PART III

THE PASTOR'S WIFE

_By the Author of "Elizabeth and Her German Garden"_

_Illustrated by Arthur Litle_

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1914

[Illustration: "Tell me, Little One," he said when she rejoined him,

"will you marry me?"]

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RÜGEN

FRÄULEIN SCHMIDT AND MR. ANSTRUTHER

PRINCESS PRISCILLA'S FORTNIGHT

THE SOLITARY SUMMER

THE CARAVANERS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Tell me, Little One," he said when she rejoined him, "will you

marry me?" _Frontispiece_

"Then why," she asked, with the courage of curiosity, "are you

a pastor?"

"Will you not, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, calling her for the

first time by her name, "cut the cake?"

"But--father, I've been doing it too"

He could no longer walk around his own garden without meeting an

interlaced couple

"You are married to her?" asked the elder Frau Dremmel, turning her

pebble eyes slowly from one to the other

Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware of this,

Ingeborg tried to hide them

"But these are very wonderful," she said, taking up the sketches.

"I wish I were really like that."

PART I

CHAPTER I

On that April afternoon all the wallflowers of the world seemed to her

released body to have been piled up at the top of Regent Street so that

she should walk in fragrance.

She was in this exalted mood, the little mouse-coloured young lady

slipping along southwards from Harley Street, because she had just had a

tooth out. After weeks of miserable indifference she was quivering with

responsiveness again, feeling the relish of life, the tang of it, the

jollity of all this bustle and hurrying past of busy people. And the

beauty of it, the _beauty_ of it, she thought, fighting a tendency to

loiter in the middle of the traffic to have a good look--the beauty of

the sky across the roofs of the houses, the delicacy of the mistiness

that hung down there over the curve of the street, the loveliness of the

lights beginning to shine in the shop windows. Surely the colour of

London was an exquisite thing. It was like a pearl that late afternoon,

something very gentle and pale, with faint blue shadows. And as for its

smell, she doubted, indeed, whether heaven itself could smell better,

certainly not so interesting. "And anyhow," she said to herself, lifting

her head a moment in appreciation, "it can't possibly smell more

_alive_."

She herself had certainly never been more alive. She felt electric. She

would not have been surprised if sparks had come crackling out of the

tips of her sober gloves. Not only was she suddenly and incredibly

relieved from acute pain, but for the first time in her life of

twenty-two years she was alone. This by itself, without the business of

the tooth, was enough to make a dutiful, willing, and hardworked

daughter tingle. She would have tingled if by some glorious chance a

whole free day had come to her merely inside the grey walls of the

garden at home; but to be free and idle in London, to have them all so

far away, her family down there in the west, to have them so necessarily

silent, so oddly vague already and pallid in the distance! Yet she had

only left them that morning; it was only nine hours since her father,

handsome as an archangel, silvery of head and gaitered of leg, had waved

her off from the doorstep with offended resignation. "And do not return,

Ingeborg," he had called into the fly where she sat holding her face and

trying not to rock, "till you are completely set right. Even a week.

Even ten days. Have them all seen to."

For the collapse of Ingeborg, daunted into just a silent feverish thing

of pain, had convulsed the ordered life at home. Her family bore it for

a week with perfect manners and hardly a look of reproach. Then they

sent her to the Redchester dentist, a hitherto sufficient man, who

tortured her with tentative stoppings and turned what had been dull and

smooth into excitement and jerks. Then, unable to resist a feeling that

self-control would have greatly helped, it began to find the etiquette

of Christian behaviour, which insisted on its going on being silent

while she more and more let herself go, irksome. The Bishop wanted

things in vain. Three times he had to see himself off alone at the

station and not be met when he came back. Buttons, because they were not

tightened on in time, burst from his gaiters, and did it in remote

places like railway carriages. Letters were unanswered, important ones.

Engagements, vital ones, through lack of reminders went unkept. At last

it became plain, when she seemed not even to wish to answer when spoken

to or to move when called, that this apathy and creeping away to hide

could not further be endured. Against all tradition, against every home

principle, they let a young unmarried daughter loose. With offended

reluctance they sent her to London to a celebrity in teeth--after all it

was not as if she had been going just to enjoy herself--"And your aunt

will please forgive us," said the Bishop, "for taking her in this manner

unawares."

The aunt, a serious strong lady, was engaged for political meetings in

the north, and had gone away to them that very morning, leaving a letter

and her house at Ingeborg's disposal for so long as the dentist needed

her. The dentist, being the best that money could buy, hardly needed her

at all. He pounced unerringly and at once on the right tooth and pulled

it out. There were no stoppings, no delays, no pain, and no aunt. Never

was a life more beautifully cleared. Ingeborg went away down Harley

Street free, and with ten pounds in her pocket. For the rest of this one

day, for an hour or two to-morrow morning before setting out for

Paddington and home, she could do exactly as she liked.

"Why, there's nothing to prevent me going _anywhere_ this evening," she

thought, stopping dead as the full glory of the situation slowly dawned

on her. "Why, I could go out somewhere really grand to dinner, just as

people do I expect in all the books I'm not let read, and then I could

go to the play--nobody could prevent me. Why, I could go to a music-hall

if I chose, and _still_ nobody could prevent me!"

Audacious imaginings that made her laugh--she had not laughed for

weeks--darted in and out of her busy brain. She saw herself in her

mouse-coloured dress reducing waiters in marble and gilt places to

respect and slavery by showing them her ten pounds. She built up lurid

fabrics of possible daring deeds, and smiled at the reflection of

herself in shop windows as she passed, at the sobriety, the

irreproachableness of the sheath containing these molten imaginings.

Why, she might hire a car--just telephone, and there you were with it

round in five minutes, and go off in the twilight to Richmond Park or

Windsor. She had never been to Richmond Park or Windsor; she had never

been anywhere; but she was sure there would be bats and stars out there,

and water, and the soft duskiness of trees and the smell of wet earth,

and she could drive about them a little, slowly, so as to _feel_ it all,

and then come back and have supper somewhere--have supper at the Ritz,

she thought, of which she had read hastily out of the corner of an eye

between two appearances of the Bishop, in the more interesting portions

of the _Times_--just saunter in, you know. Or she could have dinner

first; yes, dinner first--dinner at Claridge's. No, not at Claridge's;

she had an aunt who stayed there, another one, her mother's sister, rich

and powerful, and it was always best not to stir up rich and powerful

aunts. Dinner at the Thackeray Hôtel, perhaps. That was where her

father's relations stayed, fine-looking serious men who once were

curates and, yet earlier, good and handsome babies. It was near the

British Museum, she had heard. Its name and surroundings suggested

magnificence of a nobler sort than the Ritz. Yes, she would dine at the

Thackeray Hôtel and be splendid.

Here, coming to a window full of food, she became aware that,

wonderfully, and for the first time for weeks, she was hungry; so hungry

that she didn't want dinner or supper or anything future, but something

now. She went in; and all her gilded visions of the Ritz and the

Thackeray Hôtel were swamped in one huge cup (she felt how legitimate

and appropriate a drink it was for a bishop's daughter without a

chaperon, and ordered the biggest size costing four-pence) of Aerated

Bread Shop cocoa.

It was six o'clock when she emerged, amazingly nourished, from that

strange place where long-backed elderly men with tired eyes were

hurriedly eating poached eggs on chilly little clothless marble tables,

and continued down Regent Street.

She now felt strangely settled in her mind. She no longer wanted to go

to the Ritz. Indeed the notion of dining anywhere with the cocoa

clothing her internally as with a garment--a thick winter garment,

almost she thought like the closer kinds of fur--was revolting. She

still felt enterprising, but a little clogged. She thought now more of

things like fresh air and exercise. Not now for her the heat and glitter

of a music-hall. There was a taste in that pure drink that was

irreconcilable with music-halls, a satisfying property in its

unadulteratedness, its careful cleanliness, that reminded her she was

the daughter of a bishop. Walking away from the Aerated Bread Shop

rather gravely, she remembered that she had a mother on a sofa; an only

sister who was so beautiful that it was touching; and a class of boys,

once unruly and now looking up to her--in fact, that she had a position

to keep up. She was still happy, but happy now in a thoroughly nice way;

and she would probably have gone back in this warmed and solaced

condition to her aunt's house in Bedford Square and an evening with a

book and an early bed if her eye had not been caught by a poster outside

an office sort of place she was passing, a picture of water and

mountains, with written on it in big letters:

A WEEK IN LOVELY LUCERNE

SEVEN DAYS FOR SEVEN GUINEAS

THOSE WHO INTEND TO JOIN NEXT TRIP INQUIRE

WITHIN

Now Ingeborg's maternal grandmother had been a Swede, a creature of

toughness and skill on skis, a young woman, when caught surprisingly by

the washed-out English tourist Ingeborg's grandfather, drenched in frank

reading and thinking and in the smell of the abounding forests and in

wood strawberries and sour cream. She had lived, up to the day when for

some quite undiscoverable reason she allowed herself to be married to

the narrow stranger, in the middle of big beautiful things--big

stretches of water, big mountains, big winds, big lonelinesses; and

Ingeborg, who had never been out of England and had spent years in the

soft and soppy west, seeing the picture of the great lake and the great

sky in the window in Regent Street, felt a quick grip on her heart.

It was the fingers of her grandmother.

She stood staring at the picture, half-remembering, trying hard to

remember quite, something beautiful and elusive and remote that once she

had known--oh, that once she had known--but that she kept on somehow

forgetting. The urgencies of daily life in episcopal surroundings, the

breathless pursuit of her duties, the effort all day long to catch them

up and be even with them, the Bishop's buttons, the Bishop's speeches,

the Bishop's departures by trains, his all-pervadingness when at home,

his all-engulfing mass of correspondence when away--"She is my Right

Hand," he would say in stately praise--the Redchester tea-parties to

which her mother couldn't go because of the sofa, the county

garden-parties to which Judith had to be taken, the callers, the

bazaars, the cathedral services, the hurry, the noise--life at home

seemed the noisiest thing--these had smothered and hidden, beaten down,

put out and silenced that highly important and unrecognized part of her,

her little bit of lurking grandmother. Now, however, this tough but

impulsive lady rose within her in all her might. Her granddaughter was

in exactly the right state for being influenced. She was standing there

staring, longing, seething with Scandinavia, and presently arguing.

Why shouldn't she? The Bishop, as she had remarked with wonder earlier

in the afternoon, seemed to have faded quite pallid that long way off.

And arrangements had been made. He had engaged an extra secretary; his

chaplain had been warned; Judith was going perhaps to do something; her

mother would stay safely on the sofa. They did not expect her back for

at least a week, and not for as much longer as her tooth might ache. If

her tooth were still in her mouth it _would_ be aching. If the dentist

had decided to stop it, it would have been a fortnight before such a

dreadful ache as that could be suppressed, she was sure it would. And

the ten pounds her father had given her for taxis and tips and other

odds and ends, spread over a fortnight what would have been left of it

anyhow? Besides, he had said--and indeed the Bishop, desirous of taking

no jot from his generosity in the whole annoying business, had said it,

and said it with the strong flavour of Scripture which hung about even

his mufti utterances--that she might keep any fragments of it that

remained that nothing be lost.

"Your father is very good to you," said her mother, in whose prostrate

presence the gift had been made.--"But bishops," flashed across

Ingeborg's undisciplined and jerky mind, "have to be good"--(she caught

the flash, however, and choked it out before it had got

half-way)--"you'll be able to get yourself a spring hat."

"Yes, mother," said Ingeborg, holding her face.

"And I should think a blouse as well," said her mother thoughtfully.

"Yes, mother."

"My dear, remember I _require_ Ingeborg here," said the Bishop, uneasy

at this vision of an indispensable daughter delayed by blouses. "You

will not, of course, forget that, Ingeborg."

"No, father."

And here she was forgetting it. Here she was in front of a common poster

forgetting it. What the Ritz and the Thackeray Hôtel with all their

attractions had not been able to do, that crude picture did. She forgot

the Bishop--or rather he seemed at that distance such a little thing,

such a little bit of a thing, a tiny little black figure with a dab of

white on its top, compared to this vision of splendid earth and heaven,

that she wilfully would not remember him. She forgot her accumulating

work. She forgot that her movements had all first to be sanctioned. A

whirl of Scandinavianism, of violent longing for freedom and adventure,

seemed to catch her and lift her out of the street and fling her into a

place of maps and time-tables and helpful young men framed in mahogany.

"When--when--" she stammered breathlessly, pointing to a duplicate of

the same poster hanging inside, "when does the next trip start?"

"To-morrow, madam," said the young man her question had tumbled on.

A solemnity fell upon her. She felt it was Providence. She ceased to

argue. She didn't even try to struggle. "I'm going," she announced.

And her ten pounds became two pounds thirteen, and she walked away

conscious of nothing except that the very next day she would be off.

CHAPTER II

She was collected by the official leader of this particular Dent's

Excursion at Charing Cross the next morning and swept into a

second-class carriage with nine other excursionists, and next door there

were more--she counted eighteen of them at one time crowding round the

leader asking him questions--and besides these there was a crowd of

ordinary passengers bustling about with holiday expressions, and several

runaway couples, and every single person seemed like herself eager to be

off.

The runaway couples, from the ravaged expressions on their faces, were

being torn by doubts, perhaps already by repentances; but Ingeborg,

though she was deceiving her father who, being a bishop, should have

been peculiarly inviolate, and her mother who, being sofa-ridden, should

have appealed to her better nature, and her sister who, being exquisite,

should have been guarded from any shadow that might dim her beauty, had

none. She had been frightened that morning while she was packing and

getting herself out of her aunt's house. The immense conviction of the

servants that she was going home cowed her. And she had had to say

little things--Paddington, for instance, to the taxi driver when she

knew she meant Charing Cross, and had blushed when she changed it

through the window. But here she was, and there was a crowd of people

doing exactly the same thing whose secure jollity, except in the case of

those odd, sad couples, was contagious, and she felt both safe and as

though she were the most normal creature in the world.

"What _fun_," she thought, her blood dancing as she watched the

swarming, surging platform, "what _fun_."

Often had she been at the Redchester station in attendance on her

departing father, but what a getting off was that compared with this

hilarity. There was bustle, of course, because trains won't wait and

people won't get out of the way, but the Bishop's bustlings,

particularly when their end was confirmations, were conducted with a

kind of frozen offendedness; there was no life in him, she thought,

remembering them, he didn't let himself go. On the other hand, she

reflected, careful to be fair, you couldn't snatch illicitly at things

like confirmations in the way you could at a Dent's Tour and devour them

in secret with a fearful hidden joy. She felt like a bulb must feel, she

thought, at the supreme moment when it has nosed its little spear

successfully up through the mould it has endured all the winter and gets

it suddenly out into the light and splendour of the world. The freedom

of it! The joy of getting _clear_!

The excursionists in the carriage struggled to reach the window across

her feet and say things to their friends outside. They all talked at

once, and the carriage was full of sound and gesticulations. The friends

on the platform could not hear, but they nodded and smiled

sympathetically and shouted at intervals that it was going to be a good

crossing. Everybody was being seen off except herself and the runaway

couples; indeed, you could know which those were by the gaps along the

platform. She sat well back in her place, anxious to make herself as

convenient as possible and to get her feet tucked out of the way, a

typical daughter of provincial England and a careful home and the more

expensive clergy, well-dressed, inconspicuous, and grey. Her soft

mouse-colour hat, as the fashion that spring still went on decreeing in

the west, came down well over her eyes and ears, and little rings of

cheerful hair of a Scandinavian colouring wantoned beneath it. Her small

face was swallowed up in the shadow of the hat; you saw a liberal mouth

with happy corners, and the nostrils of a selective nose, and there was

an impression of freckles, and of a very fair sunny sort of skin.

The square German gentleman opposite her, knowing nobody in London and

therefore being, but for a different and honourable reason, in her

position of not having any one to see him off, filled up the time by

staring. Entirely unconscious that it might be embarrassing he sat and

stared. With the utmost singleness of mind he wished to see the rest of

her, when he would be able to determine whether she were pretty or not.

Ingeborg, absorbed by the wild excitement on the platform, had not

noticed him; but immediately the train started and the other passengers

had sorted themselves into their seats and were beginning the furtive

watchfulness of one another that was presently to resolve itself into

acquaintanceship, she knew there was something large and steady opposite

that was concentrated upon herself.

She looked up quickly to see what it was, and for a moment her polite

intelligent eyes returned his stare. He decided that she had missed

being pretty, and with a faint regret wondered what God was about.

"Fattened up--yes, possibly," he thought. "Fattened up--yes, perhaps."

And he went on staring because she happened to be exactly opposite, and

there was nothing else except tunnels to look at.

The other excursionists were all in pairs; they thought Ingeborg was,

too, and put her down at first as the German gentleman's wife because he

did not speak to her. There were two couples of young women, one of

ladies of a riper age, and one of earnest young men who were mentioning

Balzac to each other almost before they had got to New Cross. Indeed, a

surprising atmosphere of culture pervaded the compartment. Ingeborg was

astonished. Except the riper ladies, who persisted in talking about

Shoolbred, they were all presently saying educated things. Balzac,

Blake, Bernard Shaw, and Mrs. Florence Barclay were bandied backwards

and forwards across the carriage as lightly and familiarly as though

they had been balls. In the far corner Browning was being compared with

Tennyson; in the middle, Dickens with Thackeray. The two elder ladies,

who kept to Shoolbred, formed a sort of dam between these educated

overflowings and the silent back-water in which Ingeborg and the German

gentleman sat becalmed. Presently, owing to a politeness that could not

allow even an outlying portion of any one else's clothing or belongings

to be brushed against without "Excuse me" having been said and "Don't

mention it" having been answered, acquaintanceships were made;

chocolates were offered; they introduced each other to each other; for a

brief space the young men's caps were hardly on their heads, and the air

was murmurous with gratified noises. But the two riper ladies,

passionately preoccupied by Shoolbred, continued to dam up Ingeborg and

her opposite neighbour into a stagnant and unfruitful isolation.

She tried to peep round the lady next to her, who jutted out like a

mountain with mighty boulders on it, so as to see the three people

hidden in the valley beyond. Glimpses of their knees revealed that they

were just like the ones on the seat opposite. They were neat knees, a

little threadbare; not with the delicate threadbareness of her own home

in the palace at Redchester, where splendours of carved stone and black

oak and ancient glass were kept from flaunting their pricelessness too

obviously in the faces of the local supporters of Disestablishment by a

Christian leanness in the matter of carpets, but knees that were

inexpensive because they had to be. Who were these girls and young men,

and the two abundant ladies, and the man with the vast thick head and

unalterable stare? All people who did things, she was certain. Not just

anything, like herself, but regular things that began and stopped at

fixed times, that were paid for. That was why they were able to do

frankly and honourably what she was snatching at furtively in a corner.

For a brief astonishing instant she was aware she liked the corner way

_best_. Staggered at this, for she could in no way reconcile it with the

Bishop, the cathedral, the home, nor with any of her thoughts down there

while enfolded in these three absorbing influences, she tried to follow

her father's oft-repeated advice and look into herself. But it did not

help much. She saw, indeed, that she was doing an outrageous thing, but

then she was very happy--happier than she had ever been in Redchester,

plied with legitimate episcopal joys. There was a keenness about this

joy, the salt freshness of something jolly and indefensible done in

secret. She did look at penitence sideways for an instant, but almost,

at once decided that it was a thing that comes afterwards. First you do

your thing. You must of course do your thing, or there couldn't be any

penitence.

She sat up very straight, her face lit with these thoughts that both

amused and frightened her, her lips slightly parted, her eyes radiant,

ready for anything life had to offer.

"A little fattened up," thought the German gentleman; "a _little_ even

would probably suffice."

There was to be a night in Paris--no time to see it, but you can't have

everything, and Paris is Paris--and next morning into the train again,

and down, down, all down the slope of the map of France to Bâle, the

Gate of Beauty, surely of heavenly beauty, and then you got there, and

there were five whole days of wonder, and then....

Her thoughts hesitated. Why then she supposed, making an effort, you

began to come back. And then....

But here she thought it wisest not to go on thinking.

"Excuse me, but do you mind having that window up?" asked the lady on

her right.

"Oh, no," said Ingeborg, darting at the strap with the readiness to help

and obey she had been so carefully practised in.

It was stiff, and she fumbled at it, wondering a little why the man

opposite just watched.

When she had got it up he undid the woollen scarf round his neck and

unbuttoned the top button of his overcoat.

"At last," he said in a voice of relief, heaving an enormous sigh.

He looked at her and smiled.

Instantly she smiled back. Any shreds of self-consciousness she may have

had clinging to her in her earlier days had been finally scraped off

when Judith, that amazing piece of loveliness, came out.

"Were you cold?" she asked, with the friendly interest of a boy.

"Naturally. When windows are open one is always cold."

"Oh!" said Ingeborg, who had never thought of that.

She perceived from his speech that he was a foreigner. From the

turned-down collar and white tie beneath his opened scarf she also was

made aware that he was a minister of religion. "How they pursue me," she

thought. Even here, even in a railway carriage reserved for Dent's

excursionists only, one of them had filtered through. She also saw that

he was of a drab complexion, and that his hair, drab, too, and

close-cropped and thick, seemed to be made of beaver.

"But that's what windows are _for_," she said, after reflecting on it.

"No."

The two large ladies let Shoolbred pause while they looked at each

other.

They considered Ingeborg's behaviour forward. She ought not to have

spoken first. Impossible on a Dent's Tour not to make friends--indeed

the social side of these excursions is the most important--but there are

rules. The other end of the carriage had observed the rules. The two

ladies hoped they had not joined anything not quite high-toned. The

other end had carried out the rules with rigid _savoir-vivre_; had

accidentally touched and trodden on; had apologised; had had its

apologies accepted; had introduced and been introduced; and so had

cleared the way to chocolates.

"No?" repeated Ingeborg inquiringly.

"The aperture was there first," said the German gentleman.

"Of course," said Ingeborg, seeing he waited for her to admit it.

"And in the fulness of the ages came man, and mechanically shut it."

"Yes," said Ingeborg. "But--"

"Consequently, the function of windows is to shut apertures."

"Yes. But--"

"And not to open that which, without them, was open already."

"Y'es. But--"

"It would be illogical," said the German gentleman patiently, "to

contend that their function is to open that which, without them, was

open already."

Reassured by the word illogical, which was a nice word, well known to

and quite within the spirit of a Dent's Tour, the two ladies went on

with Shoolbred where they had left him off.

"The first day I was in England I went about logically, and shut each

single window in my boarding-house. I then discovered that this

embittered the atmosphere around me."

"It would thicken it," nodded Ingeborg, interested.

"It did. And my calling after all being that of peace, and my visit so

short, that whatever happened could be endured, I relinquished logic and

purchased in its place a woollen scarf. This one. Then I gave myself up

unrestrictedly to their air."

"And did you like it?"

"It made me recollect with pleasure that I was soon going home. In East

Prussia there are, on the one hand, drawbacks; but, on the other, are

double windows, stoves, and a just proportion of feathers for each man's

bed. Till the draughts and blankets of the boarding-house braced me to

enduring instead of enjoying I had thought my holiday too short, and

when I remembered my life and work at home--my official life and

work--it had been appearing to me puny."

"Puny?" said Ingeborg, her eyes on his white tie.

"Puny. The draughts and blankets of the boarding-house cured me. I am

returning gladly. My life there, I say to myself, may be puny but it is

warm. So," he added, smiling, "a man learns content."

"Taught by draughts and blankets?"

"Taught by going away."

"Oh?" said Ingeborg. Had Providence then only led her to that poster in

order that she should learn content? Were Dent's Tours really run,

educationally, by Providence?

"But--" she began, and then stopped.

"It is necessary to go away in order to come back," said the German

gentleman, again with patience.

"Yes. Of course. But--"

"The chief use of a holiday is to make one hungry to have finished with

it."

