on leggings and go off with Johann to his experimental fields, and she would give herself up eagerly to the duties of the day.
She could not talk at first to Ilse, a square girl with surprisingly thick legs, because though she went about always with a German grammar in one hand she found that what she had learned was never what she wanted to say. Ilse, whose skirt was short, did not wear stockings, and when Ingeborg by pointing and producing a pair had conveyed to her that it would be well if she did, Ilse raised her voice and said that she had no money to get a husband with but at least, andGott sei Dank, she had these two fine legs, and if the Frau Pastor demanded that she should by hiding them give up her chances, then the Frau Pastor had best seek some girl on whom they grew crooked or lean, and who for those reasons would only be too glad to cover them up. Ingeborg, not understanding a word but apprehending a great objection, smiled benevolently and put the stockings away, and Ilse's legs went on being bare. They worked together in great harmony, for there could be no argument. Cut off from conversation, they sang; and Ingeborg sang hymns because her memory was packed with them, and Ilse sang long loud ballads, going through them slowly verse by verse in a sort of steady howl. The very geese paused on their way to the pond to listen anxiously.
Dinner, which Ingeborg found convenient to prepare entirely in one pot, simmered placidly on the stove from twelve o'clock onwards. Anybody who was hungry went and ate it. You threw in potatoes and rice and bits of meat and carrots and cabbages and fat and salt, and there you were. What are these mysterious difficulties of housekeeping, she asked herself, that people shake their heads over? Her dinners were wholesome always, delicious if one were hungry, and quite amazingly hot. They stayed hot as persistently as poultices. And once when Ilse had the misfortune to be stung by a wasp on one of her admirable legs, Ingeborg, with immense presence of mind, seized the dinner and emptying it into a fair linen cloth bound it over the swollen place; so that when Herr Dremmel arrived, as it happened hungrily that day, about two o'clock and asked for his dinner, he was told it was on Ilse's leg and had to eat sandwiches. He could not but admire the resourcefulness of Ingeborg; but it was not until he had eaten several sandwiches that he was able still to say, as he patted her shoulder, "Little treasure."
It was the busiest, happiest time. Every minute of the day was full. It was life at first hand, not drained dry of its elemental excellences by being squeezed first through the medium of servants. To have a little kitchen all to yourself, to be really mistress of every corner of your house, to watch the career of your food from its very beginning, to run out into the garden and pull up anything you happened to want, to stand at the back door with your skirt full of grain and call your own chickens round you and feed them, to go yourself and look for eggs, to fill the funny little dark rooms with flowers and measure the stone-floored passage for a drugget you would presently order in the only carpet shop you had faith in, which was the one in Redchester—what pleasures did the world contain that could possibly come up to these? Things were a little untidy, but what did that matter? It was possible to become the slave of things; possible to miss life in preparation for living.
And the weather was so beautiful—at least, Ingeborg thought it was. There was the hottest sun, and the coolest wind, and bright, clear-skied starry nights. It is true Robert, when he scanned the naked heavens the last thing at night and peered at the thermometer outside his window the first thing in the morning, said it was the Devil's own weather, and that if there was not soon some rain all his fertilizers, all his activities, all his expenditure would be wasted; but though this would throw a shadow for a moment across her joy in each new wonderful morning she found it impossible not to rejoice in the light. Out in the garden, for instance, down there beyond the lime-trees at the end, where you could stand in the gap in the lilac hedge and look straight out across the rye-fields, the immense unending rye-fields, dipping and rising, delicate grey, delicate green, shining in sunlight, dark beneath a cloud, restlessly waving, on and on, till over away at the end of things they got to the sky and were only stopped by brushing up against it—out there with one's hand shading one's eyes from the too great brightness, who could find fault with anything, who could do anything but look and see that it was all very good? Oh, but itwasgood. It made one want to sing the Te Deum, or the Magnificat, or still better that hymn of exultation,We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory....
