There was a little bay about five minutes' paddle down the lake round a corner made by the jutting out of reeds. You took your punt round the end of an arm of reeds, and you found a small beach of fine shells, an oak-tree with half-bared roots overhanging one side of it, and a fringe of coarse grass along the top. On this you sat and listened to the faint wash of the water at your feet and watched the sun flashing off the wings of innumerable gulls. You couldn't see Kökensee and Kökensee couldn't see you, and you clasped your hands round your knees and thought. Behind you were the rye-fields. Opposite you was the forest. It was a place of gentleness, of fair afternoon light, of bland colours—silvers, and blues, and the pale gold that reeds take on in October.
Ingeborg did not bring Robertlet to this place. She decided, after four months' close association with him had cleared her mind of misconceptions, that he was too young. She would not admit, with all her dreams about what she was going to do with him still vivid in her memory, that she preferred to be alone. She would not admit that she did anything but love him ardently. He was so good. He never cried. Nor did he ever do what she supposed must be the converse of crying, crow. He neither cried nor crowed. He neither complained nor applauded. He ate with appetite and he slept with punctuality. He grew big and round while you looked at him. Who would not esteem him? She did esteem him—more highly perhaps than she had ever esteemed anybody; but the ardent love she had been told a mother felt for her first-born was a thing about which she had to keep on saying to herself, "Of course."
He was a grave baby; and she did her best by cheery gesticulations and encouraging, humorous sounds, to accustom him to mirth, but her efforts were fruitless. Then one day as she was bending over him trying to extract a smile by an elaborate tickling of his naked ribs she caught his eye, and instantly she jerked back and stared down at him in dismay, for she had had the sudden horrid conviction that what she was tickling was her mother-in-law.
That was the first time she noticed it, but the resemblance was unmistakable, was, when you had once seen it, overwhelming. There was no trace, now that she tremblingly examined him, of either Robert or herself; and as for her own family, what had become of all that very real beauty, the beauty of the Bishop, the dazzlingness of Judith, and the sweet regularities of her mother?
Robertlet was as much like Frau Dremmel as he might have been if Frau Dremmel had herself produced him in some miraculous manner entirely unassisted. The resemblance was flagrant. It grew with every bottle. He had the same steady eyes. He had the same prolonged silences. His nose was a copy. His head, hairless, was more like Frau Dremmel's, thought Ingeborg, than Frau Dremmel's could ever have possibly been, and if ever his hair grew, she said to herself gazing at him wide-eyed, it would undoubtedly do it from the beginning in a knob. Gradually as the days passed and the likeness appeared more and more she came, when she tubbed him and powdered his many creases, to have a sensation of infinite indiscretion; and she announced to Herr Dremmel, who did not understand, that Robertlet's first word would certainly beBratkartoffel.
"Why?" asked Herr Dremmel, from the other side of a wall of thinking.
"You'll see if it isn't," nodded Ingeborg, with a perturbed face.
But Robertlet's first word, and for a long time his only one, wasNein. His next, which did not join it till some months later, wasAdieu, which is the German for good-bye and which he said whenever anybody arrived.
"He isn't veryhospitable," thought Ingeborg; and remembered with a chill that not once since her marriage had her mother-in-law invited her to her house in Meuk. But she made excuses for him immediately. "Everybody," she said to herself, "feels a little stiff at first."...
To this beautiful corner of the lake, for it was very beautiful those delicate autumn afternoons, she went during Robertlet's dinner sleep to do what she called think things out; and she sat on the little shells with her hands round her knees, staring across the quiet water at the line of pale reeds along the other shore, doing it. Presently, however, she perceived that her thinking was more a general discomfort of the mind punctuated irregularly by flashes than anything that could honestly be called clear. Things would not be thought out—at least they would not be thought out by her; and she was feeling sick again; and how, she asked herself, can people who are busy being sick be anythingbutsick? Besides, things wouldn't bear thinking out. Her eyes grew bright with fear when one of those flashes lit up what was once more ahead of her. It was like a scarlet spear of terror suddenly leaping at her heart....
No, thought Ingeborg, turning quickly away all cold and trembling, better not think; better just sit in the sun and wonder what Robertlet would look like later on if he persisted in being exactly like Frau Dremmel and yet in due season had to go into trousers, and what would happen if the next one were like Frau Dremmel, too, and whether she would presently be teaching a row of little mothers-in-law its infant hymns. The thought of Frau Dremmel become plural, diminished into socks and pinafores, standing neatly at her knee being taught to lisp in numbers, seized her with laughter. She laughed and laughed; and only stopped when she discovered that what she was really doing was crying.
"Perhaps it's talking I want more than thinking," she said to Herr Dremmel at last, returning from one of these barren expeditions in search of understanding.
She said it a little timidly, for she was already less to him than she had been in that brief interval of health, and knew that with every month she would be less and less. It was odd how sure of him she was when she was not going to have a baby, of what an easy confidence in his love, and how he seemed to slip away from her when she was. Already, though she had only just begun, he was miles away from the loving mood in which he folded her in his arms and called her his little sheep.
Herr Dremmel, who was supping, and was not in possession of the context, recommended thinking. He added after a pause that only a woman would have suggested a distinction.
Ingeborg did not make the obvious reply, but said she thought if she might talk to somebody, to Robert, for instance, and with her hand in his, rathertightin his while she talked, so that she might feel safe, feel not quite so loose and unheld together in an enormous, awful world—
Herr Dremmel looked at his watch and said perhaps he would have time to hold her hand next week.
A few days later she said, equally without supplying him with the context, "It's blessing disguising itself, that's what it is."
Herr Dremmel, who again was supping, said nothing, preferring to wait.
"Blessing only pretending to be cruelty. Not really cruelty at all."
Herr Dremmel still preferred to wait.
"I thought at first it was cruelty," she said, "but now I think perhaps—perhaps it's blessing."
"What did you think was cruelty, Ingeborg?" asked Herr Dremmel, who disliked the repetition of such a word.
"Having this next baby so quickly—without time to forget."
Her eyes grew bright.
"Cruelty, Ingeborg?"
Herr Dremmel said one did not, when one was a pastor's wife, call Providence names.
"That's what I'm saying," she said. "I thought at first it was cruel, but now I see it's really ever so much better not to waste time between one's children, and then be well for the rest of one's days. It—it will make the contrast afterwards, when one has done with pain, so splendid."
She looked at him and pressed her hands together. Vivid recollections lit her eyes. "But I'd give up these splendid contrasts verywillingly," she whispered, her face gone suddenly terror-stricken.
Herr Dremmel said that family life had always been praised not only for its beauty but for its necessity as the foundation of the State.
"You told me," said Ingeborg, who had a trick which good men sometimes found irritating of remembering everything they had ever said, "the foundation of the State was manure."
Herr Dremmel said so it was. And so was family life. He would not, he informed her, quibble over terms. What he wished to make clear was that there could not be family life without a family to have it in.
"And don't you call you and me and Robertlet a family?" she asked.
"One child?" said Herr Dremmel. "You would limit the family to one child? That is a highly unchristian line of conduct."