"Oh _no_," she protested, the joy of holiday in her voice.

"Ah. You are at the beginning."

"The very beginning."

"Yet at the end you, too, will return home reconciled."

She looked at him and shook her head.

"I don't think reconciled is quite the--" She paused, thinking. "To

what?" she went on. "To puniness, too?"

The two ladies faltered in their conversation, and glanced at Ingeborg,

and then at each other.

"Perhaps not to puniness. You are not a pastor."

There was a distinct holding of the breath of the two ladies. The German

gentleman's slow speech fell very clearly on their sudden silence.

"No," said Ingeborg. "But what has that--"

"I am. And it is a puny life."

Ingeborg felt a slight curdling. She thought of her father--also, if you

come to that, a pastor. She was sure there was nothing in anything he

ever did that would strike him as puny. His life was magnificent and

important, filled to bursting point with a splendid usefulness and with

a tendency to fill the lives of every one who came within his reach to

their several bursting points, too. But he, of course, was a prince of

the Church. Still, he had gone through the Church's stages, beginning

humbly; yet she doubted whether at any moment of his career he had

looked at it and thought it puny. And was it not indeed the highest

career of all? However breathless and hurried it made one's female

relations in its upper reaches, and drudging in its lower, the very

highest?

But though she was curdled she was interested.

"It might not be amiss," continued the pastor, looking out of the window

at some well-farmed land they were passing, "if it were not for the

Sundays."

Again she was curdled.

"But--"

"They spoil it."

She was silent; and the silence of the two ladies appeared to acquire a

frost.

"It is the fatal habit of Sundays," he went on, following the

disappearing land with his eyes, "to recur."

He paused, as if waiting for her to agree.

She had to, because it was a truth one could not get away from. "Yes,"

she said, reluctantly. "Of course. It's their nature." Then a wave of

memories suddenly broke over her, and she added warmly "Oh _don't_

they!"

The frost of the ladies seemed to settle down. It grew heavy.

"They interrupt one's work," he said.

"But they _are_ your work," she said, puzzled.

"No."

She stared. "But," she began, "a pastor--"

"A pastor is also a man."

"Yes," said Ingeborg, "but--"

"You have no doubt observed that he is, invariably, also a man."

"Yes," said Ingeborg, "but--"

"And a man of intelligence--I am a man of intelligence--cannot fill up

his life with the meagre materials offered by the practice of the tenets

of the Lutheran Church."

"Oh--the _Lutheran_ Church," said Ingeborg, catching at a straw.

"Any church."

She was silent. She felt how immensely her father would not have liked

it. She felt it was wicked to sit there and listen. She also felt,

strange and dreadful to observe, refreshed.

"Then," she began, knitting her brows, for really this at its best was

bad taste, and bad taste, she had always been taught, was the very

worst--oh, but how nice it was, a little bit of it, after the swamps of

good taste one waded about in in cathedral cities! She knitted her

brows, aghast at her thoughts. "Then what," she asked, "_do_ you fill

your life up with?"

"Manure," said the German gentleman.

The ladies leapt in their places.

"Ma--" began Ingeborg; then stopped.

"I am engaged in endeavouring to teach the peasants of my parish how

best to farm their poor pieces of land."

"Oh, really," said Ingeborg, politely.

"I do it by example. They do not attend to words. I have bought a few

acres and experiment before their eyes. Our soil is the worst in

Germany. It is inconceivably thankless. And the peasants resemble it."

"Oh, really," said Ingeborg.

"The result of the combination is poverty."

"So then, I suppose," said Ingeborg, with memories of the Bishop's

methods, "you preach patience."

"Patience! I preach manure."

Again at the dreadful word the ladies leapt.

"It is," he said solemnly, his eyes glistening with enthusiasm, "the

foundation of a nation's greatness."

"I hadn't thought of it like that," said Ingeborg, seeing that he

waited.

"But on what then does a State depend in the last resort?"

She was afraid to say, for there seemed to be so many possible answers.

"Naturally on its agriculture," said the pastor, with the slight

irritation of one obliged to linger over the obvious.

"Of course," said the pliable Ingeborg, trained in acquiescence.

"And on what does agriculture depend in the last resort?"

Brilliantly she hazarded "Manure."

For the third time the ladies leapt, and the one next to her drew away

her dress.

He showed his appreciation of her intelligence by nodding slowly.

"A nation must be fed," he said, "and empty fields will feed no one."

"Of course not," said Ingeborg.

"So that it is the chief element in all progress; for the root of

progress flourishes only in a filled stomach."

The ladies began to fan themselves violently, nervously, one with _The

Daily Mirror_ the other with _Answers_.

"Of course," said Ingeborg.

"First," said the German gentleman, "you fill your stomach--"

The lady next to Ingeborg made a sudden lunge across her at the strap.

"Excuse me, but do you mind putting that window _down_?" she said in a

sort of burst.

The German gentleman, stemmed in his speech, used the interval while

Ingeborg opened the window in buttoning up his overcoat again with care

and patience and readjusting his muffler.

When he had attended to these things he resumed his enthusiasm; he

seemed to switch it on again.

"The infinite combinations of it!" he exclaimed. "Its infinite

varieties! Kali, Kainit, Chilisaltpetre, Superphosphates"--he rolled out

the words as though they were the verse of a psalm. "When I shut the

door on myself in the little laboratory I have constructed I shut in

with me all life, all science, every possibility. I analyse, I

synthesize, I separate, reduce, combine. I touch the stars. I stir the

depths. The daily world is forgotten. I forget, indeed, everything,

except my research. And invariably at the most profound, the most

exalted moments some one knocks and tells me it is Sunday again, and

will I come out and preach."

[Illustration: "Then why," she asked, with the courage of curiosity,

"are you a pastor?"]

He looked at her indignantly, demanding sympathy. "Preach!" he repeated.

"Then why," she asked, with the courage of curiosity, "are you a

pastor?"

"Because my father made me one."

"But why are you still one?"

"Because a man must live."

"He oughtn't to want to," said Ingeborg with a faint flush, for she had

been carefully trained to shyness when it came to pronouncing

opinions--the Bishop called it being womanly--"he oughtn't to want to at

the cost of his convictions."

"Nevertheless," said the pastor, "he does."

"Yes," said Ingeborg, obliged to admit it; even at Redchester cases were

not unknown. "He does," she said, nodding. "Of course he does." And

unable not to be at least as honest as the pastor she added: "And so

does a woman."

"Naturally," said the pastor.

She looked at him a moment, and then said impulsively, pulling herself a

little forward towards him by the window strap--

"_This_ woman does. She's doing it now."

The two ladies exchanged glances and fluttered their fans faster.

"Which woman?" inquired the pastor, whose mastery of English, though

ripe, was not nimble.

"This one," said Ingeborg, pointing at herself. "Me. I'm living at this

very moment--I'm whirling along in this train--I'm running away for this

holiday _entirely_ at the cost of my convictions."

CHAPTER III

After this it was not to be expected that Dent's Tour should look

favourably on either Ingeborg or the German gentleman. Running away? And

something happened at Dover that clinched it in its coldness.

The train had slowed down, and the excursionists had become busy and

were all standing up expectant and swaying with their bags and umbrellas

ready in their hands, except Ingeborg and the pastor. The train stopped,

and still the two at the door did not move. They were so much interested

in what they were saying that they went on sitting there, barbarously

corking up the congested queue inside the carriage while streams of

properly liberated passengers poured past the window on their way to the

best places on the boat.

The queue heaved and waited, holding on to its good manners till the

last possible moment, quite anxious, with the exception of the two

ladies who were driven to the very verge of naturalness by the things

they had had to listen to, lest it should be forced to show what it was

feeling (for what one is feeling, Dent's excursionists had surprisingly

discovered, is always somehow something rude), and seconds passed and

still it was kept there heaving.

Then the pastor, gazing with a large unhurried interest at the people

pushing by the window, people disfigured by haste and the greed for the

best places on the boat, said in a voice of mild but penetrating

complaint--it almost seemed as if in that congested moment he saw only

leisure for musing aloud--"But why does the good God make so many ugly

old women?"

It was when he said this that the mountainous lady at the head of the

queue flung behaviour to the winds and let herself go uncontrolledly.

"_Will_ you allow me to pass?" she cried. Nor did she give him another

instant's grace, but pressed between his and Ingeborg's knees, followed

torrentially by the released remainder.

"To keep us all waiting there just while he blasphemed!" she panted on

the platform to her friend.

And during the rest of the time the party was together it retired, led

by these two ladies, into an icy exclusiveness, outside which and left

together all day long Ingeborg and the pastor could not but make

friends.

They did. They talked and they walked, they climbed and they sight-saw.

They did everything Dent had arranged, going with him but not of him,

always, as it were, bringing up his rear. Equally careful, being equally

poor, they avoided the extras which seemed to lurk beckoning at every

corner of the day. Their frugality was flagrant, and shocked the other

excursionists even more than the dreadful things they said. "Such bad

_taste_." the Tour declared when, on the third day, after having

provoked criticism by their negative attitude towards afternoon tea and

the purchase of picture postcards, they would not lighten its several

burdens by taking their share of an unincluded outing in flys along the

lake. Even Mr. Ascough, Dent's distracted representative, thought them

undesirable, and especially could make nothing of Ingeborg, except that

somehow she was not Dent's sort. And the German gentleman, though in

appearance a more familiar type, became whenever he opened his mouth

grossly unfamiliar. "Foul-mouthed" was the expression the largest lady

had used, bearing down on Mr. Ascough at Dover to complain, adding that

as she had done all her travelling for years with and through Dent's she

felt justified in demanding that this man's mouth should be immediately

cleansed.

"I'm not a toothbrush, Mrs. Bawn," replied the distracted Mr. Ascough,

engaged at that moment in struggling for air and light in the middle of

his clinging flock.

"Then I shall write to Mr. Dent himself," said Mrs. Bawn indignantly.

And Mr. Ascough, intimidated, fought himself free and followed her down

the platform, inquiring dreadfully--really he seemed to be a person of

little refinement--whether, then, the German gentleman's conversation

had been obscene.

"I can get rid of him if it's been obscene, you know," said Mr. Ascough.

"Was it?"

So that Mrs. Bawn, incensed and baffled, was obliged for the dignity of

her womanhood to say she was glad to have to inform him she did not know

what that word meant.

But the pastor--his name was Dremmel, he told Ingeborg: Robert

Dremmel--took everything that happened with simplicity. They might shut

him out, and he would never notice it; they might turn their backs, and

he would never know. Nothing that Dent's Tour could do in the way of

ostracizing would have been able to pierce through to his consciousness.

Having decided that the women of it were plain and the men uninteresting

he thought of them no more. With his customary single-mindedness he

concentrated his attention at first only on Switzerland, which was what

he was paying to see, and he found it pleasant that the young lady in

grey should so naturally join him in this concentration. Just for a few

hours at the very beginning he had thought her naturalness, her ready

friendliness, a little unwomanly. She was, he thought, a little too

productive of an impression that she was a kind of boy. She had no

self-consciousness, which he had been taught by his mother to confound

with modesty, and no desire whatever apparently to please the opposite

sex. She went to sleep, for instance, towards the end of the long

journey right in front of him, letting her mouth open if it wanted to,

and not bothering at all that he should probably be looking at it.

Herr Dremmel, who besides his agricultural researches prided himself on

a liberal if intermittent interest in womanly charm, regretted these

shortcomings, but only for a few hours at the very beginning. By the end

of the first day in Lucerne he was finding it pleasant to pair off with

her, womanly or unwomanly. He liked to talk to her. He discovered he

could talk to her as he had been unable to talk to the few East Prussian

young ladies he had met, in spite of the stiff intensity of their desire

to please him. He searched about for a reason, and concluded that it was

because she was interested. Whatever subject he discoursed upon she

came, so it seemed, running to meet him. She listened intelligently, and

with a pliability--he did not then know about the Bishop's

training--rarely to be found in combination with intelligence.

Intelligent persons are very apt, he remembered, to argue and object.

This young lady was intelligent without argument, a most comfortable

compound, and before a definite opinion had a graceful knack of doubling

up. And if her doublings up were at all, as they sometimes were, delayed

while she put in "But--" he only needed repeat with patience to bring

out an admirable submissive sunniness. He could not of course know of

her severe training in sunniness.

By the end of the second day he had told her more about his life and his

home and his work and his ambitions than he had ever told anybody, and

she had told him, only he was unable to find that so interesting, about

her life and her home and her work. She had no ambitions, she explained,

which he said was well in a woman. He was hardly aware of the Bishop, so

lightly did she skim over him.

By the end of the third day he had observed what had, curiously, escaped

him before, that she was pretty. Not of course in the abundant East

Prussian way, the way of generous curves and of what he now began to

think were after all superfluities, but with delicacy and restraint. He

no longer considered she would be better fattened up. And he was

noticing her clothes, and after a painstaking comparing of them with

those of the other ladies applying to them the adjective elegant.

By the end of the fourth he admitted to himself that, very probably, he

was soon going to be in love.

By the end of the fifth he knew without a doubt that the thing had

happened; the, to him incontrovertible, proof being that on this day

Switzerland sank into being just her background.

Even the Rigi, he observed with interest, was nothing to him. He walked

up it, he who never walked up anything, because she wanted to. He toiled

up panting, and forgot how warmly he was dissolving inside his black

clothes in the pleasure of watching her on ahead glancing in and out of

the sunshine that fell clear and white on her as she fluttered above him

among the pine trunks. And when he got to the top, instead of looking at

the view he sat down in the nearest seat and became absorbed in the way

the burning afternoon light seemed to get caught in her hair as she

stood on the edge of the plateau, and made it look the colour of flames.

This was very interesting. He had never yet within his recollection

preferred hair to views. A curious result, he reflected, of his harmless

holiday enterprise.

He had not intended to marry. He was thirty-five, and dedicated to his

work. He felt it was a noble work, this patient proving to ignorance and

prejudice of what could be done with barrenness if only you mixed it

with brains. He was fairly comfortable in his housekeeping, having found

a woman who was a widow and had therefore learned the great lesson that

only widows ever really know, that a man must be let alone. He was poor,

and what he could spare by rigid economies went into the few acres of

sand that were to be the Light he had to offer to lighten the Gentiles.

Every man, he thought, should offer some light to the abounding Gentiles

before he died, some light which, however small, might be kept so clear

that they could not choose but see it. A wife, he had felt when

considering the question from time to time, which was each year in the

early spring, would come between him and his light. She would be a

shadow; and a voluminous, all-enveloping shadow. His church and the

business of preaching in it were already sufficiently interrupting, but

they were weekly. A wife would be every day. He could lock her out of

the laboratory, he would reflect, and perhaps also out of the

sitting-room.... When he became aware that he was earnestly considering

what other rooms he could lock her out of, and discovered that he would

want to lock her out of nearly all, he, as a wise and honest man,

decided he had best leave the much-curved virgins of the neighbourhood

alone.

The question occupied him regularly every year in the first warm days of

spring. For the rest of the year he mostly forgot it, absorbed in his

work. And here he was on the top of the Rigi, a cool place, almost,

wintry, with it suddenly become so living that compared to it his

fertilizers seemed ridiculous.

He examined this change of attitude with care. He was proud of the way

he had fallen in love; he, a poor man, doing it without any knowledge of

whether the young lady had enough or indeed any money. He sat there and

took pleasure in this proof that though he was thirty-five he could yet

be reckless. He was greatly pleased at finding himself so much attracted

that if it should turn out that she was penniless he would still manage

to marry her, and would make it possible by a series of masterly

financial skirmishings, the chief of which would be the dismissal of the

widow and the replacing of her dinginess, her arrested effect of having

been nipped in the bud although there was no bud, by this incorporate

sunshine. The young lady's tact, of which he had seen several instances,

would cause her to confine her sunshine to appropriate moments. She

would not overflow it into his working hours. Besides, marriage was a

great readjuster of values. After it, he had not a doubt his wife would

fall quite naturally into her place, which would, though honourable, be

yet a little lower than the fertilizers. If it were not so, if marriage

did not readjust the upset incidental to its preliminaries, what a

disastrous thing falling in love would be. No serious man would be able

to let himself do it. But how interesting it was the way Nature, that

old Hostility, that Ancient Enemy to man's thought, did somehow manage

to trip him up sooner or later; and how still more interesting the

ingenuity with which man, aware of this trick and determined to avoid

the disturbance of a duration of affection, had invented marriage.

He gazed very benevolently at the little figure on the edge of the view.

Why not marry her now, and frugally convert the tail-end of Dent's

Excursion into a honeymoon?

With the large simplicity and obliviousness to banns and licences of a

man of scientific preoccupations he saw no reason against this course.

It was obvious. It was desirable. It would not only save her going back

to England first, it would save the extra journey there for him. They

would go straight home to East Prussia together at the end of the week;

and as for doing it without her family's knowledge, if she could run

away from them as she had told him she had done just for the sake of a

jaunt, how much more readily, with what increase of swiftness, indeed,

would she run for the sake of a husband?

"Tell me, Little One," he said when she rejoined him, "will you marry

me?"

CHAPTER IV

Ingeborg was astonished.

She stared at him speechless. The gulf between even the warmest

friendliness and marriage! She had, she knew, been daily increasing in

warm friendliness towards him, characteristically expecting nothing

back. That he, too, should grow warm had not remotely occurred to her.

Nobody had ever grown warm to her in that way. There had always been

Judith, that miracle of beauty, to blot her into plainness. It is true

the senior curate of the Redchester parish church had said to her once

in his exhausted Oxford voice, "You know, I don't mind about faces--will

you marry me?" and she had refused so gingerly, with such fear of

hurting his feelings, that for a week he had supposed he was engaged;

but one would not call that warmth. As the sun puts out the light of a

candle so did the radiance of Judith extinguish Ingeborg. They were so

oddly alike; and Ingeborg was the pale, diminished shadow. Judith was

Ingeborg grown tall, grown exquisite, Ingeborg wrought wonderfully in

ivory and gold. No man could possibly fall in love with Ingeborg while

there before his very eyes was apparently exactly the same girl, only

translated into loveliness.

From the first it had been the most natural thing in the world to

Ingeborg to be plain and passed over. Judith was always beside her.

Whenever there was a pause in her work for her father it was filled by

the chaperoning of Judith. She accepted the situation with complete

philosophy, for nothing was quite so evident as Judith's beauty; and she

used, in corners at parties, to keep herself awake by saying over bits

of the Psalms, on which, not being allowed to read novels, her literary

enthusiasms were concentrated.

It was, then, really a very astonishing thing to a person practised in

this healthy and useful humility to have some one asking her to marry

him. That it should be Herr Dremmel seemed to her even more astonishing.

He didn't look like somebody one married. He didn't even look like

somebody who wanted to marry one. He sat there, his hands folded on the

knob of his stick, gazing at her with an entirely placid benevolence and

asked her the surprising question as though it were a way of making

conversation. It is true he had not called her Little One before, but

that, she felt as she stood before him considering this thing that had

happened to her, was pretty rather than impassioned.

Here was an awkward and odd result of her holiday enterprise.

"It's--very unexpected," she said, lamely.

"Yes," he agreed. "It is unexpected. It has greatly surprised me."

"I'm very sorry," she said.

"About what are you sorry, Little One?"

"I can't accept your--your offer."

"What! There is some one else?"

"Not _that_ sort of some one. But there's my father."

He made a great sweep with his arm. "Fathers," he said; and pushed the

whole breed out of sight.

"He's very important."

"Important! Little One, when will you marry me?"

"I can't leave him."

He became patient. "It has been laid down that a woman shall leave

father and mother and any other related obstacle she may have the

misfortune to be hampered with, and cleave only to her husband."

"That was about a man cleaving to his wife. There wasn't anything said

about a woman. Besides--" She stopped. She couldn't tell him that she

didn't want to cleave.

He gazed at her a moment in silence. He had not contemplated a necessity

for persuasion.

"This," he then said with severity, "is prevarication."

She sat down on the grass and clasped her hands round her knees and

looked up at him. She had taken off her hat when first she got to the

top to fan herself, and had not put it on again. As she sat there with

her back to the glow of the sky, the wind softly lifted the rings of her

hair and the sun shone through them wonderfully. They seemed to flicker

gently to and fro, little tongues of fire.

"Why," said Herr Dremmel, suddenly leaning forward and staring, "you are

like a spirit."

This pleased her. For a moment her eyes danced.

"Like a spirit," he repeated. "And here am I talking heavily to you, as

though you were an ordinary woman. Little One, how does one trap a

spirit into marrying? Tell me. For very earnestly do I desire to be

shown the way."

"One doesn't," said Ingeborg.

"Ah, do not be difficult. You have been so easy, of such a comfortable

response in all things up to now."

"But this--" began Ingeborg.

"Yes. This, I well know--"

He was more stirred than he had thought possible. He was becoming almost

eager.

"But," asked Ingeborg, exploring this new interesting situation, "why do

you want to?"

"Want to marry you?"

"Yes."

"Because," said Herr Dremmel, immensely prompt, "I have had the extreme

good fortune to fall in love with you."

Again she looked pleased.

"And I do not ask you," he went on, "to love me, or whether you do love

me. It would be presumption on my part, and not, if you did, very modest

on yours. That is the difference between a man and a woman. He loves

before marriage, and she does not love till after."

"Oh?" said Ingeborg, interested. "And what does he--"

"The woman," continued Herr Dremmel, "feels affection and esteem before

marriage, and the man feels affection and esteem after."

"Oh," said Ingeborg, reflecting. She began to tear up tufts of grass.

"It seems--chilly," she said.

"Chilly?" he echoed.

He let his stick drop, and got up and came and sat down, or rather let

himself down carefully, on the grass beside her.

"Chilly? Do you not know that a decent chill is a great preservative?

Hot things decay. Frozen things do not live. A just measure of chill

preserves the life of the affections. It is, by a very proper

dispensation of Nature, provided before marriage by the woman, and

afterwards by the man. The balance is, in this way, nicely held, and

peace and harmony, which nourish best at a low temperature, prevail."

She looked at him and laughed. There was no one in Redchester, and

Redchester was all she knew of life, in the least like Herr Dremmel. She

stretched herself in the roomy difference, happy, free, at her ease.

"But I cannot believe," burst out Herr Dremmel with a passionate vigour

that astonished him more than anything in his whole life as he seized

the hand that kept on tearing up grass, "I cannot believe that you will

not marry me. I cannot believe that you will refuse a good and loving

husband, that you will prefer to remain with your father and solidify

into yet one more frostbitten virgin."

"Into a what?" repeated Ingeborg, struck by this image of herself in the

future.

She began to laugh, then stopped. She stared at him, her grey eyes very

wide open. She forgot Herr Dremmel, and that he was still clutching her

hand and all the grass in it, while her mind flashed over the years that

had gone and the years that were to come. They would be alike. They had

not been able to frostbite her yet because she had been too young; but

they would get her presently. Their daily repeated busy emptiness, their

rush of barren duties, their meagre moments of what when she was younger

used to be happiness but had lately only been relief, those rare moments

when her father praised her, would settle down presently and freeze her

dead.

Her face grew solemn. "It's true," she said slowly. "I shall be a

frostbitten virgin. I'm doomed. My father won't ever let me marry."

"You infinitely childish one!" he cried, becoming angry. "When it is

well known that all fathers wish to get rid of all daughters."

"You don't understand. It's different. My father--why," she broke out,

"I used to dose myself secretly with cod liver oil so as to keep up to

his level. He's wonderful. When he praised me I usedn't to sleep. And if

he scolded me it seemed to send me lame."

Herr Dremmel sawed her hand up and down in his irritation.

"What is this irrelevant talk?" he said. "I offer you marriage, and you

respond with information about cod liver oil. I do not believe the

father obstacle. I do not recognize my honest little friend of these

last days. It is waste of time, not being open. Would you, then, if it

were not for your father, marry me?"