Whenever there was a spare half hour, such as between where dinner ended and tea began, she would run out to the lime-trees, and pacing up and down that leafy place with the gooseberry bushes and vegetables and straggling accidental flowers of the garden lying hotly in the sun between her and the back of the house, she learned German words by heart. She learned them aloud from her grammar, saying them over and over again glibly, mechanically, while her thoughts danced about the future, from the immediate future of what she would do to-morrow, the future of an afternoon in the punt among the reeds and perhaps paddling along to where the forest began, to the more responsible vaguer future of further down the months, when, armed with German, she would begin among the poor and go out into the parish and make friends with the peasants and be a real pastor's wife. Particularly she wished to get nearer her mother-in-law. It seemed to her to be her first duty to get near her. Ceaselessly she trotted up and down repeating the German for giants, umbrellas, keys, spectacles, wax, fingers, thunder, beards, princes, boats, and shoulders. Ceaselessly her lips moved, while her eyes followed the movements of the birds darting in and out of the lilac hedge and hopping among the crumbs where breakfast had been; and through her giants, umbrellas, keys, spectacles, and wax she managed not to miss a word the yellow-hammers were chirping to each other in cheerful strophe and antistrophe:A little bit of bread and no che-e-e-e-e-ese—a little bit of bread and no che-e-e-e-e-ese.
At four she would go in and make some coffee by the simple method of uniting the coffee to hot water and leaving them to settle down together on the mat outside the laboratory's locked door. Herr Dremmel did not wish to be disturbed once he was in there, and she would steal down the passage on tip-toe, biting her under-lip in the intentness of her care that no rattling of the things on the tray should reach his ears.
When he was in the house all singing ceased. She arranged that Ilse should do her outdoor duties then—clean out the hen-house, milk the cow whether it wanted to be milked or not, and minister to the pig. Johann was away all day at the experiment ground, and Ilse waded about the farmyard mess with her bare legs, thoroughly enjoying herself, for no one ever scolded her whatever she did, and the yard was separated from the village street only by a low fence, and the early manhood of Kökensee, as it passed, could pause and lean on this and learn from her manner of solacing the pig the comfortableness of the solacements awaiting her husband.
At seven Ilse went home, and Ingeborg prepared a supper so much like breakfast that nobody could have told it was evening and not morning except that the ray of sunshine fell through the honey from the west instead of the east, and there was cheese. At this meal Herr Dremmel, full of his fertilizers, was mostly in a profound abstraction. He drank the coffee with which he was becoming saturated and ate great slices of bread and cheese in an impenetrable silence. Ingeborg sat throwing crumbs to the birds and watching the sky at the edge of the world grow first a mighty red, then fade, then light up into clear green; and long after the shadows beneath the lime-trees were black and the stars and the bats were out and the frogs down in the reeds of the lake and the occasional creaking of the village pump were all that one could hear outside the immense stillness, they would go on sitting there, Herr Dremmel silently smoking, Ingeborg silently making plans.
Sometimes she would get up and cross over to him and bend her face down close to his and try in the dark to explore his eyes with hers. "Thenoiseyou make!" she would say, brushing a kiss, so much used does marriage make one to what once has seemed impossible, across the top of his hair; and he would wake up and smile and pat her shoulder and tell her she was a good little wife.
Then she felt proud. It was just what she wanted to be—a good little wife. She wanted to give satisfaction, to be as helpful to him as she had been to her father in the days before her disgrace; and more helpful, for he was so much kinder, he was so dear. For this extraordinary happiness, for this delicious safety from disapproval, for these free, fearless, wonderful days, she would give in return all she had, all she was, all she could teach herself and train herself to be.
Nearly always Herr Dremmel went back to his laboratory about ten and worked till after midnight; and she would lie awake in the funny bare bedroom across the passage as long as she could so as not to miss too much of life by being asleep, smelling with the delight delicate sweet smells gave her the various fragrances of the resting garden. And the stars blinked in through the open window, and she could see the faint whiteness of a bush of guelder roses against the curtain of the brooding night. When Herr Dremmel came in he shut the window.