"But the Christian lines of conduct seem tohurtso," murmured Ingeborg. "Oh, I know there have to be brothers and sisters," she added quickly before he could speak, "and itisbest to get it over and have done with it. It's only when I'm—it's only sometimes that I think Robertlet would have been enough family till—till I'd had time to forget—"
Again the light of terror came into her eyes. She knew it was there. She looked down at her plate to hide it.
Twice after that she came back from her thinking down by the lake and attempted to talk to him about questions of life and death. Herr Dremmel was bored by questions of life and death unless they were his own ones. He met them, however, patiently. She arrived panting, for it was uphill back to the house, desperately needing her vision rubbed a little clearer against his so that she might reach out to reassurance and courage, and he took on an air of patience almost before she had begun. In the presence of that premature resignation she faltered off into silence. Also what she had wanted to say got tangled into the silliest sentences—she heard them being silly as they came out. No wonder he looked resigned. She could have wept with chagrin at her inarticulateness, her want of real education, her incapacity for getting her thoughts torn away from their confusion and safely landed into speech. And there stood Robert, waiting, with that air of patience....
But how odd it was, the difference between his talk before she was going to have a baby and his silence—surely resigned silence—when she was! She wished she knew more about husbands. She wished that during the years at home instead of writing all those diocesan letters she had ripely reflected on the Conjugalities.
As the days went by her need of somebody to talk to, her dread of being alone with her imagination and its flashes, became altogether intolerable. She went at last, driven by panic, to the village mothers, asking anxious questions about how they had felt, how they had managed, going round on days when she was better to the cottages where families were longest. But nothing came of this; the attitude everywhere was a dull acceptance, a shrug of the shoulder, a tiredness.
Then she sought out the postman's wife, who looked particularly motherly and bright, and found that she was childless.
Then she met the forester one day in the woods, and was so far gone in need that she almost began to ask him her anxious questions, for he looked more motherly even than the postman's wife.
Then she thought of Baroness Glambeck, who before Robertlet's birth had been helpful in practical ways—would she not be helpful now in these spiritual stresses?—and she walked over there with difficulty one afternoon in November through the deep wet sand, approaching her as one naked soul delivered by its urgencies from the web of reticence and convention approaches another. But nothing could be less naked that day than the Baroness's soul. It was dressed even to gloves and a bonnet. It had no urgencies; and Hildebrand von Glambeck was there, the only son in the family of six, the member of it who had married most money, and his mother was proudly pouring out coffee for him in festal silk.
It was entirely contrary to custom for one's pastor's wife to walk in without having first inquired whether her visit would be acceptable; and when the Baroness perceived the sandy and disordered figure coming towards her down the long room she was not only annoyed but dismayed. She had not seen this dearest of her children for six months, and it was the first opportunity she had had since his arrival the evening before of being alone with him, for he had brought a friend with him from Berlin, and not till after luncheon had the friend, who painted, been satisfactorily disposed of out of doors in the park, where he announced his intention of staying as long as the sun stayed on a certain beech-tree. She wanted to ask her boy questions. She had sent the Baron out riding round his farms so as to be able to ask questions. She wanted to know about his life in Berlin, to her so remote and so full of drawbacks that yet glittered, a high, dangerous, less truly aristocratic life than this of lofty stagnation in God's provinces, but shone upon after all by the presence of her Emperor and King. In her heart she believed that the Almighty had also some years ago, probably about the time of her marriage when she, too, retired into them, withdrawn into the provinces, and there particularly presided over those best of the Fatherland's nobles who stayed with a pure persistency in the places where they happened to have been born. On His departure for the country, the Baroness decided, He had handed over Berlin and Potsdam to the care of the First of His children, her Emperor and King; and so it was that the provinces were higher and more truly aristocratic than Berlin and Potsdam, and so it was that Berlin and Potsdam nevertheless ran them very close.
And now, just as she had so cleverly contrived this hour with Hildebrand for getting at all those intimate details of his life that a mother loves but does not care to talk about before her husband, this hour for hearing about his children, his meals, his money, his dear wife's success in society and appearances, thanks to her having married into the nobility, at Court, his own health, his indigestion—that ancient tormentor of his peace,armer Junge—and whether he had seen or heard anything of poor Emmi, his eldest sister, who had miserably married six thousand marks a year and lived impossibly at Spandau and could not be got to admit she did not like it—just as she was going to be satisfied on all these points came that eccentric and pushing Frau Pastor and spoilt it all. Also Hildebrand was in the very middle of one of those sad stories of scandal that one wishes one had not to listen to but naturally wants to hear the end of.
So great was the Baroness's disappointment that she found it impossible to stop herself from affecting inability to recognise the Frau Pastor till she was actually touching the coffee table. "Ah," she then said, not getting up but slowly putting out her hand to take the hand that was being offered, and staring as though she were trying to remember where and when she had seen her before, "Ah—Frau Pastor? This is indeed an honour."
"Present me, mamma," said Hildebrand, who had got on to his feet the instant Ingeborg appeared in the doorway.
The ceremony performed he sank again into his chair and did nothing more at all, being waited on by his mother and leaving it to her to see that the visitor was given cream and sugar and cake, until the moment arrived when Ingeborg, made abundantly and elaborately aware that she was interrupting, prepared crest-fallen to go away again. Then once more he started up, alert and with his heels together.
"Well, and what did her husband do?" asked the Baroness, turning again to Hildebrand as soon as Ingeborg had been got quiet on a chair with coffee, determined to hear the end of the story.
"My dear mother," said Hildebrand, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears, "what could he do?"
"He shot her?"
"Of course."
"Naturally," said the Baroness, nodding approval. "Was she killed?"
"No. Badly wounded. But it was enough. His honour was avenged."
"And she will not," said the Baroness grimly, "begin these tricks again."
Ingeborg roused herself with an effort to say something. She was extraordinarily disappointed and unnerved by not finding the Baroness alone. "Why did he shoot her?" she asked. It seemed to her in her tiredness so very energetic of him to have shot her.
The Baroness turned a cold eye on her. "Because, Frau Pastor," she said, "she was his sinning wife."
"Oh," said Ingeborg; and added an inquiry, in a nervous desire to make for a brief space agreeable small talk before going away again, whether in Germany they always shot each other when they sinned.
"Not each other," said the Baroness severely. "At least, not if it is a husband and his wife. He alone shoots."
"Oh," said Ingeborg, considering this.
She was sitting inertly on her chair, holding her cup of coffee slanting, too much dejected to drink it.
"And then does that make her love him again?" she asked, in her small tired voice.
The Baroness did not answer.
"Only blood," said Hildebrand, "can wipe out a husband's dishonour."
"Hownasty!" said Ingeborg dejectedly.
Life seemed all blood. She drooped over her cup, thinking of the cruelty with which things were apparently packed. The Baroness and Hildebrand, after a pregnant silence, turned from her and began to talk of somebody they called poor Emmi. Ingeborg sat alone with her cup, wondering how she could get away before she began to cry. Dreadful how easily she cried now. She must buy some more handkerchiefs. They seemed lately to be always at the wash.