"But," Ingeborg flashed round at him, swept off her feet as she so often

was by an impulse of utter truth, "it's _because_ of him that I

_would_."

And the instant she had said it she was shocked.

She stared at Herr Dremmel wide-eyed with contrition. The disloyalty of

it. The ugliness of telling a stranger--and a stranger with hair like

fur--anything at all about those closely related persons she had been

taught to describe to herself as her dear ones.

"Oh," she cried, dragging her hand away, "let my hand go--let my hand

_go_!"

She tried to get on to her feet, but with an energy he did not know he

possessed he pulled her down again. He did not recognize any of the

things he was feeling and doing. The Dremmel of his real nature, of

those calm depths where lay happy fields of future fertilizers, gazed at

this inflamed conduct going on at the top in astonishment.

"No," he said, with immense determination, "you will sit here and

explain about your father."

"It's a dreadful thing," replied Ingeborg, suddenly discovering that of

all things she did not like being clutched, and looking straight into

his eyes, her head a little thrown back, "that one can't leave one's

home even for a week without getting into a scrape."

"A scrape! You call it a scrape when a good man--"

"Here's a person who goes away for a little change--privately. And

before she knows where she is she's being held down on the top of the

Rigi and ordered by a strange man--"

"By her future husband!" cried Herr Dremmel, who was finding the making

of offers more difficult than he had supposed.

"--by a strange man to explain her father. As though anybody could ever

explain their father. As though anybody could ever explain _anything_."

"God in Heaven," cried Herr Dremmel, "do not explain him then. Just

marry me."

And at this moment the snake-like procession of the rest of Dent's Tour,

headed by Mr. Ascough watch in hand, emerged from the hôtel, where it

had been having tea, on to the plateau, wiping its mouths in readiness

for the sunset.

With the jerk of a thing that has been stung it swerved aside as it was

about almost to tread on the two on the grass.

Ingeborg sat very stiff and straight and pretended to be staring

intently at the view, forgetting that it was behind her. She flushed

when she found there was no time to move far enough from Herr Dremmel

for a gap to be visible between them.

"Look at those two now," whispered the young lady last in the procession

to the young man brushing bread and butter out of his tie who walked

beside her.

He looked, and seemed inclined to linger.

"She's very _pretty_, isn't she?" he said.

"Oh, do you think so?" said his companion. "I never think anybody's

pretty who isn't--you know what I mean--really _nice_, you

know--lady-like--"

And she hurried him on, because, she said, if he didn't hurry he'd miss

the sunset.

CHAPTER V

Ingeborg spent most of the night on a hard chair at her bedroom window

earnestly endeavouring to think.

It was very unfortunate, but she found an immense difficulty at all

times in thinking. She could keep her father's affairs in the neatest

order, but not her own thoughts. There were so many of them, and they

all seemed to jump about inside her and want to get thought first. They

would not go into ordered rows. They had no patience. Often she had

suspected they were not thoughts at all but just feelings, and that

depressed her, for it made her drop, she feared, to the level of the

insect world and enter the category of things that were not going to be

able to get to heaven; and to a bishop's daughter this was disquieting.

Most of her thoughts she was immediately sorry for, they were so unlike

anything she could, with propriety, say out loud at home. To Herr

Dremmel she had been able to say them all as far as speech, a limping

vehicle, could be made to go, and this was another of his refreshing

qualities. She did not of course know of that absorbed man's habit of

listening to her with only one ear--a benevolent ear, but only

one--while with the other, turned inwards, he listened to the working

out in his mind of problems in Chilisaltpetre and super-phosphates.

She sat staring out of the window at the stars and chimney-pots, her

hands held tightly in her lap, and told herself that the moment had come

for clear, consecutive thought--_consecutive_ thought, she repeated

severely, aware already of the interlaced dancing going on in her brain.

What was she going to do about Herr Dremmel? About going home?

About--oh, about anything?

They had come down the Rigi soberly and in the train. Nobody, as usual,

spoke to them, and for the first time in their friendship neither had

they spoken to each other. They had had a speechless dinner. He had

looked preoccupied. And when directly after it she said good night, he

had drawn her out into the passage and solemnly adjured her, while the

hall-porter pretended he was out of ear-shot, to have done with

prevarications. What he would suggest, he said, was a comfortable

betrothal next day; it was too late for one that night, he said, pulling

out his watch, but next day; and as she retreated sideways step by step

up the stairs, silent through an inability immediately to find an answer

that seemed tactful enough, he had eyed her very severely and inquired

of her with a raised voice what, then, the ado was all about. She had

turned at that, giving up the search for tact, and had run up the

remaining stairs rather breathlessly, feeling that Herr Dremmel on

marriage had an engulfing quality; and he, after a moment's perplexity

on the mat at the bottom, had gone to the reading-room a baffled man.

Now she sat at the window considering.

Her journey home was only two days off, and the thought of what would be

said to her when she got there and of what her answers would be like,

ran down the back of her neck and spine as though some one were drawing

a light, ice-cold finger over the shrinking skin. She had been

persuading herself that her little holiday was harmless and natural; and

now this business with Herr Dremmel would, she felt, do away with all

that, and justify a wrath in her father that she might, else for her

private solace and encouragement, have looked upon as unreasonable. It

is a peculiarity of parents, reflected Ingeborg, that they are always

being justified. However small and innocent what you are doing may be,

if they disapprove something turns up to cause them to have been

altogether right. She remembered little things, small occasions, of her

younger days.... This was a big occasion, and what had turned up on it

was Herr Dremmel. It was a pity--oh, it was a pity she hadn't considered

before she left London so impulsively whether when she got back to

Redchester she was going to be untruthful or not. She had considered

nothing, except the acuteness of the joy of running away. Now she was

faced by the really awful question of lying or not lying. It was ugly to

lie at all. It was dreadful to lie to one's father. But to lie to a

bishop raised the operation from just a private sin which God would deal

with kindly on being asked, to a crime you were punished for if it was a

cathedral you did it to, a real crime, the crime of sacrilege.

Impossible to profane a sacred and consecrated object like a bishop.

Doubly and trebly impossible if you were that object's own daughter. Her

tightly folded hands went cold as she realised she was undoubtedly going

to be truthful. She was every bit as valiant as her Swedish grandmother

had been, that grandmother who was aware of the dangers of the things

she did with her mountains and her gusty lakes and defied them, but her

grandmother knew no fear and Ingeborg knew it very well. Hers was the

real courage found only in the entirely terrified, who, terrified, yet

see the thing, whatever it is, doggedly through. She was faint, yet

pursuing.

She saw much terror in her immediate future. She dreaded having to be

courageous. She felt she was too small really for the bravely truthful

answering of her magnificent father's questions. He would have the

catechism and the confirmation service on his side, as well as the laws

of right behaviour and filial love. It didn't seem fair. One couldn't

argue with a parent, one couldn't answer back; while as for a bishop,

one couldn't do anything at all with him except hastily agree. There was

just a possibility--but how remote--that her father would be too busy to

ask questions; she sighed as she reflected how little she could count on

that, and how the most superficial inquiry about her aunt or the dentist

would bring out the whole story.

And here was Herr Dremmel who thought nothing at all of him, even in

regard to an enormous undertaking like his daughter's marriage. There

was something sublime in such detachment. She felt the largeness of the

freedom of it blowing in her face like a brisk, invigorating wind. There

seemed to be no hedges round Herr Dremmel. He was as untied-up a person

as she had ever met. He cared nothing for other people's opinion, that

chief enslavement of her home, and he was an orphan. Sad to be an

orphan, thought Ingeborg sighing. Sad, of course, not to have any dear

ones. But it did seem to be a condition that avoided the dilemma whose

horns were concealment by means of untruths and the screwing up of

oneself to that clammily cold and forlorn condition, having courage.

Of course, Herr Dremmel didn't know her father. He hadn't faced that

impressive personality. Would he be quite so detached and easily

indifferent if he had? She thought with a shiver of what such a meeting,

supposing, just for the sake of supposing, that she allowed herself to

become engaged, would be like. Would Herr Dremmel in that setting of

carefully subdued splendour, of wainscoting and oriels, seem to her as

free and delightful as he seemed on a tour of frugal backgrounds? Would

she, in the presence of the Bishop's horrified disapproval, be able to

see him as she had been seeing him now?

She had not explored very far into her own resources yet, but she had

begun lately to perceive that she was pliable. She bent easily, she

felt, and deplored having to feel in the direction desired by the

persons she was with and who laid hold of her with authority. It is true

she sprang back again, as she had discovered so surprisingly in London,

the instant the hold was relaxed, but it seemed that she sprang only to

do, as she now with a headshake admitted, difficulty-bringing things.

And her training in acquiescence and distrust of herself was very

complete, and back in her home would she not at once bend into the old

curve again? Was it possible, would it ever be possible, in her father's

presence to disassociate herself from his points of view? What his view

of Herr Dremmel would be she very exactly knew. Did she _want_ to

disassociate herself from it?

She pushed back her chair, and began to walk quickly up and down the

narrow little room. If she didn't disassociate herself it meant

marriage; and marriage in stark defiance of the whole of her world.

Redchester would be appalled. The diocese would grieve for its Bishop.

The county would discuss her antagonistically at a hundred tea-tables.

Well, and while they were doing it, where would she be? Her blood began

suddenly to dance. She was seized, as she had been in London, by that

overwhelming desire to shake off old things and set her face towards the

utterly new. While all these people were nodding and whispering in their

stuffy stale world she would be safe in East Prussia, a place that

seemed infinitely remote, a place Herr Dremmel had described to her as

full of forests and water and immense stretches of waving rye. The lakes

were fringed with rushes; the forests came down to their edges; his own

garden ended in a little path through a lilac hedge that took you down

between the rye to the rushes and the water and the first great pines.

Oh, she knew it as though she had seen it, she had lured him on so often

to describing it to her. He thought nothing of it; talked, indeed, of it

with disgust as a God-forsaken place. Well, it was these God-forsaken

places that her body and spirit cried out for. Space, freedom, quiet;

the wind ruffling the rye; the water splashing softly against the side

of the punt (there was a punt, she had extracted); the larks singing up

in the sunlight; the shining clouds passing slowly across the blue. She

wanted to be alone with these things after the years of deafening hurry

at Redchester with a longing that was like home-sickness. She

_remembered_, somehow, that once she used to be with them--long ago, far

away.... And there used to be little things when you lay face downwards

on the grass, little lovely things that smelt beautiful--wild-strawberry

leaves, and a tiny aromatic plant with a white flower like a star that

you rubbed between your fingers....

She stood still a moment, frowning, trying to remember more; it wasn't

in England.... But even as she puzzled the vision slipped away from her

and was lost.

She wanted to read, and walk, and think. She was hungry to read at last

what she chose, and walk at last where she chose, and think at last

exactly what she chose. Was the _Christian Year_ enough for one in the

way of poetry? And all those mild novels her mother read, sandwiched

between the biographies of more bishops and little books of comfort with

crosses on them that asked rude questions as to whether you had been

greedy or dainty or had used words with a double meaning during the

day--were they enough for a soul that had, quite alone, with no father

giving directions, presently to face its God?

Her family held strongly that for daughters to read in the daytime was

to be idle. Well, if it was, thought Ingeborg lifting her head, that

head that drooped so apologetically at home, with the defiance that

distance encourages, then being idle was a blessed thing and the sooner

one got away to where one could be it, uninterruptedly, the better. In

that parsonage away in East Prussia, for instance, one would be able to

read and read.... Herr Dremmel had explained a hundred times about his

laboratory, and he himself locked into it and only asking to be left

locked. Surely that was an admirable quality in a husband, that he kept

himself locked up! And the parsonage was on the edge of the village, and

the little garden at the back had nothing between it and the sunset and

all God's other dear arrangements except a solitary and long-unused

windmill....

It was about one o'clock in the morning that her courage, however,

altogether ebbed at the prospect of going home. What would it be like,

taking up her filialities again, and all of them henceforth so terribly

tarnished? She would be a returning prodigal for whom no calf was

killed, but who instead of the succulences of a more liberal age would

be offered an awful opportunity of explaining her conduct to a father

who would interrupt her the instant she began and do the explaining

himself.

How was she going to face it, all alone?

If only she could have been in love with Herr Dremmel! With what courage

she would have faced her family then, if she had been in love with him

and come to them her hand in his. If only he looked more like the lovers

you see in pictures, like the one in Leighton's "Wedded," for

instance--a very beautiful picture, Ingeborg thought, but not like any

of the wedded in Redchester--so that if she couldn't be in love she

could at least persuade herself she was. If only he had proper hair

instead of just beaver. She liked him so much. She had even at

particular moments of his conversation gone so far as to delight in him.

But--marriage?

What was marriage? Why did they never talk about it at home? In the

Bishop's Palace it might, for all the mentioning it got, be one of the

seven deadly sins. You talked there of the married, and sometimes, but

with reserve, of getting married, but marriage itself and what it was

and meant was never discussed. She had received the impression, owing to

these silences, that though it was God's ordinance, as her father in his

official capacity at weddings reiterated, it was a reluctant ordinance,

established apparently because there seemed no other way of getting

round what appeared to be a difficulty. What was the difficulty? She had

never in her busy life thought about it. Marriage had not concerned her.

It would not be nice, she had felt, unconsciously adopting the opinion

of her environment, for a girl who was not going to marry to get

thinking of it. And it really had not interested her. She had quite

naturally turned her eyes away.

But now this question of facing her father, this need of being backed

up, this longing to get away from things, forced her to look. Besides,

she would have to give Herr Dremmel some sort of answer in the morning,

and the facing of Herr Dremmel required courage, too--of a different

kind, but certainly courage. She was so reluctant to hurt or disappoint.

It had seemed all her life the most beautiful of pleasures to give

people what they wanted, to get them to smile, to see them look content.

But suppose Herr Dremmel, before he could be got to smile and look

content, wanted to clutch her again as he had clutched her on the top of

the Rigi? She had very profoundly disliked it. She had been able to

resent it there and get loose, but if she were married and he clutched

could she still resent? She greatly feared not. She greatly suspected,

now she came to a calm consideration of it, that that was what was the

matter with marriage: it was a series of clutchings. Her father had no

doubt realised this as she was realising it now, and very properly

didn't like it. You couldn't expect him to. That was why he wouldn't

talk about it. In this she was entirely at one with him. But perhaps

Herr Dremmel didn't like it, either. Wasn't she rather jumping at

conclusions in imagining that he did? Hadn't he after all clutched

rather in anger up there than in anything else? And what about his

earnest wish, so often explained, to be left all day locked up in his

laboratory? And what about his praise, that very afternoon, of chill in

human relationships?

At that moment her eye was arrested by something white appearing slowly

and with difficulty beneath her door. She sat up very straight and

stared at it, watching its efforts to get over and past the edge of her

mat. For an instant she wondered whether it were not a kind of insect

ghost; then she saw, as more of it appeared, that it was a letter.

She held her breath while it struggled in. Nobody had ever pushed a

letter under her door before. She grew happy instantly. What _fun_. Her

heart beat quite fast with excitement while she waited to hear footsteps

going away before getting up to fetch it. Herr Dremmel, however, must

have been in his goloshes, objects from which he was seldom separated,

for she heard nothing; and after a few seconds of breathless listening

she got up with immense caution and went on tip-toe to the letter and

picked it up.

"Why," she thought, pausing for a moment with a sort of solemnity before

opening it, "I suppose this is my first love-letter."

There was nothing on the envelope and no signature, and this was what it

said:

"LITTLE ONE,

"_I wish to tell you that before going to my room to-night I instructed

the hall-porter to order a betrothal cake, properly iced and with what

is customary in the matter of silver leaves, to be in the small salon

adjoining the smoking-room to-morrow morning at nine o'clock. Since no

man can be betrothed alone, it will be necessary that you should be

there_."

CHAPTER VI

It was a perturbed betrothal, there were so many people at it.

Seven ladies besides Ingeborg appeared in the small _salon_ adjoining

the smoking-room next morning at nine o'clock. What Herr Dremmel had

done, being ignorant which was Ingeborg's room and after laborious

thought deciding that to demand her number of the hall-porter later than

dusk might very conceivably cast a slur on her reputation, young ladies

being, as he well knew, of all living creatures the most easily slurred,

was to write as many copies of the letter as there were doors on her

landing and thrust them industriously one by one beneath each door,

strong in the knowledge that she would in this manner inevitably get one

of them.

He was greatly pleased with this plan. It seemed of a beautiful

simplicity and effectiveness. "Being unaware of the context," he

reasoned, "no lady except the right one will be able to guess what the

letter can possibly refer to. She will therefore throw it aside as an

obvious mistake and think no more about it."

But the ladies did think. And none of the inhabitants of the third

floor, except Mr. Ascough who never thought anything about anything,

having discovered that if once you begin to think there is no end to it,

and a dried and brittle little man lately pensioned off by the firm he

had been clerk to and taking his first trip on the continent in a

condition of profound uninterestedness, threw it aside. These two did;

but the seven ladies not only did not throw it aside, they read it many

times, and instead of thinking no more about it thought of nothing else.

Even Mrs. Bawn, who had been a widow for six months and was heartily

tired of it, was pleased. She liked, particularly, being addressed as

Little One. There was a blindness about this that suggested genuine

feeling. She had not been so much pleased since her dear Bawn, now half

a year in glory, had told her one day, before their marriage, that he

did not care what anybody said he maintained that she was handsome.

They all thought the letter very virile, and that nothing could be more

gentlemanly than its restraint. Four of them expected a different male

member of the party to be waiting in the small _salon_, the remaining

three expected Mr. Ascough. Mr. Ascough had a caressing way with pats of

butter and the closing of the doors of filled flys that had before now

led him, on these tours, into misapprehensions. He was long since

married, but had omitted to mention it. The ladies, therefore, when they

arrived in the small _salon_ at nine o'clock did not find Mr. Ascough

nor any of the other four friends they expected. They found,

surprisingly, each other; and, standing thick and black near a decorated

table at the window and scowling in a fresh astonishment every time the

door opened and another lady came in, that very undesirable

fellow-tourist, the German gentleman.

Each one immediately knew it was Ingeborg who had been written to, and

that the letter had gone astray. Each one also thought she knew that

Ingeborg had not got the letter and would not come. But each one, except

Mrs. Bawn, was helped to cover up her shock by being sure the others did

not know of it; and the custom of life lying heavy on them they were

able, after one little start on first seeing Herr Dremmel, to drift into

the corners of the room and pretend that what they had come for was

books. Except Mrs. Bawn. Mrs. Bawn saw, stared, turned on her heel, and

went out again volcanically; and the corridor shook to her departing

footsteps and to the angry unintentional rhymes she was making aloud

with words like hoax and jokes.

With astonishment and disgust Herr Dremmel saw the seven ladies

accumulate. It was most unfortunate that on that morning of all mornings

the small _salon,_ so invariably empty, should be visited. His

inexperienced mind did not connect their appearance with his letters; it

never occurred to him that his reasoning as to what they would do on

receiving them could possibly be wrong. Nor did he, as he watched the

door open and shut seven times and seven times admit the wrong woman,

guess that their presence, if Ingeborg came, would immensely help his

betrothal.

The ladies, fingering dusty Tauchnitzes and magazines and eyeing the

table in the window with heads as much averted as could be combined with

the seeing of it, gradually found the shock they had had being soothed

by the interest they felt in what Herr Dremmel would do when he realised

that that unladylike Miss Bullivant, all unaware of what was waiting for

her, was not coming. Now that they were there they might as well stay

and see the end of it. It was really very interesting in its way; so

German; so unlike, thank goodness, what English people ever did. Would

he stand there all day, they wondered, with that really most improperly

suggestive cake, so very like a christening cake? One or two of them sat

down squarely on the sofas behind months-old magazines round whose edges

they peeped, making it clear to the unhappy man that they, at least,

intended to stay there; and they all coughed a little every now and then

in the way a waiting congregation coughs in church.

Then the door was pushed open with the jerk of somebody who is either in

a hurry or has come to a sudden determination, and who should appear but

that Miss Bullivant.

A thrill ran through the seven ladies, and they instantly became, behind

their magazines, stiff with excitement. Chance; what a chance; she had

chanced to look in; it was like a play; dear me, thought each of the

seven.

And Ingeborg, who believed as lately as the last moment on the doormat

outside that she had only come in order to tell Herr Dremmel she was not

coming, when she saw the cake, very white and bridal, on a white cloth

with white flowers in pots round it, and on either side of it a bottle

with a white ribbon about its neck, and on the other for the sake of

symmetry two glasses, was staggered. How could she, who so much loved to

please, to make happy, cruelly hurt him, spoil his little feast, wipe

out the glow, the immense relief that beamed from his face when he saw

her?

She turned round quickly, realising the presence of the seven ladies.

Amazed she stared at them, mechanically counting them. How could she

make him ridiculous, humiliate him, before all those women?

Hesitating, torn, poised on the tip of flight, she stood there. Her hand

was on the door to open it again and run; but Herr Dremmel's simplicity

came to his help more effectually than the cunningest plans. He forgot

the ladies, and stepping forward took her hand in his and quite simply

kissed her forehead, sealing her then and there, with the perfect

frankness of his countrymen when engaged in legitimate courtship, as his

betrothed. He then slipped a ring he wore on his little finger on to her

thumb, that being the only bit of her hand he could find that it would

stay on, and he being free from prejudices in the matter of fingers, and

the thing--at least so he supposed--was done.

Ingeborg in her bewilderment let these things happen to her. Her

thoughts as she stood being betrothed were jerking themselves into a

perfect tangle of knots. She was astonished at the tricks life stoops

to. A cake and the eyes of seven women. Her whole future being decided

by a cake and the eyes of seven women. Oh, no, it couldn't be. It was

only that she couldn't stop now. Impossible, utterly, to stop now. She

had never dreamed she wouldn't find him alone. These women were all

witnesses. He had kissed her before them all. His methods were really

overwhelming. Suppose her father could see her. But the kiss had been

administered very ceremoniously; it had been quite cooling; such a one

as even a bishop might feel justified in applying to the brow of a sick

person or a young child. Later, at a more convenient time, when the

pathetic cake was out of sight, when these women were out of ear-shot,

she would tell him she hadn't meant....

Amazingly she found herself advancing towards the cake with Herr Dremmel

and standing in front of it with him hand in hand. Oh, the _mischief_

people got into who came up to London to dentists! She now saw what

provincial dentists were for: they kept you in pain, and pain kept you

out of mischief. For the first time she understood what her spirit had

till then refused to accept, the teaching so popular with the Bishop

that pain was a necessary part of the scheme of things. Of course. You

were safe so long as you were in pain. In that condition the very

nearest you could get to the most seductive temptation was to glance at

it palely, with a sick distaste. And you stayed at home, and were

grateful for kindnesses. It was only when you hadn't anything the matter

with you that you ran away from your family and went to Lucerne and took

up with a strange man positively to the extent of letting him promise to

marry you.

Somebody coughed so close behind her that it made her jump. She turned

round nervously, Herr Dremmel still holding her hand, and beheld the

seven ladies flocked about her for all the world like seven bridesmaids.

They had hastily consulted together in whispers while she was being led

away to the cake as to whether they ought not to congratulate her. Their

hearts were touched by the respectful ceremony with which Herr Dremmel

had conducted his betrothal. It had had the solemn finality of a

marriage, and what woman can look on at a marriage unmoved? They had

agreed in whispers that this was one of those moments in which one lets

bygones be bygones. The two at the altar--they meant at the cake--had no

doubt said many terrible and vulgar things and had behaved in a way no

lady and gentleman would--the girl, for instance, openly admitting she

had run away from home; but what they were doing now at least was beyond

reproach, and, by uniting, two blacks were after all, in spite of what

people said about its not being possible, going to make one white. At

any rate it was charitable to hope so.

So they cleared their throats and wished her joy.