On Sundays there was a service at two o'clock once a fortnight. On the alternating Sundays Herr Dremmel was driven by Johann to another village three miles distant which was part of his scattered parish, and here he preached the sermon he had preached to Kökensee the Sunday before. He practised a rigorous economy in sermons; and it had this advantage that an enthusiast—only there was no enthusiast—by waiting a week and walking three miles, most of which was deep sand, might hear again anything that had struck him the previous week. By waiting a year, indeed, the same enthusiast, supposing him there, could hear everything again, for Herr Dremmel's sermons numbered twenty-six and were planned to begin on January 1st with the Circumcision, and leaping along through the fortnights of the year ended handsomely and irregularly with an extra one at Christmas. However inattentive a member of the congregation might be, as the years passed over him he knew the sermons. They were sermons weighty, according to the season, either with practical advice or with wrathful expositions of duty. There was one every year when the threshing time was at hand on the text Micah iv. 13,Arise and thresh, explaining with patient exactitude the newest methods of doing it. There was the annual Harvest Thanks-giving sermon on Matthew xiii., part of verse 26,Tares, after yet another year of the congregation's obstinate indifference to chemical manure. There was the sermon on Jeremiah ix. 22,Is there no physician there?preached yearly on one of the later Sundays in Trinity when the cold, continuous rains of autumn were finding out the weak spots in the parish's grandparents, and the peasants, having observed that once one called in a doctor the sick person got better and one had to pay the doctor into the bargain, evaded calling him in if they possibly could, inquiring of each other gloomily how one was to live if death were put a stop to. And there was the Advent sermon when the annual slaughter of pigs drew near, on Isaiah lxv., part of the 4th verse,Swine's flesh.
This sermon filled the church. In spite of the poor opinion of pigs in both the Old and New Testaments, where, Herr Dremmel found on searching for a text, they were hardly mentioned except as convenient receptacles for devils, in his parishioners' lives they provided the nearest, indeed the only, approach to the finer emotions, to gratitude, love, wonder. The peasant, watching this pink chalice of his future joys, this mysterious moving crucible into which whatever dreary dregs and leavings he threw, uttermost dregs of uttermost dregs that even his lean dog would not touch, they still by Christmas emerged as sausages, could not but feel at least some affection, at least some little touch of awe. While his relations were ill and having to have either a doctor or a funeral and sometimes, rousing him to fury, both, or if not ill were well and requiring food and clothing, his pig walked about pink and naked, giving no trouble, needing no money spent on it, placidly transmuting into the fat of future feastings that which without it would have become, in heaps, a source of flies and corruption. Herr Dremmel on pigs was full of intimacy and local warmth. He was more—he was magnificent. It was the sermon in the year which never failed to fill every seat, and it was the one day on which Kökensee felt its pastor thoroughly understood it.
Ingeborg went diligently to church whenever there was church to go to. She explained to Herr Dremmel that she held it to be her duty as the pastor's wife to set an example in this matter, and he pinched her ear and replied that it might possibly be good for her German. He seemed to think nothing of her duty as a pastor's wife; and when she suggested that perhaps she ought to begin and go the rounds of the cottages and not wait for greater stores of language, he only remarked that little women's duty is to make their husbands happy.
"But don't I?" she asked confidently, seizing his coat in both her hands.
"Of course. See how sleek I become."
"And I can do something besides that."
"Nothing so good. Nothing half so good."
"But Robert, one thing doesn't exclude—"
Herr Dremmel had already, however, ceased to listen. His thoughts had slid off again. She seemed to sit in his mind on the top of a slope up which he occasionally clambered and caressed her. Eagerly on these visits she would buttonhole him with talk and ask him questions so that he might linger, but even while she button-holed his gaze would become abstracted and off he slid, leaving her peering after him over the edge filled with a mixture of affection, respect for his work, pride in him, and amusement.