She roused herself again. She really must say something. As her way was when confused and unnerved, she caught at the first thing she found tumbling about in her mind. "Why was Emmi poor?" she asked in her small tired voice.
There was another pregnant silence.
To shorten it Ingeborg asked whether Emmi was the wife who had been shot—"The sinning one," she explained as nobody answered.
The silence became awful.
She looked up, startled by it. From the expression on their faces and the general feel of things she thought that perhaps they wouldn't mind if she went home now.
She got up, dropping the spoon out of her saucer. "I—think I must be going," she said. "It's a long way home."
"It seems hardly worth while to have come," said the Baroness with extraordinary chill.
To which Ingeborg, absorbed in the failure of her effort to find help and comfort, answered droopingly "No."
Outside the sun had just dropped behind the forest line, and she would have to walk fast if she wanted to be home before dark. The mist was already rising over the meadows beyond the trees of the garden and beginning to mix with the rose and lilac of the sky. The sandy avenue she had come along on that hot July day when first she discovered Glambeck lay at her feet in the still beauty of the last of its dresses for the year, very delicate, very transparent already, the leaves of the beeches almost all on the ground, making of the road a ribbon of light. A November smell of dampness and of peat smoke from cottage chimneys filled the air. There was a brooding peace over the world, as though in every house, in every family, brotherly love must needs in such gentleness continue.
She went carefully down the steps, for her body was already growing cumbersome, and along the golden way of the avenue. She tried not to cry, not to smudge the beautiful evening with her own disappointments. How foolish she had been to suppose that because she wanted to talk Baroness Glambeck would want to listen! Moods did not coincide so conveniently. She walked along, diligently stopping any stray tear with her handkerchief before it could disgrace her by coming out on to her cheeks. Presently Baroness Glambeck might passionately want to listen—it was quite conceivable—and she herself would not in the least want to talk. How foolish it all was! One had to stand on one's own feet. It was no good going about calling out for help. It was less than no good crying. Some day, if she continued intrepidly in this career of maternity which seemed to be marked out for her, she, too, would be happily pouring out coffee for a grown-up and successful man-child, all her impatiences and pangs long since forgotten. You clearly couldn't have a grown-up man-child to love and be proud of if you hadn't begun him in time, he had at some period or other to be begun. And he had to be begun in time, else one might easily be too old for acute appreciation. She went as quickly as she could down the avenue, thinking on large valiant lines and underneath her thinking feeling altogether forsaken. It must be nice, a warm thing to live where one's friends and relatives were within reach, where one could, for instance, when one felt extra lonely go and have tea with one's mother....
A man carrying what seemed to be a great deal of something indefinite was coming down the avenue towards her. She looked at him vaguely, absorbed in her thoughts. It was not the Baron, and except for him she knew nobody. She was within a yard or two of him when a quantity of sheets of paper, long slender brushes, odd articles she did not recognise, suddenly seemed to burst out from his person and scatter themselves over the beech-leaves on the ground.
"Oh, damn!" said the man, making efforts to catch them.
Ingeborg, always eager to help, began clumsily to pick up those nearest her. He had a camp-stool on one arm, and what appeared to be a mackintosh, and was altogether greatly hampered.
"Look here, don't do that," he exclaimed, struggling with these things which also apparently were slipping from him.
"Oh, but how lovely!" said Ingeborg, holding one of the sheets of paper she had picked up at arm's length and staring with her red eyes at a beech-tree on it, a celestial beech-tree surely, aflame with so great a glory of light that it could not possibly be earthly but only the sort of tree they have in heaven. Close, it was just splashes of colour; you had to hold it away from you to see it at all. She blew away some grains of sand that were on it and then held it once more as far from her as her arm would go. "Oh, but how lovely!" she said again. "Look—doesn't itshine?"
"Of course it shines. That was what it was doing," he said, coming and looking at the sketch over her shoulder a minute, his hands full of the things he had collected from the ground. "They said they'd send a servant for all this, and they didn't. I hate carrying things."
"I'll carry some," said Ingeborg.
"Nonsense. And you're not going there."
"I've been. But I'd go back as far as the steps if you like."
"Nonsense. I'll leave them at the foot of this tree. He'll see them all right."
"Not this—you mustn't leave this," she said, still gazing at the sketch.
"No. I'll take that. And I'm coming with you a little way, because I can't conceive where you can be going to at this time of the day that isn't to the Glambecks', and I'm curious. Also because it's so funny of you to be English."
"I think it's much funnier of you," said Ingeborg, picking up a pencil out of a rut in the sand and adding it to the pile he was making against the trunk of the nearest tree. "And I'm only going home."
"Home?"
He undid the pile and began again. He had got it wrong. The camp-stool, of course, must be the foundation, then the smaller fly-away things, then, neatly folded and tucking them all in, the mackintosh. She must be an English governess or superior nurse on a neighbouring estate since she talked of home. If so he did not want to go with her; nothing he could think of seemed to him quite so tiresome as an English governess or superior nurse.
He finished tucking in the mackintosh and turned round and took the sketch from her. He was, she perceived, a long, thin-necked man with a short red beard. She was, he perceived, somebody in a badly fitting tweed coat and skirt, a person with a used sort of nose and weak eyes.
"Now then," he said, "I'll go with you anyhow to the end of the avenue. Where is home?"
"Kökensee," said Ingeborg, trotting to keep up with him. "It's the next village. I'm the pastor's wife."
Ingram—for it was that celebrated artist, then at thirty-five, already known all over Europe as more especially and letting alone his small exquisite things a surprising, indeed a disturbingly surprising painter of portraits—glanced down at her and stepped out more vigorously. "That's an amusing thing to be," he said. "And quite new."
"It isn't very new. I've been it eighteen months. Why do you think it's amusing?"
"It's different from anything else. Nobody was ever a pastor's wife in—what did you call it?—before."
"Kökensee."
"Kökensee. Kökensee. I like that. You're unique to live in Kökensee. Nobody else has achieved that."
"It wasn't very difficult. I just stayed passive and was brought."
"And they didn't mind?"
"Who didn't?"
"Your people. Your father and mother. Or are you Melchisedec and never had any?"
"Why should they mind?"
"Coming so far. It's rather the end of the world. You're right up against the edge of Russia."
"I wanted to."
"Of course. I didn't suppose you were dragged across Europe by your hair to Kökensee. I'll come all the way with you. I want to see Kökensee."
"Don't walk so fast, then," said Ingeborg, panting. "Ican'twalk like that."
He looked at her as he went slower. "Is that the effect of Kökensee?" he said. "Why can't you walk like that? You're only a girl."
"I'm not a girl at all. I'm a wife, I'm a mother. I'm everything really now except a mother-in-law and a grandmother. That's all there's still left to be. I think they're rather dull things, both of them."
"You won't think so when you've got there."
"That's the dreadfullest part of it."
"It's a kindly trick Time plays on us. Are you a real pastor's wife who goes about her parish being an example?"
"I haven't yet. But I'm going to."