"Thank you," said Ingeborg a little faintly, looking from one to the

other, "it's so kind of you--but--"

They then shook hands with Herr Dremmel and said they were sure they

wished him joy, too, and he thanked them with propriety and bows.

"Such a thing has never happened on a Dent's Tour before--oh, no, never

before at all I'm sure," said the most elderly lady nervously, with a

number of nods.

"There isn't time enough, that's what I sometimes think," said the young

lady who had hurried her companion away to the sunset the evening

before. "What's a week?" And she stared at the cake and frowned.

"Dent's had a funeral once," said a square small lady who kept her hands

plunged in the pockets of a grey jersey.

"Now Miss Jewks, really--" protested the elderly lady. "One doesn't

mention--"

"Well, it wasn't their fault, Miss Andrews. They didn't _want_ to have

it, I'm sure. It was a gentleman from Gipsy Hill--"

"What a beautiful--er--cake," hastily interrupted the elderly lady.

"Funny thing, I sometimes think," continued Miss Jewks, "to go for a

holiday and die instead."

"Those silver leaves--" said the elderly lady, raising her voice, "I

call them dainty."

"It's like a wedding-cake, isn't it?" said the young lady of the sunset,

peering close at it with a face of gloom.

"Will you not, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, calling her for the first

time by her name, "cut the cake? And perhaps these ladies will do us the

honour of tasting it."

[Illustration: "Will you not, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, calling her

for the first time by her name, "cut the cake?"]

She did not recognise him in this persistent ceremoniousness. Every

trace of his usual lax behaviour was gone, his ease and familiarity of

speech, and he was as stiff and correct and grave as if he were laying a

foundation stone or opening a museum. They were the manners, though she

did not know it, which all Germans are trained to produce on public

occasions.

"Oh, thank you--"

"Oh, you're really very kind--"

"Oh, thank you very much I'm sure--"

There was a murmur of awkward and reluctant thanks. The seven ladies

were not at all certain that their cordiality ought to stretch as far as

cake. They had been moved by an impulse that did honour to their

womanliness to offer congratulations, but they did not for all that

forget the dreadful things the couple had constantly been heard talking

about and the many clear proofs it had provided that it was what Dent's

Tours were accustomed to describe as no class; and though they all liked

cake, and were getting steadily hungrier as the Dent week drew to its

close, they were doubtful as to the social wisdom of eating it. It would

be very unpleasant if these people, encouraged, were later on to

presume; if they were to try to use the eaten cake as a weapon for

forcing their way into English society. If, in a word, when the Tour got

back to England, they were to want to call.

So they took the cake reluctantly that Ingeborg, in a sort of dream, cut

and offered them; and with even more reluctance they sipped the wine in

which the German gentleman requested them to drink the newly betrothed

couple's health.

"But--" said Ingeborg, trying to rouse herself even at this eleventh

hour.

"True. There are not enough glasses. I will ring for more," was the way

Herr Dremmel finished her sentence for her.

The immense official promptness of him! She felt numbed.

And when the glasses were brought there was another ceremony--a clinking

of Herr Dremmel's glass with each glass in turn, his heels together as

in the days of his soldiering, his body stiff and his face a miracle of

solemnity; and before drinking he made a speech, the Asti held high in

front of him, in which he thanked the ladies for their good wishes on

behalf of his betrothed, Miss Ingeborg Bullivant, whose virtues he dwelt

upon singly and at length in resounding periods, before proceeding to

assure those present of his firm resolve to prove, by the devotion of

the rest of his life, the extremity of his gratitude for the striking

proof she had given before them all of her confidence in him; and every

sentence seemed to set another and a heavier seal on her as a creature

undoubtedly bound to marry him.

Dimly she began to realise something of the steely grip of a German

engagement. She wondered whether there were any more room left on her

forehead for further seals. She felt that it must be covered with great

red things, scrawled over with the inscription:

DREMMEL'S.

Well, she was after all not a parcel to be picked up and carried away by

the first person who found her lying about, and the minute she was alone

with him she would, she _must_, tell him that what she had really come

down for, though appearances were certainly by this time rather against

her, was to refuse him. She would be as gentle as possible, but she

would be plain and firm. The minute these women left them alone she

would tell him.

With a start she saw that the women were leaving them alone, and that

the minute had come. She wanted them not to go; she wanted to keep them

there at any cost. She even made a step after them as the last one,

nodding to the end, went out and shut the door, but Herr Dremmel still

had hold of her hand.

When the door had finally shut she turned to him quickly. Her head was

thrown back, her eyes were full of a screwed-up courage.

"But you know--" she began, determined to clear things up, however much

it might hurt them both.

And again he promptly finished her sentence for her, this time by

enfolding her in his arms and kissing her with a largeness and abundance

which no bishop, her mind flashed as her body stood stiff with surprise

and horror, could possibly approve.

She felt engulfed.

She felt she must be disappearing altogether.

He seemed infinitely capacious and soft.

"Oh, but I can't--I won't--oh, stop--oh, stop--it's a mistake--" she

tried to get out in gasps.

"My little wife," was all the notice Herr Dremmel took of that.

CHAPTER VII

It was raining at Redchester when Ingeborg got out at the station a week

and a day after she left it--the soft persistent fine rain, hardly more

than a mist, peculiar to that much-soaked corner of England. The lawns

in the gardens she passed as her fly crawled up the hill were incredibly

green, the leaves of the lilac bushes glistened with wet, each tulip was

a cup of water, the roads were chocolate, and a thick grey blanket of

cloud hung warm over the town, tucking it in all round and keeping out

any draught that might bite and sting the inhabitants, she thought, into

real living.

The porter told her it was fine growing weather, and she wondered

stupidly why, after the years she had had of the sort of thing, she had

had not grown, then, more thoroughly herself. A retired colonel she knew

--she knew all the retired colonels--waved his umbrella and shouted a

genial inquiry after her toothache, and she looked at him with a dead,

ungrateful eye. A passing postman touched his cap, and she turned the

other way. The same sensible female figures she had seen all her life

draped in the same sensible mackintoshes bowed and smiled, and she

pretended she hadn't seen them. Everybody, in fact, behaved as though

she were still good, which was distressing, embarrassing, and productive

of an overwhelming desire to shut her eyes and hide.

There were the shops, with the things in the windows unchanged since she

left nine days ago, the same ancient novelties nobody ever bought, the

same flies creeping over the same buns. There was the book-seller her

_Christian Year_ had come from, his windows full of more of them,

endless supplies for endless dieted daughters, vegetarians in literature

she called them to herself, forcibly vegetabled vegetarians; and there

was the silversmith who provided the Bishop with the crosses after a

good Florentine fifteenth-century pattern he presented to those of his

confirmation candidates who were the daughters in the diocese of the

great. The Duke's daughter had one. The Lord-Lieutenant's daughter had

one. On this principle Ingeborg herself had been given one, and wore it

continually night and day, as her father expected, under her dress,

where it bruised her. It was pleasant to her father to be able to

recollect, in the stress and dust of much in his work that was

unrefreshing, how there was a yearly increasing though severely sifted

number of gentle virgin blouses belonging to the best families beneath

which lay and rhythmically heaved this silver reminder of the wearer's

Bishop and of her God.

"Father," Ingeborg said, after she had worn hers for a week, "may I take

my cross off at night?"

"Why, Ingeborg?" he had inquired; adding quietly, "Did our Saviour?"

"No; but--you see when one turns round in one's sleep it sticks into

one."

"Sticks, Ingeborg?" the Bishop said gently, raising his eyebrows at such

an expression applied to such an object.

"Yes, and I'm getting awfully bruised." She was still in the schoolroom,

and still saying awfully.

"By His stripes we are healed," said the Bishop, shutting up the

conversation as one shuts up a book.

In spite of the wet warmth she shivered as the silversmith's window

reminded her of this. It had happened years ago, but even farther back,

as far back as she could remember, every time she had asked leave of her

father to do anything it had been refused; and refused with bits of

Bible, which was so peculiarly silencing.

And now here she was about to face him covered with the leaves she had

not asked for at all but had so tremendously taken, and going to ask the

most tremendous one of all, the leave to marry Herr Dremmel.

For that was how the last two days of her Dent's Tour had been spent, in

being openly engaged to Herr Dremmel. She had found her attempts to

explain that she was not so really availed nothing against his

conviction that she was. And public opinion, the public opinion of the

whole Tour, also never doubted but that she was--had not seven of its

most reliable members actually seen her in the act of becoming it? In

fact it not only did not doubt it, it was sternly determined that she

should be engaged whether she liked it or not. It was the least, the

Tour felt, that she could do. So that there was nothing for it now but

to face the Bishop.

She felt cold. No amount of the familiar moist stuffiness could warm

her. Vainly she tried to sit up, to be proud and brave, to recapture

something at least of the courage that had seemed so easy just at the

end in Switzerland with Herr Dremmel to laugh at her doubts. Her head

would droop, and her hands and feet were like stones.

It was the place, the place, she thought, the hypnotic effect of it, of

her old environment. The whole of Redchester was heavy with

recollections of past obediences. Not once had she ever in Redchester

even dreamt of rebellion. She had questioned latterly, in the remoter

and less filial corners of her heart, but she had never so much as

thought of rebellion. And the moment she got away out of sight and

hearing of home, things she knew here were wicked had appeared to be

quite good and extremely natural. How strange that was. And how strange

that now she was back everything was beginning to seem wicked again.

What was a poor wretch to do, she asked herself with sudden passion,

confronted by these shuffling standards that behaved as if they were

dancing a quadrille? This was the place in which for years her

conscience had been cockered to size and delicacy; and though it had

become temporarily tough in Herr Dremmel's company she felt it relapsing

with every turn of the wheels more and more into its ancient softness.

Yet she undoubtedly, conscience-stricken and frightened or not, had to

tell her father what she had done. She had got to be brave, and if needs

be she had got to defy. She was bound to Herr Dremmel. He had only gone

home to set his house in order, and then, he announced, she meanwhile

having prepared the Bishop, he was coming to Redchester to marry her.

Prepared the Bishop! She shivered. Herr Dremmel had tried to marry her

in Lucerne; but the Swiss, it seemed, would not be hurried, so that here

she was, and within the next few hours she was going to have to prepare

the Bishop.

She shut her eyes and thought of Herr Dremmel; of Robert, as she was was

learning to call him. With all her heart she liked him. And he had been

so kind when he found she really disliked being engulfed in embraces,

and had restricted his exhibitions of affection to the kissing of her

hand, telling her he could very well wait till later on, sure that she

would after marriage warm, as he had explained to her on the Rigi all

women did, to a just appreciation of the value of the caresses of an

honest man. He had also produced a number of German love-names from some

hitherto fallow corner of his mind, and garnished his conversation with

them in a way that made her who, nourished as she had been on the noble

language of the Bible and the Prayer-book, was instantly responsive to

the charm of words, laugh and glow with pleasure. She was his Little

Heart, his Little Tiny Treasure, his Little Sugar Lamb--a dozen little

sweet diminished German things translated straight away just as they

were into English. The freshness of it! The freshness of being admired

and petted after the economies in these directions practised in her

home. And his ring at that very moment dangled beneath her dress on the

same chain as her father's cross. Yes, she was bound to him. Duty, she

perceived, could be a very blessed thing sometimes if it protected one

from some other duty. It was Herr Dremmel now who had become her Duty.

She put up her hand to get courage by feeling the ring, for her spirit

was fainting within her--she had just caught sight of the cathedral. The

ring had been slung on the chain alongside the confirmation cross

because it was impossible to wear it on her thumb; and out there in

Switzerland, where one was simple, it had seemed a most natural and

obvious place to put it. Yet now, as the fly rattled over the cobbles of

the Close and the familiar cathedral rose before her like a menace, she

hung her head and greatly doubted but what the juxtaposition was wicked.

Nobody was on the doorstep when she arrived beneath the great cedar that

spread its shade, an intensified bit of dripping gloom where all was

gloom and dripping, across from the lawn to the Palace's entrance,

except the butler, whose black clothes struck her instantly as very neat

and smooth, and his underling, a youth kept carefully a little on the

side of a suitable episcopal shabbiness. She had telegraphed her train

from Paddington, but that, of course, was no reason why any one should

be on the doorstep. It was she whose business lay with doorsteps when

people arrived or left, she was the one who welcomed and who sped, and,

since she could not welcome herself, there was nobody there to do it.

She stole a nervous look at Wilson as he helped her out, but his face

was a blank. The boy on her other side had an expression, she thought,

as though under happier conditions he might have let himself go in a

smirk, and she turned her eyes away with a little sick feeling. Did they

know already, all of them, that she had left her aunt's a week ago? But,

indeed, that seemed a small thing now compared with the things she had

done since.

"I'm a dead girl," thought Ingeborg, as she passed beneath her parents'

porch.

The servants brought in her luggage, off which in her newness at deceit

she had not thought to scrape the continental labels, and she crossed

the hall, treading on the dim splashes of lovely blurred colour that

fell from the vast stained glass windows on to the stone flags of its

floor. It was the noblest hall, as bare of stuffs and carpets as the

cathedral itself, and she looked more than insignificant going across it

to the carved oak door that opened into the wide panelled passage

leading to the drawing-room, a little figure braced to a miserable

courage, the smallest thing to be going to defy powers of which this

magnificence was only one of the expressions.

Her mother was as usual on her sofa near a fire whose heat, that warm

day, was mitigated by the windows being wide open. Beside her was her

own particular table with the usual flowers, needlework, devotional

books, and biographies of good men. It was difficult to believe her

mother had got off that sofa nine times to go to bed, had dressed and

undressed and had meals--thirty-six of them, counted Ingeborg

mechanically, while she looked about for the Bishop, if you excluded the

before breakfast tea, forty-five if you didn't--since she saw her last,

so immovable did she appear, so exactly in the same position and

composed into the same lines as she had been nine days before. The room

was full of the singing of thrushes, quite deafeningly full, as she

opened the door, for the windows gave straight into the green and soppy

garden and it was a day of many worms. Judith was making tea as far away

from the fire as she could get, and there was no sign of the Bishop.

"Is that you, Ingeborg?" said her mother, turning her face, grown pale

with years of being shut up, to the door.

Ingeborg's mother had found the sofa as other people find salvation. She

was not ill. She had simply discovered in it a refuge and a very present

help in all the troubles and turmoil of life, and in especial a shield

and buckler when it came to dealing with the Bishop. It is not easy for

the married, she had found when first casting about for one, to hit on a

refuge from each other that shall be honourable to both. In a moment of

insight she perceived the sofa. Here was a blameless object that would

separate her entirely from duties and responsibilities of every sort. It

was respectable; it was unassailably effective; it was not included in

the Commandments. All she had to do was to cling to it, and nobody could

make her do or be anything. She accordingly got on to it and had stayed

there ever since, mysteriously frail, an object of solicitude and

sympathy, a being before whose helplessness the most aggressive or

aggrieved husband must needs be helpless, too. And she had gradually

acquired the sofa look, and was now very definitely a slightly plaintive

but persistently patient Christian lady.

"Is that you, Ingeborg?" she said, turning her head.

"Yes, mother," said Ingeborg, hesitating in spite of herself on the

threshold.

She looked round anxiously, but the Bishop was not lurking anywhere in

the big room.

"Come in, dear, and shut the door. You see the windows are open."

Judith glanced up at her a moment from her tea-making and did not move.

Even in the midst of her terrors Ingeborg was astonished, after not

having seen it for a while, at her loveliness. She seemed to have taken

the sodden greys of the afternoon, the dulness and the gathering dusk,

and made out of their gloom the one perfect background for her beauty.

"We thought you would have written," said Mrs. Bullivant, putting her

cheek in a position convenient for the kiss that was to be applied to

it.

"I--I telegraphed," said Ingeborg, applying the kiss.

"Yes, dear, but only about your train."

"I--thought that was enough."

"But, Ingeborg dear, such a great occasion. One of _the_ great occasions

of life. We did expect a little notice, didn't we, Judith?"

"Notice?" said Ingeborg faintly.

"Your father was wounded, dear. He thought it showed so little real love

for your parents and your sister."

"But--" said Ingeborg, looking from one to the other.

"We wrote to you at once--directly we knew. Didn't we, Judith?"

"Of course," said Judith.

Ingeborg stood flushing and turning pale. Had one of the Dent's Tour

people somehow found out where she lived and written about her

engagement and the impossible had happened and they weren't going to

mind? Was it possible? Did they know? And were taking it like this? If

only she had called at her aunt's house on the way to Paddington and got

the letters--what miserable hours of terror she would have been spared!

"But--" she began. Then the immense relief of it suddenly flooded her

whole being with a delicious warm softness. They did know. Somehow. And

a miracle had happened. Oh, how _kind_ God was!

She dropped on her knees by the sofa and began to kiss her mother's

hand, which surprised Mrs. Bullivant; and indeed it is a foreign trick,

picked up mostly by those who go abroad. "Mother," she said, "are you

really pleased about it? You don't mind then?"

"Mind?" said Mrs. Bullivant.

"Oh, how glad, how glad I am. And father? What does he say? Does

he--does _he_ mind?"

"Mind?" repeated Mrs. Bullivant.

"Father is very pleased, I think," said Judith, with what in one less

lovely would have been a slight pursing of the lips. And she twisted a

remarkable diamond ring she was wearing straight.

"Father is--pleased?" echoed Ingeborg, quite awe-struck by the amount

and quality of these reliefs.

"I must say I think it is really _good_ of your dear father to be

pleased, when he loses--" began Mrs. Bullivant.

"Oh, yes, yes," interrupted the overcome Ingeborg, "it's a wonder--a

wonder of God."

"Ingeborg dear," her mother gently rebuked, for this was excess; and

Judith looked still more what would have been a little pursed in any

other woman.

"When he loses," then resumed Mrs. Bullivant with the plaintive

determination of one who considers it the least she may expect as a

sofa-ridden mother to be allowed to finish her sentences, "so much."

"Yes, yes," assented Ingeborg eagerly, whose appreciation of her

parents' attitude was so warm that she almost felt she must stay and

bask in its urbanity forever and not go away after all to the bleak

distance of East Prussia.

"Your father loses not _only_ a daughter," continued Mrs. Bullivant,

"but £500 a year of his income."

"Would one call it his income?" inquired Judith, politely but yet, if

one could suspect a being with an angel's face of such a thing, with

some slight annoyance. "I thought our grandmother--"

"Judith dear, the £500 a year your grandmother left to each of you was

only to be yours when you married," explained Mrs. Bullivant, also with

some slight annoyance beneath her patience. "Till you married it was to

be mine--your father's, I mean, of course. And if you never did marry it

would have been mine--I mean his--always."

Ingeborg had heard of her Swedish grandmother's will, but had long ago

forgotten it, marriage being remote and money never of any interest to

her who had no occasions for spending. Now her heart bounded with yet

more thankfulness. What a comfort it would be to Robert. How it would

help him in his research. Extraordinary that she should have forgotten

it. When he told her of his stipend of five thousand marks--£250 it was

in English money, he explained, and there was the house and land

free--most of which went in his experiments, but what was left being

ample, he said, for the living purposes of reasonable beings if they

approached it in a proper spirit, it all depending, he said, on whether

they approached it in a proper spirit. "And after all," he had added

triumphantly, throwing out his chest just as she was about to inquire

what the proper spirit was, "no man can call me _thin_--"--to think she

had forgotten the substantial help she was going to be able to bring

him!

The full splendour of her father's generosity in being pleased at her

engagement was now revealed to her. The relief of it. The glad, warm

relief. So must one feel who is born again, all new, all clean from old

mistakes and fears. She felt lifted up, extraordinarily happy,

extraordinarily good, more in harmony with Providence and the Bible than

she had been since childhood. She would have been willing, and indeed

found it perfectly natural, to kneel down with her mother and Judith

then and there and say prayers together out loud. She would have been

willing on the crest of her wave of gratefulness quite readily to give

up Herr Dremmel in return for the family's immense kindness in not

asking her to give him up. She had felt nothing like this exaltation

before in her life, this complete being in harmony with the infinite,

this confidence in the inherent goodness of things, except on the

afternoon her tooth was pulled out.

"Oh," she exclaimed, laying her cheek on her mother's hand, "oh, I do

_hope_ you'll like Robert!"

"Robert?" said Mrs. Bullivant; and at the tea-table there was a sudden

silence among the cups, as though they were holding their breath.

"His name's Robert," said Ingeborg, still with her cheek on her mother's

hand, her eyes shut, her face a vision of snuggest, safest contentment.

"What Robert, Ingeborg?" inquired Mrs. Bullivant, shifting her position

to stare down more conveniently at her daughter.

"Herr Dremmel. It's his Christian name. He's got to _have_ one, you

know," said Ingeborg, still with her eyes shut in the blissfulness of

perfect confidence.

"Herr who?" said Mrs. Bullivant, a sharper note of life in her voice

than there had been for years. "Here's your father," she added quickly,

hastily composing herself into the lines of the unassailable invalid

again as the door opened and the Bishop came in.

Ingeborg jumped up. "Oh, father," she cried, running to him with the

entire want of shyness one may conceive in the newly washed and forgiven

soul when it first arrives in heaven and meets its Maker and knows there

are going to be no more misunderstandings for ever, "how _good_ you've

been!"

And she kissed him so fervently in a room gone so silent that the kiss

sounded quite loud.

The Bishop was nettled.

Was he then at any time not good? His daughter's excessive gratitude,

really almost noisy gratitude, for what after all had been inevitable,

the permission to go up to London and place herself in the hands of a

dentist, suggested that humaneness on his part came to her as a

surprise. He did feel he had been good to let her go, but he also felt

he would have been not good if he had not let her go. Certainly

Redchester opinion would have condemned him as cruel even if he himself,

who knew all the circumstances, was not able to think so. What had

really been cruel was the terrible muddle his papers and letters had got

into owing to her prolonged absence. Grave dislocations had taken place

in the joints of his engagements, several with far-reaching results; and

all because, he could not help feeling, Ingeborg, in spite of precept

and example, did not in her earlier years use her toothbrush with

regularity and conscientiousness. Manifestly she did not, or how could

she have needed nine enormous days to be set in repair? He himself, who

regarded his body as a holy temple, which was the one solution of the

body question that at all approached satisfactoriness, and had

accordingly brushed his teeth, from the point of view of their being

pillars of a sacred edifice, after every meal for forty years, had never

had a toothache in his life.

"Let us hope now, Ingeborg," he said, reflecting on the instance she had

provided of the modern inversion of the Mosaic law which visited the

sins of the fathers on the children, the original arrangement, the

Bishop felt, being considerably healthier, and gently putting her away

in order to go over to the tea-table where he stood holding out his hand

for the cup Judith hastened to place in it, "let us now hope, now you

have had your lesson, that in future you will remember cleanliness is

next to godliness."

And this seemed to Ingeborg an answer so surprising that she could only

stare at him with her mouth fallen a little open, there where he had

left her in the middle of the carpet.

But the Bishop had not done. He went on to say another thing that

surprised her still more; nay, smote her cold, shook her to her

foundations. He said, after a pause during which the silence in the room

was remarkable, his back turned to her while at the tea-table he

carefully selected the particular piece of bread and butter he intended

to eat, "And pray, Ingeborg, why did you not write the moment you heard

from us, and congratulate your sister on her engagement?"

CHAPTER VIII

Ingeborg was dumb.

Her father's question was like a blow, shocking her back to

consciousness. The warm dream that all was well, that she was

understood, that there was love and kindliness for her at home after all

and welcome and encouragement, the warm feeling of stretching herself in

her family's kind lap, confident that it would hold her up and not spill

her out on to the floor, was gone in a flash. She was hit awake, hit out

of her brief delicious sleep. Her family had not got a lap, but it had

an entirely unprepared mind, and into that unprepared mind she had

tumbled the name of Dremmel.