You might as well try, she thought, to buttonhole water; and she would laugh and go back to whatever she was doing with a blithe feeling that it was very ideal, this perfect independence of one another, this spaciousness of freedom to do exactly what each one liked. The immense tracts of time she had! How splendid this leisure was after the close detail of every hour at home in her father's study. When she had got over the first difficulties of German and need no longer devote most of her day to it she would get books from England and read and read; all the ones she had wanted to read but had not been allowed to. Oh, the magnificence of marriage, thought Ingeborg, beating her hands together, the splendour of its liberations! She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump.
All the books she possessed she had brought with her and spread over the living-room: the wedding-presents which had enriched her with Hardy and Meredith and Kipling and Tennyson and Ruskin, and her own books she had had as a girl. These were three, theChristian Year, given to her on her confirmation by her father,Longfellow's Poems, given her on her eighteenth birthday by her mother, and Dumas'Tulipe Noire, given her as a prize for French because Judith did not know any, one summer when a French governess was introduced (thoughtlessly, the Bishop said afterwards) into the Palace. This lady had been removed from the Palace again a little later with care, every corner of her room being scrupulously disinfected by the searching of Richards who found, however, nothing except one book in a yellow paper cover calledBibi et Lulu: Mœurs du Montparnasse; and even this was not in her room at all, but in Judith's, beneath some stockings.
Herr Dremmel took up one of the wedding volumes when first he saw them in the sitting-room and turned its pages. It wasThe Shaving of Shagpat. "Tut, tut," he said presently, putting it down.
"Why, Robert?" asked Ingeborg, eager to hear what he thought. But he patted her abstractedly, already slid off again down into regions of reality, the regions in which his brain incessantly worked out possible chemical combinations and forgot with a completeness that sometimes even surprised himself that he had a wife. Invariably, however, he found it pleasant on re-emerging to remember her.
She asked to be shown his experimental fields, and he took her with him very amiably one hot morning, promising to explain them to her; but instantly on reaching them he became absorbed, and after she had spent an hour sitting on a stone at the edge of a strip of lupins beneath a haggard little fir tree which gave the solitary bit of shade in that burning desert watching him going up and down the different strips examining apparently every single plant with Johann, she began to think she had better go home and look after the dinner, and waving a good-bye to him, which he did not see, she went.
A day or two later she asked whether it would not be good and pleasant that his mother should come over to tea with them soon.
He replied amiably that it would be neither good nor pleasant.
She asked whether it might not be a duty of theirs to invite her.
He replied, after consideration, "Perhaps."
She asked whether he did not love his mother.
He replied unhesitatingly, "No."
She then went and sat on his knee and caught hold of his ears and pulled his head up so that he should look at her.
"But Robert—" she said.
"Well, little sheep?"
Since their marriage he had instinctively left off calling her a lamb. The universe, which for a time she had managed to reduce into just a setting for one little female thing, had arranged itself into its proper lines again; the lamb had become a sheep—a little one, but yet no longer and never again a lamb. He was glad he had been able to be so thoroughly in love. He was glad he had so promptly applied the remedy of marriage. His affection for his wife was quite satisfactory: it was calm, it was deep, it interfered with nothing. She held the honourable position he had always, even at his most enamoured moments, known she would ultimately fill, the position next best in his life after the fertilizers. His house, so long murky with widows, was now a bright place because of her. Approaching poetry, he likened her to a little flitting busy bird in spring. Always he was pleased when she came and perched on his knee.
"Well, little sheep?" he said, smiling at her as she looked very close into his eyes.
Her face, seen so near, was charming in its delicate detail, in its young perfection of texture and colouring. Scrutinizing her eyes he was glad to notice once again how intelligent they were. Presently there would be sturdy boys tumbling about the garden with eyes like that, grey and honest and intelligent. His boys. Carrying on, far more efficiently, the work he had begun.
"Well, little sheep?" he said, suddenly moved.
"Oughtn'tone to love one's mother?" she asked.
"Perhaps. But one does not. Do you?"
"Oh, poor mother—" said Ingeborg quickly.