"What—not begun in eighteen months? But what do you do then all day long?"
"First I cook, and then I—don't cook."
They were out in the open, on the bit of road that passed between meadows. Ingram stopped and looked at something over to the left with sudden absorbed attention. She followed his eyes, but did not see much—a wisp of mist along the grass, the top twigs of a willow emerging from it, and above it the faint sky. He said nothing, and presently went on walking faster than ever.
"Pleasego a little slower," begged Ingeborg, her heart thumping with effort.
"I think you know," said Ingram, suiting himself to her, "you should be able to walk better than that."
"Yes," said Ingeborg.
"I suppose that's the danger of places like Kökensee—one lets oneself get slack."
"Yes," said Ingeborg.
"You mustn't, you know. Imagine losing one's lines. Just think of the horrible indefinite lines of a fat woman."
"Yes," said Ingeborg. "Do you paint much?" she asked, unable to endure this turn of the conversation.
He looked at her and laughed. "A good deal," he said. Then he added, "I'm Ingram."
"Is that your name? Mine's Dremmel."
"EdwardIngram," he said, looking at her. It was inconceivable she should not know.
"IngeborgDremmel," she said, as though it were a game.
He was silent a moment. Then he stopped with a jerk. "I don't think I'll come any farther," he said. "The Glambecks will be wondering what has become of me. Glambeck brought me down for a couple of nights, and I can't be not there all the time."
"But you wanted to see Kökensee—"
"Doesn't anybody ever read in Kökensee?"
"Read?"
"Papers? Books? Reviews? Criticisms? What the world's doing in all the million places that aren't Kökensee? Who everybody is? What's being thought and created?"
He had an oddly nettled look.
"Robert takes in the Norddeutscheallgemeinezeitung, and I've been reading Kipling—"
"Kipling! Well, good-bye."
"But isn't Kipling—why, till I married I had only the Litany."
"What on earth for?"
"That and Psalms and things. I felt veryemptyon the Litany."
"I can imagine it. I'd lose no more time then in furnishing my emptiness. Good-bye."
"Oh, don't go—wait a moment. It's such ages since I've— Furnishing it how? What ought I—?"
"Read, read, read—everything you can lay your hands on."
"But thereisn'tanything to lay hands on."
"My dear lady, haven't you postcards? Write to London and order the reviews to be sent out to you. Get some notion of people and ideas. Good-bye."
"Oh—but won't you really come and look at Kökensee?"
"It's a dark place. I'm afraid what I'd see there would be nothing."
"There'll be more light to-morrow—"
"I'm going south again to-morrow with Glambeck. I only came for a day. I was curious about provincial German interiors. Good-bye."
"Oh, but do—"
"My advice is very sound, you know. One can't shut one's eyes and just sleep while the procession of men and women who are making the world goes past one, unless"—his eyes glanced over the want of trimness of her figure, the untidy way her loose coat was fastened—"unless one doesn't mind running to seed."
"But Idomind," cried Ingeborg. "It's the last thing I want to run to—"
"Then don't. Good-bye."
He took off his hat and was already several steps away from her by the time it was on his head again. Then he turned round and called out to the dejected little figure standing where he had left it in the sandy road with the grey curtain of mist blurring it: "It really iseverybody'sduty to know at least something of what's being done in the world."
And he jerked away into the dusk towards Glambeck.
She stood a long while looking at the place where the gloom had blotted him out. Wonderful to have met somebody who really talked to one, who actually told one what to do. She went home making impulsive resolutions, suddenly brave again, her chin in the air. Ill or not ill she was not going to be beaten, she was not going to wait another day before beginning to fill her stupid mind. It was monstrous she should be so ignorant, so uneducated. What was she made of, then, what poor cheap stuff, that she could think of nothing better than to cry because she did not feel as well as she used to? Weren't there heaps of things to do even when one was ill? Had she not herself heard of sick people whose minds triumphed so entirely over their prostrate flesh that from really quite perpetual beds they shed brightness on whole parishes?
She wrote that night to Mudie demanding catalogues of him almost with fierceness, and ordered as a beginning theSpectatorandHibbert Journal, both of which at Redchester had been mentioned in her presence by prebendaries. When they arrived she read them laboriously from cover to cover, and then ordered all the monthly reviews they advertised. She subscribed at once to theTimesand to a weekly paper called theClarionbecause it was alluded to in one of the reviews; she showered postcards on Mudie, for whatever books she read about she immediately bought, deciding that that was as good a way of starting as any other; and she had not been reading papers a week before she came across Edward Ingram's name.
A great light dawned on her. "Oh—" she said with a little catch of the breath, turning hot; and became aware that she had just been having the most recognisably interesting encounter of her life.
In seven years Ingeborg had six children. She completely realised during that period the Psalmist's ideal of a reward for a good man and was altogether the fruitful vine about the walls of his house. She was uninterruptedly fruitful. She rambled richly. She saw herself, at first with an astonished chagrin and afterwards with resignation, swarming up to the eaves of her little home, pauseless, gapless, luxuriantly threatening choke the very chimneys. At the beginning she deplored this uninterrupted abundance, for she could not but see that beneath it the family roof grew a little rotten and sometimes, though she made feeble efforts to keep it out, a rather dismal rain of discomfort soaked in and dimmed the brightness of things. Good servants would not come to such a teeming household. The children that were there suffered because of the children that were soon going to be there. It was a pity, she thought, that when one produced a new child one could not simultaneously produce a new mother for it, so that it should be as well looked after as one's first child had been. She could mend their stockings, because that could be done lying on a sofa, but she was never sure about anything else that concerned them. And there were so many things, such endless vital things to be seen to if babies were to flourish. And when the first ones grew bigger and she might have begun those intimate expeditions and communions with them she used to plan, she found that, too, was impossible, for she was so deeply engaged in providing them with more brothers and sisters that she was unable to move.
The days between her first and second child were the best. She was still strong enough to tub Robertlet every night and prepare his food, and keep a watchful eye on him most of the time; also, he was only one, and easy to deal with. And he was so exact and punctual in his ways that he seemed like a clock you wound up at regular intervals and knew would then go on by itself; and his clothes, naturally, were all new and needed little mending; and she still had Ilse, who did not marry till a year later; and she had persuaded herself, for one must needs persuade oneself of something, that after this next baby there would be a pause.
This persuasion, and the few admonishments Edward Ingram had thrown at her that afternoon, helped her extraordinarily. So easily could she be stirred to courage and enthusiasm that she was able to forget most of her fears and discomforts in the new business of training her mind to triumph over her body, and she got through a surprising quantity of mixed reading that winter and spring; and when at last in the following May her hour had come, she marched off almost recklessly with her two plaits already hanging down her back and her head held high and her eyes wide and shining to the fatal bedroom where Death she supposed, but refused to care, sat waiting to see if he could not get her this time, so filled was she with the spirit she had been cultivating for six months of proud determination not to be beaten.
She was, however, beaten.