"Judith--engaged?" she stammered faintly, on the Bishop's wheeling

round, cup in hand, to examine into the cause of her prolonged silence.

"Your incredulity is not very flattering to your sister," he said; and

Judith's eyelashes as she concentrated her gaze on the teapot were alone

sufficiently lovely, the curved, dusky-golden soft things, to make

incredulity simply silly.

Mrs. Bullivant avoided all speech and clung to her sofa.

"It's--so sudden," faltered Ingeborg.

"Much may happen in a week," said the Bishop.

"Yes," murmured Ingeborg, who knew that terribly, too.

"We never can tell what a day may bring forth," said the Bishop; and

Ingeborg, deeply convinced, drooped her head acquiescent.

"No man," began the Bishop, habit being strong within him, "knoweth the

hour when the bridegroom--" But he stopped, recollecting that Ingeborg

was not engaged and therefore could not with propriety be talked to of

bridegrooms. Instead, he inquired again why she had not written; and

eyeing her searchingly asked himself if it were possible that a child of

his could be base enough to envy.

"I--didn't get the letters," said Ingeborg, her head drooping.

"You did not? That is very strange. Your mother wrote at once. Let me

see. It was on Friday it happened. It _was_ Friday, was it not, Judith?

_You_ ought to know"--Judith blushed obediently--"and to-day is Tuesday.

Ample time. Ample time. My dear," he said, turning to his wife who at

once twitched into a condition of yet further relaxed defencelessness,

"do you think it possible your letter was not posted?"

"Quite, Herbert," murmured Mrs. Bullivant, closing her eyes and

endeavouring to imagine herself unconscious.

"Ah. Then that's it. That's it. Wilson is growing careless. This last

week there have been repeated negligences. You will make inquiries,

Ingeborg, and tell him what I have said."

"Yes, father."

"And you will discharge him if he goes on like this."

"Yes, father."

"Unfaithful servant. Unfaithful servant. He that is unfaithful in a few

things--"

The Bishop, frowning at it, took a second piece of bread and butter, and

went over to the hearthrug, where he stood from force of habit, in spite

of the warmth of the day, drinking his tea, and becoming vaguely and

increasingly irritated by the action of the fire behind him.

"Then," he said, looking at Ingeborg, "you know nothing about it?"

She shook her head. She was the oddest figure in the middle of the

splendid old room, travel-stained, untidy, her face white with fatigue,

her hat crooked.

Judith glanced at her every now and then, but it was impossible at any

time to tell what the delicate white rose at the tea-table was thinking;

so impossible that the young men who clustered round her like bees when

they first saw her gave it up and went on presently to more

communicative flowers. The local Duchess had hoped her first-born would

marry her--a creature so lovely, so entirely respectable with that nice

Bishop for a father, and so happily adapted in the perfection of her

proportions for the successful production of further dukes; and she

pointed out various aspects of the girl's exquisiteness to her son, and

told him he would have the most beautiful wife in England. But the young

man, after a reproachful look at his mother for supposing he could have

missed noticing even the humblest approach to a pretty woman let alone

Judith Bullivant, said he didn't want to marry a picture but something

that was alive and, anyhow, something that talked.

"She's right enough, of course," he remarked, "and I like looking at

her. I'd be blind if I didn't. But Lord, dull? The girl hasn't got a

word to say for herself. I never met any woman who looked so ripping and

then somehow wasn't. She won't talk. She won't _talk_," he almost

wailed. "She ain't got the remotest resemblance to anything approaching

_kick_ in her."

"You might end by being thankful for that," said his mother.

He would not, however, be persuaded, and went his way and married, as

the Duchess had feared, a young lady from the halls--a young lady nimble

not only of toes but of wits, nimble, that is to say, as he proudly

pointed out to his mother, at both ends, with whom he lived in great

contentment, for she amused him, which is much.

"I have not observed you offer any congratulations, Ingeborg," said the

Bishop, becoming more and more displeased by her strange behaviour, and

not at all liking her crumpled and forlorn appearance. He again thought

of envy, but that alone could not crumple clothes. "And yet your

sister," he said, getting a little further away from the fire which had

begun to scorch him unpleasantly, "is to be the wife of the Master."

"The Master?" repeated Ingeborg, stupidly. For a moment her tormented

brain supposed Judith must be going to be a nun.

"There is only one Master," said the Bishop, in his stateliest manner.

"Everybody knows that. The Master of Ananias."

Ingeborg knew this was a great thing. The Master of Ananias, the most

celebrated of Oxford colleges, was in every way, except perhaps that of

age, desirable; but what was age when it came to all the other

desirabilities? Her father had rebuked her once for speaking of him as

old Dr. Abbot, and had informed her the Master was only sixty, and that

everybody was sixty--that is, said the Bishop, everybody of any sense.

He was not a widower, he was pleasant to look at in a shaven iron-grey

way, he was brilliantly erudite, and extremely well off apart from his

handsome salary, one of the handsomest salaries in the gift of the

Crown. Several years before, when Judith was still invisible in a

pinafore, he had stayed at the Palace--it was then Ingeborg spoke of him

as old--and had been treated by her father with every attention and

respect: He had on that occasion seemed glad to go. Now it appeared he

had been again, and must have fallen immediately--and overwhelmingly in

love with Judith for his short visit to bridge the distance between a

first acquaintance and an engagement. Who, however, knew better than

herself how quickly such distances can be bridged?

She wanted to go and kiss Judith and say sweet things to her, but her

feet seemed unable to move. She wanted to congratulate everybody with

all her heart if only they would be kind and congratulate her a little,

too. For Judith had heard what she said before her father came in, and

her mother had heard it, and the room was heavy with the uttered name of

Dremmel.

She looked round at them--her father waiting for her to show at least

ordinary decency and feeling, Judith so safe in the family's approval,

so entirely clear from hidden things, her mother lying with closed eyes

and expressionless face, and she suddenly felt intolerably alone.

"Oh, oh--" she cried, holding out her hands, "doesn't anybody love me?"

This was worse than her toothache.

Her family had endured much during those days, but at least there was a

reason then for the odder parts of her behaviour. Now they were called

upon to endure the distressing spectacle of a hitherto reserved relative

letting herself go to unbridledness. Ingeborg was going to make a scene;

and a scene was a thing that had never yet, anyhow not during the entire

Bullivant period, been made in that house.

[Illustration: "But father, I've been doing it too"]

Mrs. Bullivant shut her eyes tighter and tried to think she was not

there at all.

Judith turned red and again became absorbed in the teapot.

The Bishop, after the first cold shock natural to a person called upon

to contemplate nakedness where up to then there had been clothes, put

down his cup on the nearest table and, with an exaggerated calm, stared.

They all felt intensely uncomfortable; as uncomfortable as though she

had begun, in the middle of the drawing-room, to remove her garments one

by one and cast them from her.

"This is very sad, Ingeborg," said the Bishop.

"Isn't it--oh, _isn't_ it--" was her unexpected answer, tears in her

eyes. She was so tired, so frightened. She had been travelling hard

since the morning of the day before. She had had nothing to eat for a

time that seemed infinite. And yet this was the moment, just because she

had betrayed herself to her mother and Judith, in which she was going to

have to tell her father what she had done.

"It is the most distressing example," said the Bishop, "I have ever seen

of that basest of sins, envy."

"Envy?" said Ingeborg. "Oh, no--that's not what it is. Oh, if it were

only that! And I do congratulate Judith. Judith, I do, I do, my dear.

But--father, I've been doing it too."

It was out now, and she looked at him with miserable eyes, prepared for

the worst.

"Doing what, Ingeborg?"

"I'm engaged, too."

"Engaged? My dear Ingeborg."

The Bishop was alarmed for her sanity. She really looked very strange.

Had they been giving her too much gas?

His tone became careful and humouring. "How can you," he said quietly,

"have become engaged in these few days?"

"Much may happen in a week," said Ingeborg. It jumped out. She did try

not to say it. She was unnerved. And always when she was unnerved she

said the first thing that came into her head, and always it was either

unfortunate or devastating.

The Bishop became encased in ice. This was not hysteria, it was

something immeasurably worse.

"Be so good as to explain," he said sharply, and waves of icy air seemed

to issue from where he stood and heave through the room.

"I'm engaged to--to somebody called Dremmel," said Ingeborg.

"I do not know the name. Do you, Marion?"

"No, oh, no," breathed Mrs. Bullivant, her eyes shut.

"Robert Dremmel," said Ingeborg.

"Who are the Dremmels, Ingeborg?"

"There aren't any."

"There aren't any?"

"I--never _heard_ of any," she said, twisting her fingers together. "We

usedn't to talk about--about things like _more_ Dremmels."

"What is this man?"

"A clergyman."

"Oh. Where is he living?"

"In East Prussia."

"In where, Ingeborg?"

"East Prussia. It--it's a place abroad."

"Thank you. I am aware of that. My education reaches as far as and

includes East Prussia."

Mrs. Bullivant began to cry. Not loud, but tears that stole quietly down

her face from beneath her closed eyelids. She did not do anything to

them, but lay with her hands clasped on her breast and let them steal.

What was the use of being a Christian if one were exposed to these

scenes?

"Pray, why is he in East Prussia?" asked the Bishop.

"He belongs there."

Again the room seemed for an instant to hold its breath.

"Am I to understand that he is a German?"

"Please, father."

"A German pastor?"

"Yes, father."

"Not by any chance attached in some ecclesiastical capacity to the

Kaiser?"

"No, father."

There was a pause.

"Your aunt--what did she say to this?"

"She didn't say anything. She wasn't there."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I haven't been at my aunt's."

"Judith, my dear, will you kindly leave the room?"

Judith got up and went. While she was crossing to the door and until she

had shut it behind her there was silence.

"Now," said the Bishop, Judith being safely out of harm's way, "you will

have the goodness to explain exactly what you have been doing."

"I think I wish to go to bed," murmured Mrs. Bullivant, without changing

her attitude or opening her eyes. "Will some one please ring for

Richards to come and take me to bed?"

But neither the Bishop nor Ingeborg heeded her.

"I didn't _mean_ to do anything, father--" began Ingeborg. Then she broke

off and said, "I--can explain better if I sit down--" and dropped into

the chair nearest to her, for her knees felt very odd.

She saw her father now only through a mist. She was going to have to

oppose him for the first time in her life, and her nature was one which

acquiesced and did not oppose. In her wretchedness a doubt stole across

her mind as to whether Herr Dremmel was worth this; was anything, in

fact, worth fighting about? And with one's father. And against one's

whole bringing-up. Was she going to be strong enough? Was it a thing one

ought to be strong about? Would not true strength rather lie in a calm

continuation of life at home? What, when one came to think of it, was

East Prussia really to her, and those rye-fields and all that water? She

wished she had had at least a piece of bread and butter. She thought

perhaps bread and butter would have helped her not to doubt. She looked

round vaguely so as not to have to meet her father's eye for a moment

and her glance fell on the tea-table.

"I think," she said faintly, getting up again, "I'll have some tea."

To the Bishop this seemed outrageous.

He watched her in a condition of icy indignation such as he had not yet

in his life experienced. His daughter. His daughter for whom he had done

so much. The daughter he had trained for years, sparing no pains, to be

a helpful, efficient, Christian woman. The daughter he had honoured with

his trust, letting her share in the most private portions of his daily

business. Not a letter had he received that she had not seen and been

allowed to answer. Not a step in any direction had he taken without

permitting her to make the necessary arrangements. Seldom, he supposed

bitterly, had a child received so much of a father's confidence. His

daughter. That crumpled and disreputable--yes, now he knew what was the

matter with her appearance--disreputable-looking figure cynically

pouring itself out tea while he, her father whom she had been deceiving,

was left to wait for her explanations until such time as she should have

sated her appetite. Positively she had succeeded, he said to himself,

bitterly enraged that he should be forced to be bitterly enraged, in

making him feel less like a bishop should feel than he had done since he

was a boy.

"It's because I've had nothing to eat since Paris," Ingeborg explained

apologetically, holding the teapot in both hands because one by itself

shook too much, and feeling, too, that the moment was not exactly one

for tea.

The Bishop started. "Since where?" he said.

"Paris," said Ingeborg; adding tremulously, having quite lost her nerve

and only desiring to fill up the silence, "it--it's a place abroad."

Mrs. Bullivant murmured a more definitely earnest request that Richards

might be rung for to take her to bed.

"Ingeborg," said the Bishop in a voice she did not know. "Paris?"

"Yes, father--last night."

"Ingeborg, come here."

He was pointing to a chair a yard or two from the hearthrug on which he

stood, and his voice was very strange.

She put down the cup with a shaking hand and went to him. Her heart was

in her mouth.

"What have you been doing?" he said.

"I told you, father. I'm engaged to Herr--"

"How did you get to Paris?"

"By train."

"Will you answer me? What were you doing in Paris?"

"Having dinner."

She was terrified. Her father was talking quite loud. She had never in

her life seen him like this. She answered his questions quickly, her

heart leaping as he rapped them out, but her answers seemed to make him

still angrier. If only he would let her explain, hear her out; but he

hurled questions at her, giving her no time at all.

"Father," she said hurriedly, seeing that after that last answer of hers

he did for a moment say nothing, but stood looking at her very

extraordinarily, "please let me tell you how it all happened. It won't

take a minute--it won't really. And then, you see, you'll _know_. I

didn't mean to do anything, I really didn't; but the dentist pulled my

tooth out so quickly, that very first day, and so instead of coming home

I went to Lucerne--"

"To--"

"Yes," she nodded, in a frenzy of haste to get it all said, "to

Lucerne--I couldn't tell you why, but I did--I seemed pushed there, and

after a little while I got engaged, and I didn't in the least mean to do

that, either, really I didn't--but somehow--" Was there any use trying

to tell him about the white and silver cake and the seven witnesses and

the undoubting kind Herr Dremmel and all the endless small links in the

chain? Would he ever, ever understand?--"somehow I _did_. You see," she

added helplessly, looking up at him with eyes full of an appeal for

comprehension, for mercy, "one thing leads to another." And as he still

said nothing she added, even more helplessly, "Herr Dremmel sat opposite

me in the train."

"You picked him up casually, like any servant girl, in a train?"

"He was one of the party. He was there from the beginning. Oh, yes, I

forgot to tell you--it was one of Dent's Tours."

"You went on a Dent's Tour?"

"Yes, and he was one of it, too, and we all, of course, always went

about together, rather like a school, two and two--I suppose because of

the pavement," she said, now saying in her terror anything that came

into her head, "and as he was the other one of my two--the half of the

couple I was the other one of, you know, father--we--we got engaged."

"Do you take me for a fool?" was the Bishop's comment.

Ingeborg's heart stood still. How could her father even _think_--

"Oh, father," was all she could say to that; and she hung her head in

the entire hopelessness, the uselessness of trying to tell him anything.

She knew she had been saying it ridiculously, tumbling out a confusion

of what must sound sad nonsense, but could he not see she was

panic-stricken? Could he not be patient, and help her to make her clean

breast?

"I'm stupid," she said, looking up at him through tears, and suddenly

dropping into a kind of nakedness of speech, a speech entirely simple

and entirely true, "stupid with fright."

"Do you suggest I terrorize you?" inquired the incensed Bishop.

"Yes," she said.

This was terrible. And it was peculiarly terrible because it made the

Bishop actually wish he were not a gentleman. Then, indeed, it would be

an easy matter to deal with that small defying creature in the chair.

When it comes to women the quickest method is, after all, to be by

profession a navvy....

He shuddered, and hastily drew his thoughts back from this abyss. To

what dread depths of naturalness was she not by her conduct dragging

him?

"Father," said Ingeborg, who had now got down to the very bottom of the

very worst, a place where once one has reached it an awful sincerity

takes possession of one's tongue, "do you see this? Look at them."

And she held up her hands and showed him, while she herself watched them

as though they were somebody else's, how they were shaking.

"Isn't that being afraid? Look at them. It's fear. It's fear of you.

It's you making them do that. And think of it--I'm twenty-two. A woman.

Oh, I--I'm _ashamed_--"

But whether it was a proper shame for what she had done or a shocking

shame for her compunctions in sinning, the Bishop was not permitted that

afternoon to discover; because when she had got as far as that she was

interrupted by being obliged to faint.

There was a moment's confusion while she tumbled out of the chair and

lay, a creased, strange object, on the floor, owing to Mrs. Bullivant's

having produced an exclamation; and this to the Bishop, after years of

not having heard her more than murmur, was almost as disconcerting as

if, flinging self-restraint to the winds, she had suddenly produced

fresh offspring. He quickly, however, recovered the necessary presence

of mind and the bell was rung for Richards; who, when she came, knelt

down and undid Ingeborg's travel-worn blouse, and something on a long

chain fell out jingling.

It was her father's cross and Herr Dremmel's ring metallically hitting

each other.

The Bishop left the room without a word.

CHAPTER IX

A pall descended on the Palace and enveloped it blackly for four awful

days, during which Mrs. Bullivant and her daughters and the chaplain and

the secretary and all the servants did not so much live as feel their

way about with a careful solicitude for inconspicuousness.

This pall was the pall of the Bishop's wrath; and there was so much of

it that it actually reached over into the dwellings of the Dean and

Chapter and blackened those white spots, and it got into the hitherto

calm home of the Mayor, who had the misfortune to have business with the

Bishop the very day after Ingeborg's return, and an edge of it--but

quite enough to choke an old man--even invaded the cathedral, where it

extinguished the head verger, a sunny octogenarian privileged to have

his little joke with the Bishop, and who had it unfortunately as usual,

and was instantly muffled in murkiness and never joked again.

That the Bishop should have allowed his private angers to overflow

beyond his garden walls, he who had never been anything in public but a

pattern in his personal beauty, his lofty calm, and his biblically

flavoured eloquence of what the perfect bishop should be, shows the

extreme disturbance of his mind. But it was not that he allowed it: it

was that he could not help it. He had, thanks to his daughter, lost his

self-control, and for that alone, without anything else she had done, he

felt he could never forgive her.

Self-control gone, and with it self-respect. He ached, he positively

ached during those first four black days in which his natural man was

uppermost, a creature he had forgotten so long was it since he had heard

of him, thoroughly to shake his daughter. And the terribleness of that

in a bishop. The terribleness of being aware that his hands were

twitching to shake--hands which he acutely knew should be laid on no one

except in blessing, consecrated hands, divinely appointed to bless and

then dismiss in peace. That small unimportant thing, that small weak

thing, the thing he had generously endowed with the great gift of life

and along with that gift the chance it would never have had except for

him of re-entering eternal blessedness, the thing he had fed and

clothed, that had eaten out of his hand and been all bright tameness--to

bring disgrace on him! Disgrace outside before the world, and inside

before his abased and humiliated self. And she had brought it not only

on a father, but on the best-known bishop on the bench; the best known

also and most frequently mentioned, he had sometimes surmised with a

kind of high humility, in the--how could one put it with sufficient

reverence?--holy gossip of the angels. For in his highest moods he had

humbly dared to believe he was not altogether untalked about in heaven.

And here at the moment of much thankfulness and legitimate pride when

his other daughter was so beautifully betrothed came this one, and with

impish sacrilegiousness dragged him, her father, into the dust of base

and furious instincts, the awful dust in which those sad animal men sit

who wish to and do beat their women-folk.

He could not bring himself to speak to her. He would not allow her near

him. Whatever her repentance might be it could never wipe out the memory

of these hours of being forced by her to recognise what, after all the

years of careful climbing upwards to goodness, he was still really like

inside. Terrible to be stirred not only to unchristianity but to

vulgarity. Terrible to be made to wish not only that you were not a

Christian but not a gentleman. He, a prince of the Church, was desiring

to be a navvy for a space during which he could be unconditionally

active. He, a prince of the Church, was rent and distorted by feelings

that would have disgraced a curate. He could never forgive her.

But the darkest hours pass, and just as the concerned diocese was

beginning to fear appendicitis for him, unable in any other way to

account for the way he remained invisible, he emerged from his first

indignation into a chillier region in which, still much locked in his

chamber, he sought an outlet in prayer.

A bishop, and indeed any truly good and public man, is restricted in his

outlets. He can with propriety have only two--prayer and his wife; and

in this case the wife was unavailable because of her sofa. For the first

time the Bishop definitely resented the sofa. He told himself that the

wife of a prelate, however ailing--and he believed with a man's

simplicity on such points that she did ail--had no business to be

inaccessible to real conversation. With no one else on earth except his

wife can a prelate or any other truly good and public man have real

conversation without losing dignity, or, if the conversation should

become very real, without losing office. That is why most prelates are

married. The best men wish to be real at times.

When Ingeborg stripped off her deferences, and, after having most

scandalously run away and most scandalously entangled herself with an

alien clerical rogue, had the face to hold up her hands at him and

accuse him, accuse _him_, her father, of being the cause of their

shaking, the Bishop had been as much horrified as if his own garden path

on which he had trodden pleasantly for years had rent itself asunder at

his feet and gaped at him. He had made the path; he had paid to have it

tidied and adorned; and he required of it in return that it should keep

quiet and be useful. To have it convulsed into an earthquake and its

usefulness interrupted must be somebody's fault, and his instinct very

properly was to go to his wife and tell her it was hers.

But there was the sofa.

He desired to converse with his wife. He had an intolerable desire for

even as few as five minutes' real conversation with her. He wanted to

talk about the manner in which Ingeborg must have been brought up, about

the amount of punishment she had received in childhood; he wished to be

informed as to the exact nature of the participation her mother had

taken in her moral education; he wished to discuss the responsibility of

mothers, and to explain his views on the consequences of maternal

neglect; and he wanted, too, to draw his wife's attention to the fact

she easily apparently overlooked, that he had bestowed a name grown

celebrated on her, and a roof that through his gifts and God's mercy was

not an ordinary but a palace roof, and that in return the least he might

expect.... In short, he wanted to talk.

But when driven by his urgencies he went to her room to break down the

barricade of the sofa, he found not only Richards hovering there

tactfully, but the doctor; for Mrs. Bullivant had foreseen her husband's

probable desire for conversation, and the doctor, a well-trained man,

was in the act of prescribing complete silence.

It was then that, thwarted and debarred from the outlet a man prefers,

he sought his other outlet, and laid all these distressful matters in

prayer at the feet of heaven. On his knees in his chamber he earnestly

begged forgiveness for his descent to naturalness, and a restoration of

his self-respect. Without his self-respect what would become of him? He

had lived with it so intimately and long. Fervently he desired the

molten moments in which his hands had twitched, wiped out, and

forgotten. He asked for help to conduct himself henceforth with calm. He

implored to be given patience. He implored to be given self-control. And

presently, after two days of his spare moments spent in this manner, he

was sitting upon a chair and telling himself that the main objection to

praying, if one might say so with all due reverence, is that it is

one-sided. It is a monologue, said the Bishop--also with all due

reverence--and in troubles of the kind he was in one needs to be sure

one is being attended to. He did not think he could possibly be being

attended to, because, pray as he might, withdraw and wrestle as he

might, he continued to want to shake his daughter.

For there was the constant irritation going on of the affairs of the

diocese getting into a more hopeless disorder. All that time she was

away guiltily gadding, and now all this time she was not away but

unavailable till she should have utterly repented, his letters were

piling themselves up into confused heaps, and his engagements were a

wilderness in which he wandered alone in the dark. The chaplain and the

typist did what they could, but they had not been with him so long as

his daughter and were not possessed of the mechanical brainlessness that

makes a woman so satisfactory as a secretary. His daughter, not having

what might be called actual brains, was not troubled by thought. The

distresses of possible alternatives did not disturb her. She did not,

therefore, disturb him by suggesting them. She was mechanically

meticulous. She respected detail. She remembered. She knew not only what

had to be done, which was easy, but what had to be done exactly first.