Her mother, far away, was already becoming a rather sad and a quite tender memory. All those days and years on a sofa, and all the days and years still to come.... Now she knew better, now that she was married herself, what it must have been like to be married to the Bishop, to have twenty years of unadulterated Bishop. She no longer wondered at the sofa. She was full of understanding and pity.
"One does, no doubt, at the beginning," said Herr Dremmel.
"And then leaves off? Is that all children are born for, that they may leave off loving us?"
He became cautious. He talked of the general and the individual. Of many mothers and some mothers. Of the mothers of the present generation—he called them theGewesene—and the mothers of the generation to be born—he called them theWerdende. And presently, as she sat rather enigmatically silent on his knee, he developed affection for his mother, explaining that no doubt it had always been there, but like many other good things when life was busy and a man had little time to go back and stir them had lain dormant, and he now thought, indeed he recognised, that it would be excellent to urge her to come over soon and spend an afternoon—or still better a morning.
"But you're not here in the morning," said Ingeborg.
"Ah—that is true. I am present, however, at dinner."
"But nobody ever knows when."
"I might, perhaps, arrive early."
In this way the elder Frau Dremmel, who had her pride to consider as the widow of her neglectful son's traditionally appreciative father, and who would consequently never have taken what she called in her broodings the first step, did, about seven weeks after the marriage, cross the threshold of her daughter-in-law's home.
The visit was arranged to begin the following Friday at four, for Ingeborg thought the afternoon feeling was altogether more favourable to warmth than anything you were likely to get before midday, and Johann drove in to Meuk to fetch Frau Dremmel in time for that hour.
There was to be tea out in the garden the first thing, because tea lubricates the charities, and then, with the aid of a dictionary, conversation. Ingeborg had had time to think out her mother-in-law, and was firm in her resolve that no artificial barrier such as language should stand in the way of the building up of affection. If necessary she might even weave the German for giants, umbrellas, keys, and spectacles into a sentence as a conversational opening, and try her mother-in-law with that; and if Frau Dremmel showed the least responsiveness to either of these subjects she might go on to wax, fingers, thunder, and beards, and end with princes, boats, and shoulders. That would be three sentences. She could not help thinking they would be pregnant with conversational possibilities. There would be three replies; and Frau Dremmel, being in her own language, would of course enlarge. Then Ingeborg would open her dictionary and look up the words salient in the enlargement, and when she had found them smile back, brightly comprehending and appreciative.
This, including having tea, would take, she supposed, about fifty minutes.
Then they would walk a little up and down in the shade, pointing out the rye-field to each other, and that would be another ten minutes perhaps.
Then at five, she supposed, Frau Dremmel would ask for and obtain the carriage and go away again. Ingeborg made up her mind to kiss her at the end when the visit had reached the doorstep stage. It would not be difficult, she thought. The doorstep, she well knew, was a place of enthusiasms.
She and Ilse were immensely active the whole morning preparing, both of them imbued with much the same spirit with which as children they prepared parties for their dolls. But this was a live doll who was coming, and they were making real cakes which she would actually eat. The cakes were of a variety of shapes, or rather contortions, the coffee was of a festival potency, sandwiches meant to be delicate and slender were cut, but under the very knife grew bulky—it must be the strong German air, Ingeborg thought watching them, perplexed by this conduct—and there were the first gooseberries.
When the table was set out under the lime-trees and finished off with a jug of roses she gazed at her work in admiration. And the further she got away from it the more delightful it looked. Nearer it was still attractive but more with the delusive attractiveness of tables at a school treat. Perhaps there was too much food, she thought; perhaps it was the immense girth of the sandwiches. But down from the end of the path it looked so charming that she wished she could paint it in watercolours—the great trees, the tempered sunlight, the glimpse of the old church at one end, the glimpse of the embosomed lake at the other, and in the middle, set out so neatly, with such a grace of spotlessness, the table of her first tea-party.