It was the absence of pauses that beat her. She came to be, as the German phrase put it, in a continual condition of being blest. She came to be also continually more bloodless. Gradually sinking away more and more from energy as one child after the other sapped her up, she left off reading, dropping the more difficult things first. TheHibbert Journalwent almost at once. Soon theTimeswas looked at languidly and not opened. TheNational Reviewgave her an earache. Presently she was too far gone even for theSpectator. TheClarionlasted longest, but a growing distaste for its tone caused it finally to be abandoned. For she was becoming definitely religious; she was ceasing to criticise or to ask Why? She would sit for hours contemplating the beauty of acquiescence. It gave her a boneless satisfaction. The more anæmic she grew the easier religion seemed to be. It was much the least difficult thing to be passive, to yield, not to think, not to decide, never to want explanations. And everybody praised her. How nice that was! Baroness Glambeck approved, Frau Dosch approved loudly. The elder Frau Dremmel came out each year twice and silently approved of a mother whose offspring was so strikingly like herself; while as for Kökensee, it regarded her with the respect due to a person becoming proverbial. It is true Robert seemed to love her rather less than more, in spite of her obviously deserving to be loved more than ever now that she was at one with him about Providence; yet it was hardly fair to say that, either, for nobody could be kinder than he was when he was not busy. He was busy from morning to night. How nice that was, she thought, her hands folded; she had always thought it nice to be busy.
Of her six children Robertlet flourished, and so did the sister who came after him. The next two died, one doing it boldly of mumps, a thing that had never been achieved before and greatly interested the doctor, who predicted a memorable future for him if he had been going to have one, and the other, more explicably, by falling out of the punt when his very existence depended on his keeping in it. Then they took to being born dead; two of them in succession did this; and it was after the second had done it that Ingeborg reached her lowest ebb of vitality and could hardly be got to say a sentence that did not include heaven.
When she had been up and dressed two months and still lay about on sofas being religious, Herr Dremmel, who was patient but slowly becoming conscious that there was an atmosphere ofchapelle ardenteabout his parlour on his coming into it with the innocent briskness of a good man to his supper, thought perhaps the Meuk doctor, who by now was a familiar feature in his life, had better come over and advise; and so it was that Ingeborg went to Zoppot, that bracing and beautiful seaside resort near Danzig, leaving her home for the first time since her marriage, going indeed with as much unwillingness as so will-less a person could possess, but sent off regardless of her moist opposition by the doctor, who would not even allow her to take Robertlet and Ditti with her.
She went in the care of the nurse who had helped her after Robertlet's birth, and she was to stay there all June and all July, and all August and September as well if necessary.
"But what will they do without me?" she kept on feebly asking. "And my duties—how can I leave everything?"
Tears poured down her face at her departure. She gave keepsakes to both the servants. She sent for the sexton, with whom she had latterly grown friendly, and tried to speak but could not. She folded the impassive Robertlet and Ditti to her heart so many times that they were stirred to something almost approaching activity and resistance.
"Your prayers—you won't forget what Mummy taught you?" she wept, as though she were taking leave of them for ever.
"Dear Robert," she sobbed, clinging to him with her cheek against his on the platform at Meuk where he saw her off, "do forgive me if I've been a bad wife to you. Ihavetried. You won't forget—will you—ever—that Ididtry?"
The nurse gave her a spoonful of Brand's Meat Jelly. The journey was a journey of jelly combating grief. All the way each relapse into woe was instantly interrupted by jelly; and it was not till the evening, when they reached the little pension on the sands which was to be their home for two months, and Ingeborg going to the open window gave a quick cry as the full freshness and saltness and heaving glancing beauty burst upon her, that the nurse threw the rest of the tin away and put her trust altogether in the sea.
Herr Dremmel returned to his wifeless home in a meditative frame of mind. As he jolted along in the same carriage, only grown more shaky, in which he had brought his bride back seven years before, he indulged, first, in a brief wonder at the ups and downs of women; from this he passed to a consideration of the superior reliability of chemicals; from this, again, he proceeded to reflect that, nevertheless, a man's life should be decorated at the edges, and that the most satisfactory decoration was a wife and family. Ingeborg, in spite of her ups and downs, had been a good wife to him, and he did not regret having attached her to his edges, but then he also had done his part and been a good husband to her. Few marriages, he thought, could have been so harmonious and successful as theirs. He loved her as an honest man should love his wife—at judicious intervals. Always he had affection for her, and liked being with her when she was feeling well. Her money—every wife should have a little—had helped him much, indeed had made most of the successes that had rewarded his labours possible, and she had given him a child a year, which was, he was aware, the maximum output and rendered him civically satisfactory. That these children should, four of them, not have succeeded in staying alive, and that the two who had should bear so striking a resemblance to his mother, a person he knew for unintelligent, were misfortunes, but one did not dwell on misfortunes; one turned one's back on them and went away and worked. The central fact of life, its core of splendour, he said to himself as, arrived at home, he hung up his hat in the passage and prepared to plunge with renewed appetite into his laboratory, was work; but, he added as he passed the open door of the sitting-room, and was reminded by its untidiness of domesticities, since one had to withdraw occasionally from the heat of that great middle light and refresh oneself in something cooler, one needed a place of relaxation where the interest was more attenuated, a ring of relative tepidity round the bright centre of one's life, and this ring was excellently supplied by the object commonly called the family circle. The harder he worked, the more hotly he pursued knowledge, the more urgent was a man's need for intervals of tepidity. One sought out one's little wife and rested one's brain; one took one's son on one's knee; one pulled, perhaps, the plait of one's daughter.
Life for Herr Dremmel was both great and simple. During the seven years of his marriage it had become continually more so. There were times he could remember previous to that event when he had lost sight of this truth in a confused hankering, periods during which he had hankered persistently, moments that astonished him afterwards to call to mind when, the lilacs being out in the garden and the young corn of the fields asprout in the warm spring sun, his laboratory, that place of hopes and visions, had incredibly appeared to him to be mere bones. Marriage had banished these distortions of perception, and he had lived seven years in the full magnificent consciousness of the greatness and simplicity of life. He was armoured by his singleness of purpose. He never came out of his armour and was petty. Not once, while Ingeborg in a distant corner of the house was fearing that she had hurt him, or offended him, or had made him think she did not love him, had he been hurt or offended or thinking anything of the sort. He was absorbed in great things, great interests, great values. There was no room in his thoughts for meditations on minor concerns. The days were not wide enough for the bigness they had to hold, and it never would have occurred to him to devote any portion of their already limited space to inquiring if he had been hurt. His interested eyes, carefully examining and comparing and criticising phenomena, had no time for introspection. As the years passed and successes followed upon his patience, his absorption and subjugation by his work became increasingly profound; for a man has but a handful of years, and cannot during that brief span live too inquisitively. Herr Dremmel was wringing more out of Nature, who only asks to be forced to tell, each year. He was accumulating experiences and knowledge of an interest and value so great that everything else was trivial beside them. The passing day was forgotten in the interest of the day that was to come. The future was what his brain was perpetually concerned with, and an eye ranging with growing keenness over a growingly splendid and detailed vision cannot observe, it would be an interruption, a waste to observe, the fluctuations in the moods of, for instance, a family or a parish.