And both the chaplain and the typist were men with ideas, and instead of

assisting him along one straight and narrow path which is the only way

of really getting anywhere, including, remembered the Bishop, to heaven,

they were constantly looking to the right and the left, doubting,

weighing, hesitating. The chaplain had as many eyes for a question as a

fly, and saw it from as many angles. Fairness, desirability, the

probable views of the other side, their equal Rightness, these things

faltered interminably round each letter to be answered, were hesitated

over interminably in the mellow intonations of that large-minded,

well-educated young man's voice, and he was echoed and supported by the

typist, who was also from Oxford, and had been given this chance of

nearness to the most distinguished of bishops at such a youthful age

that the undergraduate milk had not yet dried on the corners of his

eloquent and hesitating mouth, and gave a peculiarly sickly flavour,

thought the irritated Bishop, to whatever came out of it.

The Bishop felt that if this went on much longer the work of the diocese

would come to a standstill. In ten days the Easter recess would be over,

and he was due in the House of Lords, where he had been put down for a

speech on the Home Rule Bill from the point of view of simple faith, and

how was he to leave things in this muddle at home, and how was he to

have the peace of mind, the empty clarity, appropriate to a proper

approach of the measure if his inward eye went roving away to Redchester

all the time and to the increasing confusion on his study table?

The trail of Ingeborg was over all his day. When, warm and ruffled from

prayer, he plunged down into his work again, he could not do a thing

without being reminded she was not there. He was forced to think of her

every moment of his time. It was ignoble, but without her he was like an

actor who has learned not his part but to lean on the prompter, and who

finds himself on the stage with the prompter gone dead in his box. She

was dead to him, dead in obstinate sin; and dignity demanded she should

continue dead until she came of her own accord and told him she had done

with that terrible affair of the East Prussian pastor. He did not know

whether he would then forgive her--he would probably defer forgiveness

as a disciplinary measure, after having implored heaven's guidance--but

he would allow a certain amount of resurrection, sufficient to enable

her to sit up at her desk every day and disentangle the confusion her

wickedness alone had caused. In the evenings she would, he thought, at

any rate for a time, be best put back in her grave.

At this point he began to be able to say "Poor girl," and to feel that

he pitied her.

But it was not till the end of the week, as Sunday drew near, that his

prayers did after all begin to be answered, and he regained enough

control of his words if not of his thoughts to be able to reappear among

his family and show nothing less becoming than reserve. He even

succeeded, though without speaking to her, in kissing Ingeborg's

forehead night and morning and making the sign of the Cross over her

when she went to bed as he had done from her earliest years. She seemed

smaller than ever, hardly there at all, and made him think of an empty

dress walking about with a head on it. Contemplating her when she was

not looking his desire to shake her became finally quenched by the

perception that really there would be nothing to shake. It would be like

shaking out mere clothes, garments with the body gone out of them; there

would be dust, but little satisfaction. She had evidently been feeling,

he was slightly soothed to observe, for not only was her dress empty but

her face seemed diminished, and she certainly was remarkably pale. She

struck him as very unattractive, entirely designed by Providence for a

happy home life. And to think that this nothing, this amazing

littleness--well, well; poor girl.

On the Sunday afternoon he determined to help her by getting into touch

with her from the pulpit. On that day he several times assured himself

before preaching that his only feeling in the sad affair was one of

concern for her and grief. The pulpit, he knew from experience, was a

calm and comfort-bringing place when he was in it; it was, indeed, his

way with a pulpit that had brought the Bishop to the pinnacle of the

Church on which he found himself. He was at his best in it, knowing it

for a blessed spot, free from controversy, pure from contradiction, a

place where personal emotions could find no footing owing to the wise

custom that prevented congregations from answering back. Put into common

terms, the terms of his undergraduate days, he could let himself rip in

the pulpit; and the Bishop was in a ripped condition altogether at his

greatest.

He spoke that Sunday specially to Ingeborg, and he told himself that

what had come straight from his heart must needs go straight to hers.

The Bible was very plain. It did not mince matters as to the dangers she

was running. The punishment for her class of sin right through it was

various and severe. Not that the ravens of another age and the eagles of

a different climate--he had taken as his text that passage, or rather

portion of a passage--he described it as remarkable--in the Proverbs:

"The ravens of the valley shall pick it out and the young eagles shall

eat it"--were likely ever miraculously to appear in Redchester, though

even on that point the Bishop held that nothing was certain; but there

were, he explained, spiritual ravens and eagles provided by an

all-merciful Providence for latter-day requirements whose work was even

more thorough and destructive. He earnestly implored those members of

his flock who knew themselves guilty of the particular sin the passage

referred to, to seek forgiveness of their parents before Heaven

interfered. He pointed out that what is most needed, if people are to

live with any zest and fine result at all, is encouragement, and what

encouragement could equal full and free forgiveness? The Bible, he said,

understood this very well, and the Prodigal Son's father never hesitated

in his encouragement. It seemed difficult to suppose one could equal the

lavishness of the best robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf,

yet he felt certain--he _knew_ there were fathers at that very moment,

there in that town, nay, in that cathedral, ready with all and more than

that. Who would wish to punish his dear child, the soul given into his

hands to be whitened for heaven? One knew from one's own experience--all

who had once been children must know--how sorry one was for having done

wrong, how _bleeding_ one felt about it; and just then, just at that

moment of sorrow, of heart's blood, was not what one needed so that one

might get on one's feet again quickly and do better than ever, not

punishment but forgiveness? A frequent and free forgiveness, said the

Bishop, and his voice was beautiful as he said it, was one of the chief

necessities of life. What poor children want, poor frail children, so

infinitely apt to fall, so infinitely clumsy at getting up, is a

continual wiping out and never thinking again of the yesterdays, a daily

presentation by authority to yesterday's stumblers of that most bracing

object, the cleaned and empty slate. Why, it was as necessary, he

declared, his fine face aglow, if one was to work well and add one's

cheerful contribution to the world's happiness, as a nourishing and

sufficient breakfast--the congregation thrilled at this homely

touch--and to numb a human being's powers of cheerful contribution by

punishment was _waste_. How cruel, then, to force a father by one's

stubbornness to punish; how cruel and how sinful to hinder him, by not

seeking out at once what he so freely offered, to hinder him from

bringing forth his best robe, his ring, his fatted calf. What a heavy

responsibility towards their fathers did children bear, said the Bishop,

who had ceased himself being anybody's child many years before. This, he

said, is a sermon to children; to erring children; to those sad children

who have gone astray. We are all children here, he explained, and if

life has been with us so long that we can no longer find any one we may

still with any certainty call father, we are yet to the end Children of

the Kingdom. But, he continued, though every single soul in this

cathedral is necessarily some one's child, not every single soul in it

is inevitably some one's father, and he would say a few words to the

fathers and remind them of the infinite effect of love. To punish your

child is to make its repentance go sour within it. Do not punish it.

Love it. Love it continuously, generously, if needs be obstinately;

smite its hardness, as once a rock was smitten, with the rod of

generosity. Give it a chance of gushing forth into living repentance.

Generosity begets generosity. Love begets love. Show your love. Show

your generosity. Forgive freely, magnificently. Oh, my brothers, oh, my

children, my little sorry children, what could not one, what would not

one do in return for love?

The Bishop's face was lifted up as he finished to the light of the west

window. His voice was charged with feeling. He had forgotten the ravens

and eagles of the beginning, for he never allowed his beginnings to

disturb his endings, well knowing his congregation forgot them, too. He

was an artist at reaching into the hearts of the uneducated. Everything

helped him--his beauty, his voice, and the manifest way in which his own

words moved him.

And the typist, as he walked back to the Palace with the chaplain across

the daisies of the Close, was unable to agree with the chaplain that a

course at Oxford even now in close reasoning might help the Bishop. The

typist thought it would spoil him; and offered to lay the chaplain

twenty to one that Redchester that afternoon would be full of erring

children upsetting their fathers' Sunday by wanting to be forgiven.

It was; and Ingeborg was one of them.

CHAPTER X

She waylaid him after tea on the stairs.

"Father," she said timidly, as he was passing on in silence.

"Well, Ingeborg?" said the Bishop, pausing and gravely attentive.

"I--want to tell you how sorry I am."

"Yes, Ingeborg?"

"So sorry, so ashamed that I--I went away like that on that tour. It was

very wrong of me. And I went with your money. Oh, it was ugly. I--hope

you'll forgive me, father?"

"Freely, Ingeborg. It would be sad indeed if I lagged behind our Great

Exemplar in the matter of forgiveness."

"Then--I may come back to work?"

"When you tell me you have broken off your clandestine engagement."

"But father--"

"There are no buts, Ingeborg."

"But you said in your sermon--"

The Bishop passed on.

In her eagerness Ingeborg put her hand detainingly on his sleeve, a

familiarity hitherto unheard of in that ordered and temperate household.

"But your sermon--you said in your sermon, father--why, how can free

forgiveness have conditions? They didn't do it that way in the

Bible"--(this to him who was by the very nature of his high office a

specialist in forgiveness; poor girl, poor girl)--"You said yourself

about the Prodigal Son--his father forgave _everything_, and perhaps

he'd done worse things even than going to Lucerne--"

"We are not told, Ingeborg, of any clandestine engagement," said the

Bishop, pursuing his way hampered but, as he was glad to remember

afterwards, calm.

"But you know about it--how can it be clandestine when you know about

it?"

"Once more, Ingeborg, there are no buts."

"But why shouldn't I marry a good man?"

She was actually following him up quite a number of the stairs, still

with her hand on his arm, and her face, so unattractive in its unwomanly

eagerness, quite close to his.

"Why should I have to be forgiven for wanting to marry a good man?

Everybody marries good men. Mother did, and you never told her she

wasn't to. Oh, oh--" she went on, as his dressing-room door was quietly

closed upon her, "that isn't free forgiveness at all--it isn't what you

_said_--it isn't what you _said_--it's _conditions_."...

And her voice from the doormat became quite a cry, regardless of

possible listening Wilsons.

How glad he was that he had been able to put her aside quietly and get

himself, still controlled, into his dressing-room. How strange and new

were these reckless outbreaks of unreserve. And her reasoning, how

wholly deplorable. She wished, unhappy girl, to enjoy the advantages and

privileges of the forgiven state while continuing in the sin that had

procured the forgiveness. She wished, he reflected, though in educated

language, to eat her cake and have it, too. Yet was it not clear that a

free forgiveness could only be bestowed on an unlimited penitence? There

could be no reservations of particular branches of sin. All must be

lopped. And the East Prussian pastor was a branch that must be lopped

with the cleanest final cut before real submission could be said to have

set in.

But the Bishop in his dressing-room, though he retained his apparent

calm, was sore within him. His sermon had failed. The girl must be a

stone. It wasn't, he thought profoundly worried, as if he hadn't given

her nearly a week for undisturbed thought and hadn't approached her that

day with all the helpfulness in his power from the pulpit. Both these

things he had done; and she was no nearer recovery than before. Was

training then nothing? Was environment nothing? Was blood nothing? Was

the blood of bishops, that blood which of all bloods must surely be most

potent in preventing its inheritors in all their doings, nothing?

On the following afternoon there was a party at the Palace, arranged by

Mrs. Bullivant in the confident days before she knew what Ingeborg was

really like. It was a congratulatory party for Judith, and all

Redchester and all the county had been invited. Nothing could stop this

party but a death in the household--any death, even Richards' might do,

but nothing short of death, thought the afflicted lady, wondering how

she was to get through the afternoon; and as she crept on to her sofa at

a quarter to four to be put by Richards into the final folds and knew

that as four struck a great surge of friends would pour in over her and

that for three hours she would have to be bright and happy about Judith,

and sympathetically explanatory about Ingeborg--who looked altogether

too odd to be explained only by a long past dentist--she felt so very

low that she was unable to stop herself from thinking it was a pity

people didn't die a little oftener. Especially maids. Especially maids

who were being so clumsy with the cushions....

And the Master of Ananias had been there since before luncheon, and how

exhausting that was. She had had to do most of the entertaining of him,

the Bishop being unavoidably absent from the meal, and Ingeborg, who did

the conversation in that family, not being able to now because she was

in disgrace, and Judith, dear child, never saying much at any time. And

the Master had been very exuberant; and his vitality, delightful of

course but just a little overwhelming at his age, had reminded her that

she needed care. How difficult it had been to get him out into the

garden, to somewhere where she wasn't. She hadn't got him there till

half-past two, by which time he had been vital without stopping since

twelve, and even then she had had to invent a pear-tree in full blossom

that she wasn't at all sure about, and tell him she had heard it was a

wonderful sight and ought not to be missed. But how difficult it had

been. Judith had not seemed to want to show him the pear-tree, and he

would not go and look at it unless she went, too. Judith had gone at

last, but with an expression on her face as though she thought she was

going to have to bear things, and no girl should show a thought like

that before marriage. And then there had been an immense number of small

matters to see to because of the party, matters Ingeborg had always seen

to but couldn't now because she was in disgrace, and how difficult all

that was. Still, Mrs. Bullivant felt deeply if vaguely that nobody

temporarily evil should be allowed to minister to anybody permanently

good. Such persons, she felt, should be put aside into a place made

roomy for repentance by the clearing out of all claims. During the whole

of the week since her daughter's return she had not let her even pour

out tea, either when the riven family was by itself or when

congratulatory callers came. "Poor Ingeborg isn't very well," she had

murmured, quenching the inquisitiveness natural to callers. She had made

up her mind that first evening, when the full horror of what her

daughter had done became clear to her, that she would ask nothing of

her, not even tea.

But it did make difficulties. She felt entirely low, quite damp with the

exertion of meeting them, when she crept into position on the sofa at a

quarter to four and waited with closed eyes for the next wave of life

that would wash over her. And it all happened as she had feared--she was

perpetually having to explain Ingeborg. Guest after guest came up with

the expressions of rejoicing proper to guests invited to rejoice over

Judith, and the smiling laudations of what was indeed a vision of beauty

each ended with a question about Ingeborg. What had she been

doing?--(the awful innocence of the question)--how perfectly miserably

seedy she looked; poor little Ingeborg; was it really just that tiresome

tooth?

Mrs. Bullivant, as she murmured what she could in reply to this

ceaseless flow of sympathy from the retired officers and their wives and

daughters, and the cathedral dignitaries and their wives and daughters,

and the wives and daughters of the county who came without their men

because their men wouldn't come, felt vaguely but deeply that it was

somehow wrong that Ingeborg should both sin and be sympathised with. She

had no right, her injured mother felt, to look so small and stricken.

Her family had quite properly removed her outside the pale of their

affection till she should announce her broken-off engagement to that

dreadful German and ask to be forgiven for ever having been engaged at

all, but she ought not to look like somebody who is outside a pale. She

seemed positively to be advertising the pale. It was bad taste. It was

really the worst of taste when you were the sinner to look like the

sinned against; to look ill-used; to droop openly. Yet never could a

girl who had done such horrible, such detestably deceitful and vulgar

things, have been treated so gently by her family. It had been, Mrs.

Bullivant felt, the only good thing in a wretched affair, the perfect

breeding with which the Bullivants had met the situation. Not one of

them had even remotely alluded to the scene she had made the first

afternoon. No one had questioned her, no one had troubled her in any

way. She had been left quite free, and no one had exacted the smallest

sacrifice of her time to any of their needs. Her father had given her a

complete holiday, not allowing her at all in his study, and whenever she

had attempted to do anything for her mother or in the house Richards had

been rung for. Judith, dear child, seemed instinctively to do the right

thing, and without a word from her mother avoided Ingeborg; she was so

delicate about it, so fine in her feeling that here was something not

quite nice, that she turned red each time Ingeborg during the first day

or two tried to talk to her, and quietly went into another room. All the

last part of the week Ingeborg had spent in the garden, quite free,

quite undisturbed, not a claim on her. And yet here she was, standing

about at the party or sitting alone in foolish corners, thin, and pale,

and unsmiling, like a reproach.

Through a gap in the crowd Mrs. Bullivant presently saw her being talked

to by one who had once been a general but now in retirement wreaked his

disciplines on bees. She just had time to notice how her daughter

started and flushed when this man suddenly addressed her--such bad

manners to start and flush--before the crowd closed again. She shut her

eyes for a moment and felt very helpless. Who knew to what lengths

Ingeborg's bad manners might not go, and what she might not be saying to

the man?

What the general was telling her, with the hearty kindliness fathers of

other daughters use to daughters of other fathers--will use, indeed,

commented the Bishop observing the incident from afar and allowing

himself the solace of an instant's bitterness, to any created female

thing if only she will oblige them by not being their own--was that he

couldn't have her looking like this.

"Oh, like what?" asked Ingeborg quickly, starting and flushing; for her

week as an outcast had lowered her vitality to such an extent that she

was morbidly afraid her face might somehow have become a sort of awful

crystal in which everybody would be able to see the Rigi, and herself

being proposed to on its top.

"Shocking white about the gills," said the hearty man standing over her,

cup in hand and see-sawing on his toes and heels because his boots

creaked and it gave him a vague pleasure to make them go on doing it.

"You must come round and have a good game of tennis with Dorothy some

afternoon. You've been shut up working too hard at that letter-writing

business, that's what you've been doing, young lady."

"I wish I had--oh, I wish I had," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands

together and looking up at this stray bit of kindliness with a quick

gratefulness.

"We always think of you as sitting there writing, writing," the hearty

man went on, more intent on what he was saying than on what she was

saying. "Father's right hand, mother's indispensable, you know. I tell

Dorothy--"

Ingeborg twisted on her chair. "Oh," she said, "don't tell

Dorothy--don't tell her--"

"Tell her what? You don't know what I was going to say."

"Yes, I do--about that's how daughters ought to be--like _me_. And

Dorothy's so good and dear, and wouldn't ever in this world have gone

off to--"

She stopped, but only just in time, and looked at him frightened.

She had all but said it. The general, however, was staring at her with

kindly incomprehension. Her head drooped a little, and she gazed vaguely

at his toes as they rhythmically touched and were lifted up from the

carpet. "Nobody knows what anybody else is really like inside," she

finished forlornly.

"You come up and have some tennis," he said, patting her on the

shoulder. And later on to the Bishop he remarked, in his hearty desire

to have everything trim and in its proper place, the young in the fresh

air, older persons at desks in studies, white faces reserved for

invalids, roses blooming in the cheeks of girls, that he mustn't

overwork that little daughter of his.

"Overwork!" exclaimed the Bishop, full of bitter memories of an empty

week.

"Turn her out into the sun, Bully, my boy," said the general whose fag

the Bishop had been at Eton.

"Into the sun!" exclaimed the Bishop, having for six mortal days

observed her from windows horribly idling in it.

"If you keep 'em shut up you can't expect girls any more than you can

expect a decent bee to provide you with honey."

"Honey!" exclaimed the Bishop.

That Duchess who had wanted her eldest son to marry Judith tapped

Ingeborg on the arm with her umbrella as she passed her followed by her

daughter and said: "Little pale child, little pale child," and shook her

head at her and frowned and smiled, and whispered to Pamela that it

looked very like jealousy; and Pamela said Nonsense to that, and tried

to linger and talk to Ingeborg, but her mother, filled with the passion

for refreshment that seizes all persons who go to parties, dragged her

along with her to where it could be found, and on the way she was seen

by the Bishop, who at once left the old lady who was talking to him to

enfold Lady Pamela in his care and compass her about with a cloud of

little attentions--chairs, ices, fruit; for not only had he confirmed

her but he felt a peculiar interest in her particular kind of

clean-limbed intelligent beauty. Of all the confirmation crosses he had

given away he liked best to think of Lady Pamela's. Certainly in that

soft cradle, beneath the muslin and lace of propriety, he could be sure

it would not jangle against an illicit and alien ring.

"You still wear it?" he said, his beautiful voice, lowered to suit the

subject, charged with feeling as with his own hands he brought her tea;

and he felt a little checked, a little disappointed, when she said,

smiling at him, her grey eyes level with his so well grown was she,

"Wear what?"

And another thing this young woman did that afternoon that checked and

disappointed him--she showed a disposition to take care of him; and no

bishop of sixty, or indeed any other honest man of sixty, likes that.

"She thinks me _old_," he thought with acute and pained surprise as she

charmingly made him sit down lest he might be tired standing, and

charmingly shut a window behind them lest he should be in a draught, and

charmingly later on when he took her down the garden to show her the

pear-tree turned her pretty head and asked him over her shoulder whether

she were walking too fast. "She thinks me _old_," he thought; and it was

an amazement to him, for only last year he was still fifty-nine, still

in the fifties, and the fifties, once one was used to them, were nothing

at all.

He became very grave with Lady Pamela. He felt that the showing of the

pear-tree had lost a good deal of its savour. He felt it still more

when, turning the bend in the path that led to the secluded corner that

made the pear-tree popular as a resort, he perceived Ingeborg sitting

beneath it.

She was alone.

"Why is she always by herself?" asked Lady Pamela, who was, the Bishop

could not help thinking, being rather steadily tactless.

He made no answer. He was too seriously nettled. Apart from everything

else, to have one's daughter cropping up....

"Ingeborg--!" called Lady Pamela, waving her sunshade to attract her

attention as they walked on towards her, for Ingeborg, under the tree,

was sitting with her chin on her hand looking at nothing and once more

advertising by her attitude, Mrs. Bullivant would have considered, that

she was outside the pale.

"I think," said the Bishop pausing, "we ought perhaps to go back."

"Ought we? Oh, why? It's lovely here. Ingeborg!"

"I think," said the Bishop, now altogether annoyed at this persistent

determination to include his daughter--as though one could ever

satisfactorily include daughters--in what might have been a poetic

conversation between beauty and youth on the one side and prestige and

more than common gifts on the other, beauty, too, if you come to that,

and as great in its male ripe way as hers in its girlishness--"I think

that I at any rate must go back. My wife--"

"Ingeborg! Wake up! What are you dreaming about?"

Positively Lady Pamela was not listening to him.

He turned on his heel and left her to go on waving her sunshade at his

daughter if that was what she liked, and went back towards the house

reflecting that women really are quite sadly deficient in imagination

and that it is a great pity. Even this one, this well-bred, well-taught

bright being, was so unimaginative that she actually saw no reason why a

man's grown-up daughter.... Really a deficiency of imagination amounted

to stupidity. He hardly liked to have to admit that Lady Pamela was

stupid, but anyhow women ought not to have the vote.

He went away back into the main garden along the path by the great

herbaceous border then in a special splendour of tulips and all the

clean magnificence of May, thinking with his eyes on the ground how

different things would have been if when he was a curate he had been

sane enough not to marry. The clearness now in his life if only he had

not done that! Nobody sofa-ridden in it, no grown-up thwarting

daughters, and himself vigorous, distinguished, entirely desirable as a

husband, choosing with the mellow, yet not too mellow, wisdom of middle

life exactly who was best fitted to share the advantages he had to

offer. Even Lady Pamela would not then have been able to think of him as

old. It was his family that dated him: his grey-haired wife, his

grown-up daughters. The folly of curates! The black incurable folly of

curates. And he forgot for a gloomy instant what he as a rule with a

sigh acknowledged, that it had all been Providence, even then restlessly

at work guiding him, and that Mrs. Bullivant and the girls merely

constituted one of its many inscrutable ends.

The baser portion of the Bishop's brain was about to substitute another

word for guiding when he was saved--providentially, the nobler portion

of his brain instantly pointed out--by encountering the Duchess.

She was coming slowly along examining the plants in the border with the

interest of a garden-lover, and pointing out by means of her umbrella

the various successes to a man the Bishop took to be one of her party.

He was a big man in ill-fitting shiny black with something of the air of

one of the less reputable Cabinet Ministers and was, in fact, Herr

Dremmel; but no one except Herr Dremmel knew it. He had arrived that

afternoon, a man animated by a single purpose, which was to marry

Ingeborg as soon as possible and get back quickly to his work; and he

had come straight from the station to the Palace and walked in

unquestioned with all the others, and after a period of peering about in

the drawing-room for Ingeborg had drifted out into the garden, where he

had at once stumbled upon the Duchess, who was being embittered by a

prebendary of servile habits who insisted on agreeing with her as to the

Latin name of a patch of Prophet-flower when she knew all the time she

was wrong.