Frau Dremmel arrived in a black bonnet with a mauve flower in its front to mark that ten years had been at work upon the mitigation of her grief. Her son came out of his laboratory when he heard the crashes of the carriage among the stones and holes of the village street, and he was ready at the door to help her down. He was altogether silent, for he had been torn from the middle of counting and weighing the grains in samples of differently treated rye, and would have to begin the last saucerful all over again. Beside this brevity Ingeborg, in a white frock and wearing the buckled shoes of youth, with the sun shining on her freckled fairness and bare neck and her mouth framed into welcoming smiles, looked like a child. She certainly did not look like anybody's wife; and the last thing in the world that she at all resembled was the wife of a German pastor.
Again Frau Dremmel, as she had done that day at Meuk, turned her eyes slowly all over her while she was receiving her son's abstracted kiss; but she said nothing except, to her son,Guten Tag, and passively submitted to Ingeborg's shaking both her hands, which were clothed in the black cotton of decent widowhood.
"Do say something, Robert," murmured Ingeborg. "Say how glad I am. Say all the things I'd say if I could say things."
Herr Dremmel gazed at his wife a moment collecting his thoughts.
"Why should one say anything?" he said. "She is a simple woman. No longer young. My wife," he said to his mother, "desires me to welcome you on her behalf."
"Ach," said Frau Dremmel.
Ingeborg began to usher her along the passage towards the back door and the garden. Frau Dremmel, however, turned aside half-way down it into the living-room.
"Oh, not in there!" cried Ingeborg. "We're going to have tea in the garden. Robert, please tell her—"
But looking round for help she found Robert had gone, and there was the sound of a key being turned in a lock.
Frau Dremmel continued to enter the living-room. Before she could be stopped she had arranged herself firmly on its sofa.
"But tea," said Ingeborg, following her and gesticulating, "tea, you know. Out there—in the garden—"
She pointed to the door, and she pointed to the window. Frau Dremmel slowly took off her gloves and rolled them together, and undid her bonnet strings and looked at the door and at the window and back again at her daughter-in-law, but did not move. Then Ingeborg, making a great effort at gay cordiality and determined that when words failed affectionate actions should fill up the gaps, bent over the figure on the sofa and took its arm. "Won't you come?" she said, adding a sentence she had taken special pains to get by heart, "liebe Schwiegermutter?" And smilingly, but yet, when it came to touching her, rather gingerly, and certainly with her heart in her mouth, she gently pulled at her sleeve.
Frau Dremmel stared up at her without moving.
"Liebe Schwiegermutter—tea—garden—better," said Ingeborg, still smiling but now quite hot. She could not remember a single German word exceptliebe Schwiegermutter.
Frau Dremmel, urged and encouraged, was finally got out of the house and into the garden and along between the gooseberry bushes to where the tea-table stood and an armchair for her with a cushion on it. She went with plain reluctance. She did not cease to stare at her daughter-in-law. Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware of this, Ingeborg tried to hide them, but you cannot hide feet that are being walked on, and when she sat down to pour out the coffee she found her short skirt was incapable of hiding anything lower than above her ankles.
She grew nervous. She spilt the milk and dropped a spoon. Beside the rigid figure in the armchair she seemed and felt terribly fluid and uncontrolled. The cheek that was turned to her mother-in-law flushed hotly. She acutely knew her mother-in-law was observing this, and that made it hotter. If only, thought Ingeborg, she would look at something else or say something. Over the rim of her cup, however, Frau Dremmel's eyes moved up and down and round and through the strange creature her son had married. The rest of her was almost wholly motionless. Ingeborg had nervously swallowed three cups of the black stuff before Frau Dremmel was half through one. At last a German word flashed into her mind and she flung herself on it. "Schön—wunderschön!" she cried, waving her hands comprehensively over all the scenery.
For an instant Frau Dremmel removed her eyes from her daughter-in-law's warm and quivering body to follow her gesture, but seeing nothing soon got them back again. She made no comment on the scenery. Her face remained wholly impassive; and Ingeborg realized that the rye-field would be no use as a means of entertainment.