Wives, children, and parishes are adornments, obligations, and means of livelihood. They are what a man has as well, but only as well. Herr Dremmel during these years had trained his parish to be unobtrusive in return for his own unobtrusiveness, and in spite of occasional restiveness on the part of Baron Glambeck, who continued from time to time, on the ground that the parish was becoming heathen and displaying the smug contentment characteristic of that condition, to endeavour to persuade the authorities to remove him somewhere else, was more firmly established than ever in the heart of a flock that only wanted to be left alone; and as for his wife and children, he regarded them benevolently as the necessary foundation of his existence, the airy cellars that kept the fabric above sweet and dry. Like cellars, one had to have them, and one was glad when they were good, but one did not live in them. As a wise man who wished to do fine work before being overtaken by the incapacitations of death, he had contrived his life so that it should contain enough love to make him able to forget love. It is not, he had come to know very well since his marriage, by doing without but by having that one can clear one's mind of wanting; and it is only the cleared mind that can achieve anything at all in the great work of helping the world to move more quickly on its journey towards the light.
For some weeks after Ingeborg's departure he was immensely unaware of her absence. It was June, that crowded month for him who has experimental fields; and small discomforts at home, such as ill-served, unpunctual meals and rooms growing steadily less dusted, at no time attracted his notice. He would come out of his laboratory after a good morning's work in much the same spirit with which the bridegroom issuing from his chamber, a person details cannot touch, is filled, and would eat contentedly any food he found lying about and be off to his fields almost before Robertlet and Ditti had done struggling with their bibs and saying their preliminary grace.
The children, however, took no base advantage of this being left to themselves. Robertlet did not turn on Ditti and seize her dinner because she was a girl; Ditti did not conceal more than her share of pudding in her pocket for comfort during the empty afternoon hours. They sat in silence working through the meal, using their knives to eat with instead of their forks, for knives rather than forks were in their blood, and unmoved by the way in which bits they had carefully stalked round and round their plates ended by tumbling over the edge on to the tablecloth. They were patient children, and when that happened they made no comment, but dropping their knives also on the tablecloth picked up the bits in their fingers and ate them. At the end Ditti said the closing grace as her mother had taught her, Robertlet having officiated at the opening one, and they both stood behind their chairs with their eyes shut while she expressed gratitude in German to the dear Saviour who had had the friendliness to be their guest on that occasion, and having reached the Amen, in which Robertlet joined, they did not fall upon each other and fight, as other unshepherded children filled with meat and pudding might have done, but left the room in a sober file and went to the kitchen and requested the servant Rosa, who was the one who would have been their nurse if they had had one, to accompany them to their bedroom and see that they cleaned their teeth.
They spent the afternoons in not being naughty.
Herr Dremmel, accordingly, because of this health and sobriety in his children and his own indifference to his comfort, had no domestic worries such as engulf other men whose wives are away to disturb him, and it was not till July was drawing to a close and a long drought forced leisure upon him that Ingeborg's image began to obtrude itself through the chinks of his work.
At first he thought of her as a mother, as somebody heavy, continually recovering from or preparing for illness; but presently he began to think of her as a wife, as his wife, as his proper complement and relaxation from all this toil shut up in a dull laboratory. She seemed to grow brighter and lighter thought of like that, and by the time he received a letter asking if she might stay away another fortnight to complete what was being a thorough cure she was so brightly in his mind that he felt extremely disappointed.
He wrote giving the permission she asked, and made the discovery that his house looked empty and that a fortnight was long. He paced the garden in the hot evenings, smoking beneath the lime-trees where he and she at the beginning used so gaily to breakfast, and forgot how slow of movement and mind she had been for several years, how little he had really seen of her, how more and more his attitude towards her had been one of patience; and when he went in to his supper, which he suddenly did not like and criticised, what he found himself looking for was not the figure he had been used to find lying silent on the sofa, but the quick, light, flitting thing that laughed and pulled his ears, the Ingeborg of the beginning, his little sheep.
On the day she came home, although it was the very height of harvesting and the first samples of the year's grain lay on his table waiting to be examined, he gave up the afternoon to driving in to Meuk to meet her, and waited on the platform with an impatient expectancy he had not felt for years.
"It is not good for man to live alone," were his first words as he embraced her largely in the door of the railway carriage, while the porter, in a fever to get out the hand luggage and run and attend to other passengers, had to wait till he had done. "Little sheep, how could you stay away so long from the old shepherd?"
She was looking very well, he thought—sunburnt and with many new freckles, rounder, quite young, a sweet little wife for a long solitary husband to have coming home to him.
He lifted her proudly into the carriage and drove through Meuk with his arm round her, waving the other one at the doctor who rallied past them in his own high shaky vehicle and shouting, "Cured!"
The doctor, however, seemed surprised at seeing Ingeborg, and did not smile back but looked inscrutably at them both.
She asked about the welfare of the children, and whether their ears had been properly washed.
"Ears?" exclaimed Herr Dremmel. "And what, pray, have the ears of others to do with a reunited wedded couple?"
She hoped, a little hurriedly, that Rosa and the cook had been good to him.
"Rosa and the cook?" he cried. "What talk is this of Rosa and the cook? If you are not silent with your domesticities I will kiss you here and now in the middle of the open highroad."
She said she had never really thanked him for letting her go to Zoppot and be there so long.
"Too long, Little One," he interrupted, drawing her closer. "Almost had I forgotten what a dear little wife I possess."
"But I'm going to make up for it all now," she said, "and work harder than I've ever done in my life."
"At making the good Robert happy," he said, pinching her ear.
"And doing things for the children. Dreadful to think of them all this time without me. Were they good?"
"Good as fishes."
"Robert—fishes?"
"They are well, Little One, and happy. That is enough about the children. Tell me rather about you, how you filled up your days."
"I walked, I sailed, I bathed, I lay in the sun, and I made resolutions."
"Excellent. I shall await the result with interest."
"I hope you'll like them. I know they'll be very good for the children."
She had so earnest a face that he pulled it round by the chin and peered at it. Seen close she was always prettiest, full of delicacy and charm of soft fair skin, and after examining her a moment with a pleased smile he stooped down and did, after all, kiss her.
She flushed and resisted.
"What?" he said, amused. "The little wife growing virginal again?"
"You've made my hat crooked," she said, putting up her hands to straighten it. "Robert, how are the fields?"
"I will not talk about the fields. I will talk about you."
"Oh, Robert. You know," she added nervously, "I'm notreallywell yet. I've still got to go on taking tiresome things—that tonic, you know. The doctor there said I'm still anæmic—"
"We will feed her on portions of the strongest ox."
"So you mustn't mind, if I—if I—"
"I mind nothing if only I once more have my little wife at home," said Herr Dremmel; and when he helped her down on to the parsonage steps, where stood Robertlet and Ditti in a stiff and proper row waiting motionless till their mother should have got near enough for them to present her with the nosegays they were holding, he kissed her again, and again pinched her ear, and praised God aloud that his widowerhood was over.