"You tell me," she said, turning on Herr Dremmel who was peering at

them.

"What shall I tell you, madam?" he inquired, politely sweeping off his

felt hat and bowing beautifully.

"This. What is its name? I've forgotten."

Herr Dremmel, who took a large interest in botany, immediately told her.

"Of course," said the Duchess. "I knew it was Arnebia even when I said

it was something else. It's a borage."

"_Arnebia echinoides_, madam," said Herr Dremmel peering closer. "A

native of Armenia."

"Of course they'll conquer us," remarked the Duchess to the prebendary.

"Oh, of course," he agreed, though he did not take her meaning, for he

had been a prebendary some time and was a little slow, intellectually,

at getting under way.

Then the Duchess dropped him and turned entirely to Herr Dremmel, who

though he had never seen a herbaceous border in his life by sheer

reasoning was able to tell her very intimately what the Bishop, who he

supposed did the digging, had been doing to it the previous autumn, and

the exact amount and nature of the fertilizers he had put in.

She was suggesting he should come back with her that afternoon to Coops

and stay there indefinitely, so profound and attractive did his

knowledge seem of what her own garden and her farm needed in the way of

a treatment he alluded to as cross-dressing, when he interrupted her--a

thing that had never happened to her before while inviting somebody to

Coops--to inquire why there were so very many people in the drawing-room

and on the lawn.

The Duchess stared. "It's a party," she said. "To celebrate the

betrothal. Don't you know?"

"I am gratified," said Herr Dremmel, "to find the parents so evidently

pleased. It adds a grace to what was already full of charm. But would it

not have been more complete if they had invited me?"

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess. "Much more complete. Well,

anyhow, here you are. So you think my soil wants nitrogen?"

"Certainly, madam. In the form of rape cake and ammonia salts--but

combined with organic manure. Artificial manure alone will not, in hot

weather--who is that?" he broke off, pointing with his umbrella to the

Bishop advancing along the path, his eyes on the ground, sardonically

meditating.

"What?" said the Duchess, intent on the notes she was making of his

recommendations in her note-book.

"That," said Herr Dremmel.

The Duchess looked up. "Why, the Bishop, of course. Go on about the hot

weather."

"Her father," said Herr Dremmel; and he advanced, hat in hand, and the

other held out in friendliest greeting, to meet him.

The Duchess went after him. "Bishop," she said, "this is a man who knows

all the things worth knowing." And the Bishop, taking this to be her

introduction of a friend, cordially returned Herr Dremmel's handshake.

He was never cordial again.

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel, "I am greatly pleased to make your

acquaintance. My name is Dremmel. Robert Dremmel."

The Bishop had just enough self-control not to snatch his hand away, but

to let Herr Dremmel continue to hold and press it. His mind began to

leap about. How to get the Duchess away; how to get Herr Dremmel turned,

noiselessly, out of the house; how to prevent Ingeborg's coming at any

moment along the path behind them with Lady Pamela....

"We have every reason, sir," said Herr Dremmel, holding the Bishop's

hand in a firm pressure, "to congratulate each other, I you, on the

possession of such a daughter, you me--"

"Isn't she a lovely girl," said the Duchess, for whom only Judith

existed in that family. "Would rape cake and the other thing help my

flowers at all, or is it only for the mangels?"

"Mangels!" thought the Bishop, "Rape cake!" And swiftly glanced behind

him down the path.

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel, desiring to be very pleasant to the Bishop and

slightly waving the Duchess aside, "permit me also to congratulate

you--"

"_Have_ you had any tea?" inquired the Bishop desperately of the

Duchess, turning to her and getting his hand away.

"Thank you, yes. Well, Mr. Dremmel? Don't interrupt him, Bishop, he's

_most_ interesting."

"--on the results," continued Herr Dremmel to the Bishop, "of your

autumnal activities. This blaze of flowers is sufficient witness to the

devotion, the assiduity--"

"You don't suppose he did it himself, do you?" said the Duchess.

"And your costume, sir," said Herr Dremmel, concentrated on the Bishop

and earnestly desiring to please, "suggests a quite particular and

familiar interest in what this lady rightly calls the things really

worth knowing."

"But he can't help wearing that," said the Duchess.

Again Herr Dremmel, and with some impatience, waved her aside.

"It is a costume most appropriate in a garden," he continued. "Even the

gaiters are horticultural, and the apron is pleasantly reminiscent of

the innocence of our first parents. So Adam might have dressed--"

"Oh, but you _must_ come to Coops!" cried the Duchess. "Bishop, he's to

come back with me."

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel with something of severity, for he was

beginning to consider the Duchess forward, "is this lady Mrs. Bishop?"

"Oh, oh!" screamed the Duchess, while Herr Dremmel watched her

disapprovingly and the Bishop struggled not to seize him by the throat.

"My dear Bishop," said the Duchess, wiping her eyes, "I never had such a

compliment paid me. The best-looking bishop on the bench--"

"_Do_ come indoors," he implored. "I can't really let you stand about

like this--"

"Thank you, I'm not in the least tired. Go on, Mr. Dremmel."

"Sir, can I see you alone?" said Herr Dremmel, now without any doubt as

to the Duchess's forwardness. "On such an occasion as this, before we

begin together openly to rejoice it seems fitting we should first by

ourselves, unless this lady is your daughter's mother--"

"Oh, oh!" again screamed the Duchess.

The Bishop turned on him in a kind of blaze, quite uncontrollable. "Yes,

sir, you can," he said. "Come into my study--"

"What? Are you going to take him away from me?" cried the Duchess.

"My dear Duchess, if he has business with me--" said the Bishop. "I'll

take you indoors first," he said, offering her his arm. "This

gentleman"--he glared at him sideways, and Herr Dremmel, all unused as

he was to noticing hostility, yet was a little surprised at the

expression of his face--"will wait here. No, no, he won't, he'll come,

too"--for approaching round the bushes behind which grew the pear-tree

the Bishop had caught sight of skirts. "Come on, sir--"

"But--" said the Duchess, as the Bishop drew her hand hastily through

his arm and began to walk her off more quickly than she had been walked

off for years.

"Come on, sir--" the Bishop flung back, almost hissed back, at Herr

Dremmel.

"One moment," said Herr Dremmel holding up his hand, his gaze fixed on

what was emerging from the bushes.

"Come _on_, sir!" cried the Bishop, "I can only see you alone if you

come at once--"

But Herr Dremmel did not heed him. He was watching the bushes.

"Will you come?" said the Bishop, pausing and stamping his foot, while

he held the Duchess tight in the grip of his arm.

"Why," said Herr Dremmel without heeding him, "why--yes--why it

_is_--why, here at last appears the Little Sugar Lamb!"

"The little _what_?" said the Duchess, resolutely pulling out her hand

from the Bishop's arm and putting up her eyeglass. "Heavens above us, he

can't mean Pamela?"

But nobody answered her; and indeed it was not necessary, for Herr

Dremmel, gone down the path with a swiftness amazing in one of his

appearance, was already, in the sight of all Redchester and most of the

county, enfolding Ingeborg in his arms.

"Of course," was the Duchess's comment to the Bishop as she watched the

scene with her eyeglass up and the placidity of relief, "of course they

will conquer us."

CHAPTER XI

And so it came to pass that Herr Dremmel, armed only with simplicity,

set aside the resistances of princes, potentates, and powers, and was

married to Ingeborg by her father the Bishop in his own cathedral. And

it was done as quickly as the law allowed, not only because Herr Dremmel

was determined it should be, but because the enduring of his daily

arrival for courting purposes from Coops, where he was staying, became

rapidly impossible for the Bishop. Also there was the Master of Ananias,

spurred to a frenzy of activity by Herr Dremmel's success in getting

things hurried on, insisting that he had been engaged long enough and

demanding to be married on the same day.

In the end he was, and Ingeborg's wedding, being Judith's as well, was

unavoidably splendid. All along the line the Bishop's hand was forced.

The very wedding-dress had to be as beautiful for the one as for the

other of his daughters; and, absurdly and wickedly, he was obliged to

spend as much on her trousseau who was going into pauperdom and

obscurity for the rest of her days as on hers who would no doubt be

soon, though of course only in God's good time, the most magnificent of

widows. He never afterwards was able to feel quite the same to the

Duchess. Without knowing anything of the circumstances, of the secret

disgrace of the affair, of the blank undesirability in any case of such

a son-in-law, of the extraordinary inconvenience and pecuniary loss of

Ingeborg's marrying at all, she had taken up Herr Dremmel to an extent

that was positively near making her ridiculous, supposing that, humanly

speaking, were possible, and had rammed him down the county's throat

till at last it believed that of the two husbands Ingeborg had secured

the better. And this gossip filtered through into the Palace, and

Judith, who never did speak, spoke less than ever, but edging away more

and more decidedly from the blandishments of the Master, who had not

been invited to Coops, spent most of her time in her own room engaged in

not looking at her trousseau; and the Palace became such an

uncomfortable place what with one thing and another, and the strain of

remaining calm and becoming in conduct to the ducally protected Herr

Dremmel was so great, that at last the Bishop was as eager as any one to

get the wedding over and feverishly furthered any scheme that would, by

hastening it, deliver him.

To Ingeborg he never spoke, but turned away with the same cold horror

that came over the rest of the family when from windows he or it beheld

her being courted with what seemed a terrible German thoroughness in

places like the middle of the lawn. He could no longer walk round his

own garden without meeting an interlaced couple; and though he suggested

to Herr Dremmel with what he felt was really admirable self-restraint

that these public endearments might give rise to comment, Herr Dremmel

merely replied that as Ingeborg was his _Braut_ it ought to give rise to

much more comment, even to justifiable complaints, if his manner to her

were less warm.

"In England we do not--" began the Bishop; but broke off for fear of

losing his self-restraint. And Herr Dremmel and Ingeborg continuing to

perambulate the garden slowly, with a frequent readjusting of their

steps to each other's--for it is a difficult method, the interlaced one,

of getting along a path--the Bishop and Mrs. Bullivant retreated for

refreshment and comfort to the delicacy of Judith, to her lovely

withdrawals. That the Master should blandish was natural, because a man

is natural; but they knew that a woman, if she is to approach any ideal

of true womanhood, cannot be too carefully unnatural, and should she be

persuaded or betrayed into some expression of affection for her lover,

some answering caress, at least she must not like it. And there was

Ingeborg progressing round the garden as described, or in the middle of

the lawn openly having her hand held, and looking pleased.

It was rank.

[Illustration: 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. The _cosiness_ of 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't _much_

alive--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 all _good_--isn't

it all _good_--"

"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 never _had_ any 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 children _like_?"

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.

PART II

CHAPTER XII

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?"

[Illustration: "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 expect _devils_ to 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.

CHAPTER XIII

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, and _Gott 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 it _was_ good. 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. "The

_noise_ you 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, the _Christian 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 called _Bibi 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 was _The 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't_ one 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 the _Gewesene_--and the mothers of the generation to be

born--he called them the _Werdende_. 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.

CHAPTER XIV

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

except _liebe 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.

[Illustration: Especially her gaze lingered on her feet. Becoming aware

of this, Ingeborg tried to hide them]

She could not again say _schön_, and the meal went on in silence. Frau

Dremmel's method of eating it was to begin a piece of each of the cakes

and immediately leave it off. This afflicted Ingeborg, who had supposed

them to be very lovely cakes. Frau Dremmel's place at the table--she had

pulled her chair close up to it--was asterisked with begun and abandoned

cakes. On the other hand she ate many of the sandwiches, and they drew

forth the only word she said to Ingeborg during the whole of tea.

"_Fleisch_," said Frau Dremmel, removing her eyes for one moment from

Ingeborg to the sandwiches that were being offered her, and with a

dingy, investigating forefinger lifting up that portion of each sandwich

which may be described as its lid.

"_Ja, ja_," said Ingeborg responsively, delighted at this flicker of

life.

It was, however, the only one. After it silence, complete and

impenetrable, settled down on Frau Dremmel. She did not even speak to

her son when half an hour later he came out in search of the coffee he

had failed to find on his doormat. Her manners prevented her, in his

house on this first visit after his marriage, from uttering the

unmanageable truths that come so naturally from the mouths of neglected

mothers; and except for those she had nothing to say to him. Herr

Dremmel expected nothing. His deeply engaged thoughts left no room in

him for anything but a primitive simplicity. He was hungry, and he ate;

thirsty, and he drank. The silent figure at the table, of whose presence

every nerve in Ingeborg's body was conscious, produced no impression on

him whatever.

"Robert--do tell your mother how I really _do_ want to talk to her if

only I could," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together in her lap and

tying and untying her handkerchief into knots. There were little beads

on her upper lip. The rings of hair on her temples were quite damp.

He glanced at his mother, drawn up and taut in her chair, and

immediately she turned her eyes on to him and stared back at him

steadily.

"Little One," he said, "I have told you she is a simple woman, not used

to or capable of wielding the weapons of social arts. Be simple, too,

and all will be well."

"But I _am_ being simple," protested Ingeborg. "I'm dumb; I'm blank;

what can I be simpler than that?"

"Then all is well. Give me coffee."

He ate and drank in silence, and got up to go away again.

Frau Dremmel looked at him and said something.

"Is it the carriage?" asked Ingeborg.

"She wants to go indoors," said Herr Dremmel.

"Indoors?"

"She says she does not like mosquitoes."

He went away into the house. There was nothing for it but to follow. As

they reached the back door the church clock struck five, but Ingeborg,

glancing at her mother-in-law's impassive face, saw this sound meant

nothing to her. She followed her into the living-room and watched her

helplessly as she arranged herself once more on the sofa.

When the clock struck half-past five she was still on it. She seemed to

be waiting. For what was she waiting? Ingeborg asked herself, whose

handkerchief was now rubbed into a hard ball between her nervous hands.

Impossible either to move her or communicate with her. Rigidly she sat,

her eyes examining the room and each object in it but yet not for an

instant missing the least of her daughter-in-law's movements. Ingeborg

seized her dictionary and grammar and made a final effort to build a

bridge out of them across which their souls might even now go out to

meet each other, but Frau Dremmel did not seem to understand the nature

of her efforts, and only stared with a deepened blankness when Ingeborg

read her out a sentence from the grammar that dealt with weather they

were not that day having.

What was she waiting for? Seven o'clock struck, and still she waited.

The clock in the room ticked through the minutes, and every half hour

they could hear the church clock striking. Ingeborg brought her a

footstool; brought her a cushion; brought her, in extremity, a glass of

water; began to sew at a torn duster; left off sewing at it; fluttered

nervously among the pages of her grammar; pored in her dictionary; and

always Frau Dremmel watched her. She found herself struggling against a

tendency to think of her mother-in-law as It. At seven she heard Ilse go

home singing--happy Ilse, able to go away. Soon afterwards she finally

faltered into immobility, giving up, sitting now quite still herself in

her chair, the flush faded from her cheek, pale and crumpled. It was her

and Robert's supper-time. Soon it would be their bedtime. Quite soon it

would be to-morrow. And then it would be next week. And then there would

be winter coming on.... Was this visit never to end?

At eight it at last became plain to her that what Frau Dremmel was

waiting for must be supper. This was terrible, for there was none. At

least, there was only that repetition of tea and breakfast that made her

and Robert's lives so wholesome. She had calculated the visit on the

basis of tea only, and had prepared only and elaborately for that. For

half an hour she sat on and hoped she was mistaken. She did not know

that in East Prussia if you are invited to tea you also stay to supper.

But at half-past eight she realised that there was nothing for it but to

go and fetch it in.

When the ruins of the same meal that had been offered her once already

were produced a second time and set out clumsily on the unaccustomed

living-room table among the pushed-aside Merediths and Kiplings, the

bones of this skeleton being slowly put together under her very eyes,

and Ingeborg at last by ceasing to go in and out fetching things and

sinking into a chair indicated that that was all, Frau Dremmel, after

waiting a little longer, opened her mouth and startled her

daughter-in-law by speech.

"_Bratkartoffel_," said Frau Dremmel.

Ingeborg sat up quickly. After the hours of silence it was uncanny.

"_Bratkartoffel_," said Frau Dremmel again.

"Did you--did you speak?" said Ingeborg, staring at her.

"_Bratkartoffel_," said Frau Dremmel a third time.

Ingeborg jumped up and ran across the passage to the laboratory door.

"Robert--Robert," she cried, twisting the handle, "come--come

quickly--your mother--she's talking, she's saying things--" There was

the same excitement and wonder in her voice as there is in that of a

parent whose baby has suddenly and for the first time said Papa.

Herr Dremmel came out at once. From the sound of her he felt something

must have happened.

She seized him and pulled him into the living-room. "Now--listen," she

said, holding him there facing the sofa.

Herr Dremmel looked perplexed. "What is it, Little One?" he asked.

"Listen--she'll say it again soon," said Ingeborg eagerly.

"What is it, mother?" he asked in German.

Frau Dremmel, without moving her head, ran her eyes over the table.

"Are there not even--not even--" she began, but stopped. She was

evidently combating an emotion.

"Thunder of heaven," said Herr Dremmel, looking from one woman to the

other, "what is it?"

But Frau Dremmel was not able, after the hours of waiting for a supper

that seemed to her in every detail a studied insult on her

daughter-in-law's part, to bear harshness from her son. Drawing out a

handkerchief that had no end and that reached to her eyes while yet

remaining in her pocket, she began to cry.

Ingeborg was appalled. She ran to her, and, kneeling down, begged her in

English to tell her what was the matter. She called her _liebe

Schwiegermutter_ over and over again. She stroked her sleeve, she patted

her, she even laid her head on her lap.

But Frau Dremmel for the first time did not notice her. She was saying

detached things into her handkerchief, and they were all for her son.

"A widow," wept Frau Dremmel. "A widow for ten years. When I think of

your dear father. How much he thought of me. My first visit. My visit on

your marriage. Treated as though I were anybody. Forced to drink coffee

out of doors. Like a homeless animal. No sofa. No real table. Flocks of

mosquitoes. No supper. No supper at all. Nothing prepared for me. For

the mother. For your sainted father's wife. His cherished wife long

before you were thought of. If it had not been for me you would not have

been here at all. Nor she. And I am to go home unfed. Uncared for. Not

even the least one has a right to expect given one. Not even what the

poorest peasant has each night. Not even"--again she said the magic

word--"_Bratkartoffel_--"

"There, there," said Ingeborg soothingly, stroking her

anxiously--"there, there. Robert, what _is Bratkartoffel_?"

"But never mind. Never mind," said Frau Dremmel, wiping her eyes only to

weep afresh--"soon I shall be with him. With him again. With your dear

father. And this--this is nothing, all nothing. It is only the will of

God."

"There, there," said Ingeborg, anxiously stroking her.

CHAPTER XV

It was not until some days later that she discovered the reason for her

mother-in-law's tears.

She could get no information from Herr Dremmel. His thoughts were not to

be pinned a minute to such a subject. He swept her questionings away

with the wave of the arm of one who sweeps his surroundings clear of

rubbish, and the most that could be extracted from him was a general

observation as to the small amount of good to be obtained from

proximities. But Ingeborg one afternoon, walking longer than usual,

facing the hot sun and the flies and sand of the road beyond the village

to see where it led to instead of, as she generally did, exploring

footpaths in the forest, came after much heat and exertion to a thicket

of trees that were not firs or pines but green cool things, oaks, and

acacias and silver birches, and going through them along a grass-grown

road fanning herself with her hat as she walked in the pleasant shade,

found herself stopped by a white gate, a notice telling her she was not

to advance further, and a garden. Beyond the flower beds and long untidy

grass of this garden she saw a big steep-roofed house built high on a

terrace. On the terrace a dog was lying panting, with its tongue out.

Nothing else alive was in sight, and there were no sounds except the

rustling of the leaves over her head and such faint chirping as birds

make in July.

"Who lives in that big white house away over there?" she asked Herr

Dremmel when next she saw him, which was not till that evening at

supper; and she nodded her head, her hands being full of the coffee pot,

in the direction of the north.

Herr Dremmel was ruffled. He had been plunged in parish affairs since

breakfast, for it was the day appointed by him and recurring once a

fortnight into which by skilful organizing he packed them all. The world

in consequence on every second Tuesday appeared to him a place of folly.

People were born and lived embedded in ancient folly. The folly of their

parents, already stale when they got it, was handed down to them intact,

not shot at all, thought Herr Dremmel on these alternate Tuesdays, with

the smallest ray of perception of different and better things. The

school children were still learning about Bismarck's birthday, the

schoolmaster was still laboriously computing attendances and

endeavouring to obey the difficult law which commanded him to cane the

absent, the elders of the church were still refusing to repair the

steeple in time, the confirmation class was still meeting explanations

and exhortations with thick inattention, the ecclesiastical authorities

were still demanding detailed reports of progress when there was not and

could not be progress, couples were still forgetting marriage until the

last hurried moment and then demanding it with insistent cries, infants

were still being hastily christened before the same neglects that killed

those other infants who else might have been their proud and happy

grandparents carried them off, and peasants were still slinking away at

the bare mention of intelligence and manure.

He was exceedingly ruffled; for while he had been wrestling with these

various acquiescences and evasions his real work was lying neglected out

there in the sun, in there in the laboratory, and a whole day of twelve

precious hours was gone for ever; and when Ingeborg said, "Who lives in

that big white house?" Herr Dremmel, with his wasted day behind him, and

the continued brassiness of the heavens above him, and the persistence

in that place of trees of mosquitoes, stared at her a moment and then

said, bringing his hand down violently on the table, "Hell and Devils."

"Who?" said Ingeborg.

"We must call on them at once."

"What?"

"My patron. He will be incensed that I have not presented you sooner. I

forgot him. That will be another day lost. These claims, these social

claims--"

He got up and took some agitated steps about the table.

"No sooner," he said, frowning angrily at the path, "has one settled one

thing than there appears another. To-day, all day the poor. To-morrow,

all day the rich--"

"Do we call continuously all day?"

"--both equally obstinate, both equally encased from head to foot in the

impenetrable thick armour of intellectual sloth. How," he inquired,

turning to her with all the indignant wrath of the thwarted worker, "is

a man to work if he lives in a constant social whirl?"

Ingeborg sat regarding him with astonishment. "He can't," she said.

"But--do we whirl, Robert? Would one call what we do here whirling?"

"What? When my work has been neglected all day to-day on behalf of the

poor and will be neglected all day to-morrow on behalf of the rich?"

"But why will it take us all day?"

"A man must prepare, he cannot call as he is. He must," said Herr

Dremmel with irritable gloom, "wash." And he added with still greater

irritation and gloom, "There has to be a clean shirt."

"But--" began Ingeborg.

He waved her into silence. "I do not like," he said, with a magnificent

sweep of his arm, "clean shirts."

She stared at him with the parted lips of interest.

"I am not at home in them. I am not myself in a clean shirt for at least

the first two hours."

"Don't let's call," said Ingeborg. "We're so happy as we are."

"Nay," said Herr Dremmel, immediately brought to reason by his wife's

support of his unreason, "but we must call. There are duties no decent

man neglects. And I am a decent man. I will send a messenger to inquire

if our visit to-morrow will be acceptable. I will put on my shirt early

in order to get used to it. And I will endeavour, by a persistent

amiability so long as the visit lasts, to induce my patron to forget

that I forgot him."

Herr Dremmel had for some time past been practising forgetting his

patron. He had found this course, after divers differences of opinion,

simplest and most convenient. The patron, Baron Glambeck of Glambeck,

was a serious real Christian who believed that the poor should, like

some vast pudding that will not otherwise turn out well, be constantly

stirred up, and he was unable to approve of a pastor who except in

church and on every alternate Tuesday forbore to stir. It was for this

forbearance, however, that Herr Dremmel was popular in the parish.