They had tea, a meal that had long before been substituted for the heavier refreshment of coffee, in a parlour filled with flowers by Rosa and the cook, the very cake, baked for the occasion, being strewn with them. Herr Dremmel lounged on the sofa behind the table looking placidly content, with one arm round his wife, while Robertlet and Ditti, awed by the splendours of the decorations for their mother's home-coming and their own best clothes and spotless bibs, sat opposite, being more completely good than ever. From their side of the table they stared unflinchingly at the two people on the sofa—at their comfortably reclining, pleased-looking father, whom they knew so differently as a being always hurriedly going somewhere else, at their mother sitting up very straight, with her veil pushed up over her nose, pouring out tea and smiling at them and keeping on giving them more jam and more milk and more cake even after, aware from their sensations that overflowing could not be far off, they had informed her by anxious repetitions of the wordsatt, which she did not seem to hear, that they were already in a dangerous condition. And they wondered dimly why, when she poured out the tea, her hand shook and made it spill.
"I will now," said Herr Dremmel when the meal was finished, getting up and brushing crumbs out of the many folds that were characteristic of his clothes, "retire for a space into my laboratory."
He looked at Ingeborg and smiled. "Picture it," he said. "The only solace I have now had for two months and a half has been in the bony arms of my laboratory. I grow weary of them. It is well to have one's little wife home again. A man, to do his work, needs his life complete, equipped in each of its directions. His laboratory seems bony to him if he has not also a wife; his wife would seem not bony enough if he had not also a laboratory. Bony and boneless, bony and boneless—it is the swing of the pendulum of the wise man's life." And he bent over her and lifted her face up again by putting his finger under her chin. "Is it not so, Little One?" he asked, smiling.
"I—suppose so," said Ingeborg.
"Suppose so!"
He laughed, and pulled an escaping tendril of her hair, and went away in great contentment and immersed himself very happily in the saucers of new grain waiting to be weighed and counted.
It was a fine August afternoon, and his windows were open, for there was no wind to blow his papers about, and he was pleased when he presently became aware out of the corner of an eye withdrawn an instant from its work that his wife had come out on to the path below and was walking up and down it in the way she used to before the acuter period of the sofa and the interest in life beyond the grave had set in.
He liked to see her there. There was a grass bank sloping up from the path to beneath his windows, and by standing on tip-toe on the top of this and stretching up an arm as far as it would go one was just able to tap against the glass. He remembered how she used to do this when first they were married, on very fine days, to try to lure him out from his duties into dalliance with her among the lilacs. It amused him to find himself almost inclined to hope she would do it now, for it was long since there had been dalliance and he felt this was an occasion, this restoration to normality, on which some slight trifling in a garden would not be inappropriate.
But Ingeborg, though she loitered there nearly half an hour, did not even look up. She wandered up and down in the cool shade the house threw across the path in the afternoon, her hat off, apparently merely enjoying the beauty of a summer day bending towards its evening, and presently he forgot her in the vivid interest of what he was doing; so that it was the surprised expression of some one who has forgotten and is trying to recall that he looked at her when, after a knock at the door which he had not heard, he saw her come in and stand at the corner of his table waiting till he had done counting—a process he conducted aloud—to the end of the row of grains he was engaged upon.
His thoughts were still chiefly with them as he looked up at her when he had done and had written down the result, but there was room in them also for a slight wonder that she should be there. She had not penetrated into his laboratory for years. She had been tamed, after a period of recurring insurrections, into respect for its sanctity. But he did not mind being interrupted on this occasion; on the contrary, as soon as he had fully returned to consciousness he was pleased. There was a large warmth pervading Herr Dremmel that afternoon which made him inclined not to mind anything. "Well, Little One?" he said.
Immediately she began to deliver what sounded like a speech. He gazed at her in astonishment. She appeared to be in a condition of extreme excitement; she was addressing him rapidly in a trembling voice; she was much flushed, and was holding on to the edge of the table. It was so sudden and so headlong that it was like nothing so much as the gushing forth of the long corked-up contents of an over-full bottle, and he gazed at her in an astonishment that did not for some time permit him to gather the drift of what she was saying.
When he did she had already got to the word Ruins.
"Ruins?" repeated Herr Dremmel.
"Ruins, ruins. Itmuststop—itcan'tgo on. Oh, I saw it so clearly the last part of the time in Zoppot. I suppose it was the sea wind blew me clear. Our existence, Robert, our decently happy existence in a decently happy home with properly cared-for children—"
"But," interrupted Herr Dremmel, raising his hand, "one moment—what is it that must stop?"
"Oh, don't you see all that will be in ruins about us—but inruins, Robert—all our happy life—if I go on in this—in this wild career of—of unbridled motherhood?"
Herr Dremmel stared. "Unbridled—?" he began; then he repeated, so deep was his astonishment, "Wild career of—Ingeborg, did you say unbridled motherhood?"
"Yes," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together, evidently extraordinarily agitated. "I learned that by heart at Zoppot, on purpose to say to you. I knew if I didn't directly I got into this room I'd forget everything I meant to say. I know it sounds ridiculous, the way I say it—"
"Unbridled motherhood?" repeated Herr Dremmel. "But—are you not a pastor's wife?"
"Oh, yes, yes—I know, I know. I know there's Duty and Providence, but there's me, too—there is me, too. And, Robert, won't you see? We shall be happy again if I'm well, we shall be two real people instead of just one person and a bit of one—you and a battered thing on a sofa—"
"Ingeborg, you call a wife and a mother engaged in carrying out her obligations a battered thing on a sofa?"
"Yes," said Ingeborg, hurrying on to the principal sentence of those she had prepared at Zoppot and learned by heart, desperately clutching at it before Robert's questions had undermined her courage and befogged the issues. "Yes, and I've come to the conclusion after ripe meditation—after ripe yes—the production of the—of the—yes, of the already extinct"—(dead seemed an unkind word, almost rude) "is wasteful, and that—and that—....Oh, Robert," she cried, flinging out her hands and letting go all the rest of the things she had learned to say, "don't you think this persistent parenthood might end now?"
He stared at her in utter amazement.
"It—itdisagreeswith me," she said, tears in her voice and in her anxious, appealing eyes.
"Am I to under—"
"AnyhowIcan't go on," she cried, twisting her fingers about in an agony. "There's so little of me to go onwith. I'm getting stupider every day. I've got no brains left. I've got no anything. Why, I can hardly get together enough courage to tell you this. Oh, Robert," she appealed, "it isn't as though it made youreallyhappier—you don't reallyparticularlynotice the children when they're there—it isn't as though it made anybodyreallyhappier—and—and—I'm dreadfully sorry, but I've done."
And she dropped on to the floor beside him and put her cheek against his sleeve and tried to make up by kissing it and clinging to it for her subversion of that strange tremendous combination of Duty and Providence that so bestrode her life. "If only you wouldn'tmind—" she kept on saying.
But Herr Dremmel, for the first time since he had known her, was deeply offended, deeply hurt. She had pierced his armour at the one vulnerable spot. His manhood was outraged; his kindness, his patience, his affection were forgotten and spurned. He looked down at the head against his arm with a face in which wounded pride, wrath, shockedness at so great a defiance of duty, and the amazed aggrievement of him whose gifts and blessings are not wanted, struggled together. Then, as she still went on clinging and incoherently suggesting that he should not mind, he rose up, took her by the hand, helped her to her feet, and led her to the door; and there, after facing her a moment in silence with it opened in his hand while she stood blinking up at him with appealing eyes, he said dreadfully: "Evidently you do not and never have loved me."
Ingeborg crept away down the passage with the sound in her ears of the key being turned in the lock behind her.
She was crushed. That Robert should think she had never loved him, that he should not even let her tell him how much she had and did! She stared out of the little window at the foot of the stairs at the untidy vegetables in the garden. This was the quality of life—Brussels sprouts, and a door being locked behind one. It was all grey and difficult and tragic. She had hurt Robert, offended him. He was in there thinking she didn't love him. What he had said was peculiarly shattering coming from a mouth that had been always kind. Yet what was there to do but this? The alternative, it seemed, was somebody's dying; and if the children did live there would be the death of the spirit, the decay of all lovely things in the home, the darkening of all light; there would be neglect, apathy, an utter running to seed. But she felt guilty and conscience-stricken. She was no longer sure she was right. Perhaps it was indeed her duty to go on, perhaps she was indeed being wicked and cruel. The clearness of vision that had been hers at Zoppot was blurred; she was confused, infinitely distressed. Yet through the distress and confusion there kept on jabbing something like a little spear of light, and always it pointed in this one direction....
She stood leaning against the wall by the open window, a miserable mixture of doubt and conviction, remorse and determination. All her life she had been servile—servile with the sudden rare tremendous insurrections that upheave certain natures brought up in servility, swift tempests more devastating than the steady fighting of systematic rebels. Her insurrections were epoch-making. When they occurred the destiny of an entire family was changed. Fathers and husbands were not prepared for anything but continued acquiescence in one so constantly acquiescent. As far as she was concerned they felt they might sleep peacefully in their beds. Then this obedient thing, this pliable uncontradicting thing would return, for instance, from an illicit trip abroad, betrothed to an unknown foreigner, and somehow in spite of violent opposition marry him; or, as in this second volcanic upheaval, with no preliminaries whatever, refuse point blank—the final effect on Herr Dremmel's mind of her incoherence was a point blankness—to live with her husband as his wife.
Behind the locked door his anger was as great as her distressed confusion outside it. She was to be his wife but not his wife. Under his roof. A perpetual irritation. She had decreed, this woman who had nothing to decree, that there were to be no more Dremmels. The indignation of the thwarted ancestor was heavy upon him. Her moral obliquity shocked him, her disregard for the give and take necessary if a civilised community is to continue efficient. How was he going to work with that constant reminder about his house of his past placidities? Already it had begun, the annoyance, the hindering, for here he was sitting in front of his samples making mistakes in weighing, adding up wrong, forced by humiliatingly different results each time to count the grains over and over again.
Driven by the stress of the situation to unfairness, he remembered with a kind of bitter affection those widows who had darkened his past so soothingly before his marriage, the emotional peace their bony dustiness, their bonneted dinginess had secured him. They had been, he perceived, like a dark blind shading his eyes from the tormenting glare of too much domesticity. The most infuriated of that black and blessed band had been better than this threatening excess of relationship. Not one had ever come between him and his steady reaching forward. Not one had even once caused him to count his grains twice over. A man who wishes to work, he told himself, must clear his life of women; of all women, that is—for there are certain elementary actions connected with saucepans and bedmaking that only women will do—except widows. A wife who is not a wife and who yet persists in looking as if she were one, can be nothing but a goad and a burden for an honest man. Either she should look like some one used up and finished or she should continue to discharge her honourable functions until such time as she developed the physical unattractiveness that placed her definitely on the list of women one respects. That Ingeborg should choose the moment when she seemed younger and rounder than ever to revolt against Duty and Providence appeared to him in his first wrath deliberately malicious. He was amazed. He could not believe he was being called out of his important and serious work, beckoned out of it just when it was going so well, in order to be hurt, in order to be made acquainted with pain, and by her of all people in the world whom he used to call—surely he had been kind?—his little sheep. To be hit by one's sheep! To be hit violently by it so that the blows actually shook one at the very moment of greatest affection for it, of rejoicing over its return, of plunging one's hands most confidently into the comfort of its wool!
Herr Dremmel was amazed.
He stayed in his laboratory in this condition till supper; then, during the meal, he carefully read a book which he propped up in front of him against the loaf, while Ingeborg, ministering to him with the eager deftness of the conscience-stricken, watched for a sign of forgiveness out of the corners of red eyes.
He stayed after supper in his laboratory till past midnight, still being amazed, reduced indeed at last to walking up and down that calm temple of untiring attempts to nail down ultimate causes, considering how best he could bring his wife to reason.
The business of bringing a woman to reason had always seemed to him quite the most extravagant way of wasting good time. To have to discuss, argue, explain, threaten, adjure, only in order to get back to the point from which nobody ought ever to have started, was the silliest of all silly necessities. Again he fumed at the thought of an untractable, undutiful wife about him, and recognised the acute need to be clear of feminine childishness, egotism, unforeseeable resiliences, if a man would work. In his stirred stale it appeared altogether monstrous that the whole world should be blotted out, the great wide world of magnificent opportunity and spacious interest, even for a day, even for an hour, by the power to make him uncomfortable, by the power to make him concentrate his brains on an irrelevant situation, of one small woman.
He went to their room about half-past twelve determined to have no more of the nonsense. He would bring her then and there, by the shortest possible route, to reason. He would have it out even to the extent of severity and have done with it. He was master, and if she forced him to emphasize the fact he would.
Carrying the lamp he went to their room with the firm footsteps of one who has ceased to be going to stand things.
But the room was empty. It was as chillily empty of wifely traces as it had been since the beginning of June.
"This is paltry," thought Herr Dremmel, feeling the offence was now so great as to have become ridiculous; and determined to discover into what fastness she had withdrawn and fetch her out of it, he went lamp in hand doggedly through the house looking for her, beginning with the thorough patience of one accustomed to research in the kitchen, where shy cockroaches peeped at him round the legs of tables, examining the parlour, stuffy with the exhaustion of an ended day, penetrating into a room in which Rosa and the cook reared themselves up in their beds to regard him with horror unspeakable, and at last stumbling up the narrow staircase to where Robertlet and Ditti slept the sleep of the unvaryingly just.
Here, in a third small bed of the truckle type, lay his defaulting wife, her face to the wall, her body composed into an excess of motionlessness.
"Ingeborg!" he called, holding the lamp high over his head.
But she did not stir.
"Ingeborg!" he called again.
But never did woman sleep so soundly.
He walked across to the bed and bent over, searching her face by the light of the lamp. Most of it was buried in the pillow, but the one eye visible was tightly shut, more immensely asleep than any eye he had ever seen.