Before his time there had been a constant dribble of pastor all over it,

making it never a moment safe from intrusion. Herr Pastor Dremmel might

be fiery in the pulpit, but he was quite quiet out of it; he was like a

good watchdog, savage in its kennel and indifferent when loose. Kökensee

had as one man refused to support the patron when he had wished some

time before to bring about Herr Dremmel's removal. Its pastor did not go

from house to house giving advice. Its pastor was invisible and

absorbed. These were great things in a clergyman, and should not lightly

be let go. Nothing could be done in the face of the parish's opposition,

and Kökensee kept its pastor; but Baron Glambeck ceased to patronise

Divine Service in Kökensee, and until Herr Dremmel brought Ingeborg to

make his wedding call he had had no word with him for three years.

The Dremmels had announced themselves for four o'clock, and when they

drove up to the house along the shady grass road and through the white

gate they were met on the steps of the terrace by a servant who, if he

had been in Redchester, would have been Wilson. On the top of the steps

stood Baron Glambeck, tightly buttoned-up in black, formal, grave.

Further back, beneath the glass roof of the terrace, stood his wife,

tightly buttoned-up in black, formal, grave. They were both, if Ingeborg

had known it, extremely correct according to the standards of their part

of the country. They were unadorned, smoothed out, black, she abundant

in her smoothness, he spare in his; and they greeted Ingeborg with

exactly the cordiality suitable to the reception of one's pastor's new

wife, who ought to have been brought to call long ago but was not in any

way responsible for those bygones which studded their memory so

disagreeably in connection with her husband, a cordiality with the chill

on. Dignity and coats of arms pervaded the place. Monograms with

coronets were embroidered and painted on everything one sat on or

touched. The antlers of deer shot by the Baron, with the dates and

places of their shooting affixed to each, bristled thickly on the walls.

They saw no servant who was not a man.

"Please take your hat off," said the Baroness in English, carefully

keeping her voice slightly on the side of coldness.

Ingeborg was very nearly frightened.

She would have been quite frightened if she had been less well trained

by the Bishop in unimportance. She had, however, owing to this training,

left off being shy years before. She had so small an opinion of herself

that there was no room in her at all for self-consciousness; and she

arrived at the Glambecks' in her usual condition of excessive

naturalness, ready to talk, ready to be pleased and interested.

But it was conveyed to her instantly on seeing the Baroness--there was

an astonishment in the way she looked at her--that her clothes were not

right. And just the request or suggestion or demand--she did not know

which of these it really was--that she should take off her hat, made her

realise she was on new ground, in places where the webs of strange

customs were thick about her feet.

She was, for a moment, very nearly frightened.

"You will be more comfortable," said the Baroness, "without your hat."

She took it off obediently, glancing beneath her eyelashes, as she drew

out the pins, at the Baroness's smooth black head and unwrinkled black

body, perceiving with the clearness of a revelation that that was how

she ought to look herself. Skimpier, of course, for the years had not

yet had their will with her, but she ought to be a version of the effect

done in lean. She resolved, in her thirst after fulfilled duty, to get a

black dress and practise.

She thought it wisest not to think what her hair must be looking like

when her hat was off, for she had not expected to be hatless, and well

did she know it by nature for a straggler, a thing inclined to wander

from the grasp of hairpins and go off on its own account into wantonings

and rings which were all the more conspicuous because of their lurid

approach in colouring to the beards of her ancestors--sun-kissed

Scandinavians who walked the earth in their strength hung, according to

the way the light took them, with beards that were either the colour of

flames, or of apricots, or of honey. Well, if they _would_ make her take

her hat off....

By the time she was on the sofa she was presently put on in the inner

hall she had caught up with her usual condition of naturalness again,

and sat on it interested and forgetful of self. The Baroness's eyes

wandered over her, and they wandered over her with much the same quality

in their look that had been in her mother-in-law's. And always when they

got to her feet they lingered. Her skirt again reached only to her

ankles. All her outdoor skirts did that. "But I can't help _having_

feet," thought Ingeborg, noticing this. They were small by nature, and

the artful shoes of the London shoemaker who had shared in providing her

and Judith's trousseau made them seem still smaller. She did not try to

hide them as she had tried when Frau Dremmel stared. It was Frau

Dremmel's heavy silence that had unnerved her. These people talked; and

the Baroness's English was reassuringly good.

Nobody, the Baroness was thinking, and also simultaneously the Baron,

who was fit to be a pastor's wife had feet like that--little, incapable

feet. Nobody, indeed, who was a really nice woman had them. One left off

having them when one was a child and never had them again. The errands

of domesticity on which one ran, the perpetual up and down of stairs,

the hours standing on the cold stone floor of servants' quarters seeing

that one was not cheated, the innumerable honourable activities that

beautified and dignified womanhood, necessitated large loose shoes. A

true wife's feet should have room to spread and flatten. Feet were one

of those numerous portions of the body that had been devised by an

all-wise Creator for use and not show.

As for the rest of the Frau Pastor's appearance there were, it is true,

some young ladies in the country who dressed rather like that in the

summer, but they were ladies in the Glambeck set, ladies of family or

married into family. That the person who had married one's pastor, a man

whose father had been of such obscure beginnings, and indeed

continuations, that even his having been dead ten years hardly made him

respectable, should dress in this manner was a catastrophe. Already they

had suffered too much from the conduct of their loose-talking,

unchristian pastor; and now, instead of bringing a neat woman in black

to be presented to them, a neat woman with a gold chain, perhaps, round

her high black collar, it being a state occasion and she, after all,

newly married--but only a very light chain, and inherited not

bought--and a dress so sufficient that it reached beyond and enveloped

anything she might possess in the way of wrist or ankle or throat, here

was the most unsuitable wife he could have chosen--short, of course, of

marrying among Jews. While as for her hair, when it came to her hair

their thoughts ceased to formulate. That small and flattened and

disordered head, like a boy's head run wild, like something on fire,

which emerged when she took off her hat....

Coffee was served on the big table in front of the sofa. The Baroness

sat beside Ingeborg, and the Baron and Herr Dremmel drew up chairs

opposite. The coffee was good, and there was one excellent cake. No

gooseberries, no flowers, no unwieldy sandwiches; just plainness and

excellence.

The two men talked to each other, not to the women, the Baron stiffly

and on his guard, Herr Dremmel taking immense pains to be amiable and

not offend. Between them hung the memories of altercations. Between them

also hung the knowledge of the three years during which the Baron and

his wife, as a result of the last and hottest difference of opinion, had

attended Divine Service in a church that did not belong to them. They

had altogether cut Kökensee. For three years their private gallery in

the church in which their ancestors had once a fortnight feared God had

been a place where mice enjoyed themselves. Its chairs were covered with

dust; its hymn-books, growing brown, still lay open at the place the

Glambecks had praised God out of last. Such a withdrawal of approval

would have made any other pastor's life a thing of chill and bleakness;

Herr Dremmel hardly observed it. He had no vanities. He was pleased that

the rival pastor should be gratified. He cared nothing for comment, and

had no eye for shrugs and smiles. His eyes, his thoughts, were wanted

for his work; and he found it a relief, a release from at least one

interruption, when his patron took to leaving him frigidly alone.

Indeed, when he drove up to the Glambecks' house and remembered he had

not had to go there for three peaceful years he felt really grateful,

and he showed his gratitude by performing immense feats of social

pleasantness during the visit. He agreed gigantically with everything

the Baron said. Whatever subject was touched upon---very cautiously, for

the Baron mistrusted all subjects with Herr Dremmel--he instantly

dragged it off the dangerous shoals of the immediate and close up to a

cosmic height and distance, a height and distance so enormous that even

what the Kaiser said last became a negligible tinkling and Conscience

and Dogma quavered off into silence; and he explained to the Baron, who

guardedly said "Perhaps," that though people's opinions might and did

vary seen near, if one spread them out wide enough, pushed them back far

enough, took them up high enough, bored them down deep enough, got them

away from detail and loose from foregrounds, one would come at last to

the great Mother Opinion of them all, in whose huge lap men curled

themselves up contentedly like the happy identities they indeed were and

went, after kissing each other, in placidest agreement to sleep.

"Perhaps," said the Baron.

Personalities, immediate interests, duties, daily life, were swamped in

the vast seas in which, with politeness but determination, Herr Dremmel

took the Baron swimming. One only needed, he repeated, warm with the

wish to keep in roomy regions, to trace back any two opinions, however

bitterly different they now were, far enough to get at last to the point

where they sweetly kissed.

"Perhaps," said the Baron.

"One only needed--" went on Herr Dremmel, making all-embracing movements

with his arms.

But the Baron cleared his throat and began to enumerate contrary facts.

Herr Dremmel agreed at once that he was right just there, and pushed the

point of kissing back a little further.

The Baron went after him with more facts.

Herr Dremmel again agreed, and went back further. In this way they came

at last to the Garden of Eden, beyond which the Baron refused to budge,

alleging that further back than that no Christian could go; and even in

that he repudiated the kiss. He was convinced, though he concealed it,

that at no period of human thought could his and Herr Dremmel's

opinions, for example, have kissed.

But it was an amiable view, and Herr Dremmel was extremely polite and

was bent evidently on peace, and the Baron, recognising this, became

less distrustful. He even contributed a thought of his own at last,

after having been negatively occupied in dissecting Herr Dremmel's, and

said that in his opinion it was details that made life difficult.

The Baroness, who loved him and overheard him, was anxious he should

have more coffee with plenty of milk in it after this.

"Men," she explained to Ingeborg in careful English as she poured it

out, "need much nourishment because of all this head-work."

"I suppose they do," said Ingeborg.

"When I was first married I remember it was my chief pride and joy that

at last I had some one of my very own to nourish."

"Oh?" said Ingeborg.

"It is an instinct," said the Baroness, who had the air of administering

a lesson, "in a true woman. She wishes to nourish. And naturally the joy

of nourishing two is double the joy of nourishing one."

"I suppose it is," said Ingeborg, who did not quite follow.

"When my first-born--"

"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg, glad to understand.

"When my first-born was laid in my arms I cannot express, Frau Pastor,

what happiness I had in being given yet another human being to nourish."

"I suppose it was delightful," said Ingeborg, politely sympathetic.

The Baroness's eyes drooped a moment inquiringly from Ingeborg's face to

her body.

"For six years," she went on, after a pause, "I had fresh reason for

happiness regularly at Christmas."

"I suppose you have the loveliest Christmases here," said Ingeborg.

"Like the ones in books. With trees."

"Trees? Naturally we have trees. But I had babies as well. Every

Christmas for six years regularly my Christmas present to my dear

husband was able to be a baby."

"What?" said Ingeborg, opening her eyes. "A fresh one?"

"Naturally it was fresh. One does not have the same baby twice."

"No, of course not. But--how did you hide it till Christmas day?"

"It could not, naturally," said the Baroness stiffly, "be as much a

surprise as a present that was not a baby would have been, but it was

for all practical purposes hidden till Christmas. On that day it was

born."

"Oh, but I think that was very wonderful," said Ingeborg, genuinely

pleased by such neatness. She leaned forward in her enthusiasm and

clasped her hands about her knees.

"Yes," said the Baroness, relaxing a little before this flattering

appreciation. "Yes. It was. Some people would call it chance. But we, as

Christians, knew it was heaven."

"But how _punctual_," said Ingeborg admiringly, "how _tidy_!"

"Yes, yes," mused the Baroness, relaxing still more in the warm moisture

of remembrance, "they were happy times. Happy, happy times. One's little

ones coming and going--"

"Oh? Did they go as well as come?" asked Ingeborg, lowering her voice to

condolence.

"About one's knees, I mean, and the house."

"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg, relieved.

"Every year the Christmas candles shining down on an addition to our

treasures. Every year the gifts of past Christmases gathered about the

tree again, bigger and stronger instead of being lost or broken as they

would have been if they had been any other kind of gift."

"But what happened when there weren't any more to give?"

"Then I gave my husband cigar-cases."

"Oh."

"After all, most women have to do that all their lives. I did not

grumble. When heaven ceased to provide me with a present for him, I knew

how to bow my head and went and bought one. There are excellent

cigar-cases at Wertheim's in Königsberg if you wish to give one to Herr

Pastor next Christmas. They do not come unsewn at the corners by July

or August in the way those one buys in other shops do. Ah, yes. Happy

years. Happy, happy years. First the six years of great joy collecting

my family, and then the years of happiness bringing it up. Of course you

are fond of children?"

"I've never had any."

"Naturally you have not," said the Baroness, stiffening again.

"So I don't know," said Ingeborg.

"But every true woman loves little children," said the Baroness.

"But they must be _there_," said Ingeborg.

"One has God-implanted instincts," said the Baroness.

"But one must _see_ something to practise them on," said Ingeborg.

"A true woman is all love," said the Baroness, in a voice that sounded

very like scolding.

"I suppose she is," said Ingeborg, who felt that she never could have

met one. She had a vision of something altogether soft and squelchy and

humid and at the same time wonderful. "Are any of your children at

home?" she asked, thinking she would like to test her instincts on the

younger Glambecks.

"They are grown up and gone. Out into the world. Some far away in other

countries. Ah, yes. One is lonely--" The Baroness became loftily

plaintive. "It is the lot of parents. Lonely, lonely. I had five

daughters. It was a great relief to get them all married. There was

naturally the danger where there were so many of some of them staying

with us always."

"But then you wouldn't have been lonely," said Ingeborg.

"But then, Frau Pastor, they would not have been married."

"No. And then," said Ingeborg, interested, "you wouldn't have been able

to _feel_ lonely."

The Baroness gazed at her.

"These things are _nice_, you know," said Ingeborg, leaning forward

again in her interest. "One does _like_ it somehow--being sad, you know,

and thinking how lonely one is. Of course it's much more delicious to be

happy, but not being happy has its jollinesses. There's a perfume...."

She sought about in her mind--"It's like a wet day. It looks gloomy and

miserable compared to what yesterday was like, but there _is_ an

enjoyment. And things"--she hesitated, groping--"things seem to grow.

Different ones. Yet they're beautiful, too."

But the Baroness, who did not follow and did not want to, for it was not

her business to listen to her pastor's wife, drooped an inquiring eye

again over Ingeborg's body and cut her tendency to talk more than was

becoming in her position short by remarking that she was still very

thin.

When they had sat there till the coffee was cold Ingeborg, in a pause of

the talk, got up to go.

The three others stared at her without moving. Even her own Robert

stared uncomprehending. It seemed a lame thing to have to explain that

she was now going home, but that was what she did at last murmur down to

the motionless and surprised Baroness.

"Are you not feeling well?" inquired the Baroness.

"What is it, Ingeborg?" asked Herr Dremmel.

The Baron went over to a window and opened it. "A little faint, no

doubt," he said, adding something about young wives.

The Baroness asked her if she would like to lie down.

Herr Dremmel became alert and interested. "What is it, Little One?" he

asked again, getting up.

"I think it would be good if the Frau Pastor rested a little before

supper," said the Baroness, getting up, too.

"Certainly," said Herr Dremmel, quite eagerly, and with a funny

expression on his face.

Ingeborg gazed from one to the other.

"But, Robert," she said, wondering why he looked like that, "oughtn't we

to go home?"

"Dear Frau Pastor," said the Baroness quite warmly, "you will feel

better presently. Believe me. There is an hour still before supper. Come

with me, and you shall lie down and rest."

"But Robert--" said Ingeborg, astonished.

She was, however, taken away--it seemed a sort of sweeping of her

away--through glass doors, down a carpetless varnished passage into a

spare bedroom, and commanded to put herself on the high white bed with

her head a little lower than her feet.

"But," she said, "why?"

"You will be better by supper-time. Oh, I know all these things," said

the Baroness, who was opening windows and had grown suddenly friendly.

"Do you feel sick?"

"Sick?"

She wondered whether the amount of cake she had eaten had appeared

excessive. She had had two pieces. Perhaps there was a rigid local

custom prescribing only one. She felt again that she was in a net of

customs, with nobody to explain. The Baroness seemed quite disappointed

when she assured her she did not feel sick at all. Ought guests to feel

sick? Was it a subtle way of drawing attention to the irresistibleness

of the host's food? It then occurred to her that it might very possibly

be the custom in these country places to put callers to bed for an hour

in the middle of their call, and that her omission to put her

mother-in-law there was one of the causes of her tears. Next to going

home as quickly as one did in England she felt going to bed was

altogether the best thing.

This thought, that it must be the custom, made her instantly pliable.

With every gesture of politeness she hastened to clamber up on to the

billows of feathers and white quilt. There was a smell of naphthalin as

she sank downwards, a smell of careful warfare carried on incessantly

with moth.

The Baroness came away from letting in floods of air, and looked at her.

"I am sure," she said, "you do feel sick."

"I think I do--a little," said Ingeborg, anxious to give every

satisfaction.

It was evidently the right thing to say, for her hostess's face lit up.

She went out of the room quickly and came back with some Eau de Cologne

and a fan.

Ingeborg watched her with bright alert eyes over the edge of a billow of

feathers while she fetched a little table and brought it to the bed and

arranged these things on it.

How odd it was, she thought, greatly interested. Was the Baron

simultaneously putting Robert to bed in some other room? She felt she

had grown suddenly popular, that she was doing all the right things at

last. Contrasted with its loftiness during the first part of the call

the Baroness's manner was quite human and warm. She put the table close

to her side, and told her the best thing she could do, quite the best

thing, would be to try and sleep a little; if she wanted anything she

was to ring, and the maid Tina would appear.

"Ah, yes," she said in conclusion, standing for a moment looking down at

her and heaving a great sigh that seemed to Ingeborg somehow to be

pleasurable, "ah, yes. When one has said A, dear Frau Pastor, one must

say B. Ah, yes."

And she went out again on tip-toe, softly closing the door and leaving

Ingeborg in a state of extreme and active interest and interrogation.

"When one has said A one must say B...." Why must one? And what was B?

What, indeed, if you came to that, was A?

She listened a moment, raised on her elbow, her bright head more ruffled

than ever after its descent into the billows, then she slid down on to

the slippery floor and ran across in her stockings to one of the big

open windows.

It looked on to a tangle of garden, a sort of wilderness of lilac bushes

and syringa and neglected roses and rough grass and hemlock at the back

of the house. There was nobody anywhere to be seen, and she got up on to

the sill and sat there in great enjoyment, swinging her feet, for it all

smelt very sweet at the end of the long hot day, till she thought the

hour, the blessed hour, must be nearly over. Then she stole back and

rearranged herself carefully on the bed.

"But this is _the_ way of paying calls," she thought, pulling the quilt

up tidily under her chin and waiting for what would be done to her next.

CHAPTER XVI

They did not get away till nine o'clock.

There was supper at seven, an elaborate meal, and they sat over it an

hour and a half. Then came more coffee, served on the terrace by

servants in white cotton gloves, and half an hour later, just before

they left, tea and sandwiches and cakes and fruit and beer.

Ingeborg was now quite clear about the reason for her mother-in-law's

tears. She saw very vividly how dreadful her behaviour must have seemed.

That groaning supper-table, that piling up as the end of the visit drew

near of more food and more and more, and the refreshment of bed in the

middle....

"I shall invite her all over again," she said suddenly, determined to

make amends.

When she said this the carriage had finally detached them from sight and

sound of the now quite cordial Glambecks, and was heaving through the

sand of the dark wooded road beyond their gate.

"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down. He

had got his arm round her, and at the bigger joltings tightened his hold

and lifted her a little. His voice was tender, and when he bent down

there was an enveloping smell of cigars and wine, mixed with the

india-rubber of his mackintosh.

Ingeborg knew that for some reason she could not discover she had made

herself popular. There was the distinct consciousness of having

suddenly, half way through the visit, become a success. And she was

still going on being a success, she felt. But why? Robert was

extraordinarily attentive. Too attentive, really, for oh, what a

wonderful night of stars and warm scents it was, once they were in the

open--what a night, what a marvel of a night! And when he bent over her

it was blotted out. Dear Robert. She did love him. But away there on

that low meadow, far away over there where a white mist lay on the

swampy places and the leaves of the flags that grew along the ditch

stood up like silver spears in the moonlight, one could imagine the damp

cool fragrance rising up as one's feet stirred the grass, the perfect

solitariness and the perfect silence. Except for the bittern. There was

a bittern, she had discovered, in those swamps. If she were over there

now, lying quite quiet on the higher ground by the ditch, quite quiet

and alone, she would hear him presently, solemnly booming.

"Whom will the Little One invite?" asked Herr Dremmel, bending down

across the whole of the Milky Way and every single one of all the

multitude of scents the night was softly throwing against her face.

He kissed her very kindly and at unusual length. It lasted so long that

she missed the smell of an entire clover field.

"Your mother," said Ingeborg, when she again emerged.

"Heavens and earth!" said Herr Dremmel.

"I know now what I did--or rather didn't do. I know now why she kept on

saying _Bratkartoffel_. Oh, Robert, she must have been _hurt_. She must

have thought I didn't care a bit. And I did so want her to be happy. Why

didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what, little sheep?"

"About there having to be supper, and about her having to go to bed."

"To bed?"

"Did the Baron put you?"

"Put me?"

"To bed?"

Herr Dremmel bent down again and looked a little anxiously at as much of

her face as he could see in the moonlight. It seemed normal; not in the

least flushed or feverish. He touched her cheek with his finger. It was

cool.

"Little One," he said, "what is this talk of beds?"

"Only that it would save rather a lot of awful things happening if you

would just give me an _idea_ beforehand of what is expected. It wouldn't

take a minute. I wouldn't disturb you at your work for anything, but at

some odd time--breakfast, for instance, or while you're shaving--if

you'd _say_ about beds and things like that. One couldn't guess it, you

know. In Redchester one didn't do it, you see. And it's such a really

beautiful arrangement. Oh"--she suddenly flung her arms round him and

held him tight--"I _am_ glad I married one of you!"

"One of me?"

Herr Dremmel again peered anxiously at her face.

"One of you wonderful people--you magnificent, spacious people. In

Redchester we got rid of difficulties by running away. You face them and

overcome them. There isn't much doubt, is there, which is the finer?"

He transferred his cigar to the hand that was round her shoulder and

spread his right one largely over her forehead. It was quite cool.

"Who," went on Ingeborg enthusiastically, jerking her head away from his

hand, "would have a custom that makes calls last five hours without

rebelling? You are too splendidly disciplined to rebel. You don't. You

just set about finding some way of making the calls endurable, and you

hit on the _nicest_ way. I loved that hour in bed. If only I'd known

that the other day when your mother came! The relief of it...."

"But my mother--" began Herr Dremmel in a puzzled voice. Then he added

with a touch of severity, "Your remarks, my treasure, are not in your

usual taste. You forget my mother is a widow."

"Oh? Don't widows?"

"Do not widows what?"

"Go to bed?"

"Now kindly tell me," he said, with an impatience he concealed beneath

calm, for he had heard that a husband who wishes to become successfully

a father has to accommodate himself to many moods, "what it is you are

really talking about."

"Why, about your not explaining things to me in time."

"What things?"

"About your mother having to go to bed."

"Why should my mother have to go to bed?"

"Oh, Robert--because it's the custom."

"It is not. Why do you suppose it is the custom?"

"What? When I've just been put there? And you saw me go?"

"Ingeborg--"

"Oh, don't call me Ingeborg--"

"Ingeborg, this is levity. I am prepared for much accommodating of

myself to whims in regard to food and kindred matters, but am I to

endure levity for nine months?"

She stared at him.

"You went to bed because you were ill," he said.

"I wasn't," she said indignantly. Did he, too, think she did not know

how to control herself in the presence of cake?

"What? You were not?"

There was a note of such sharp disappointment in his voice that in her

turn she peered at his face.

"Now kindly tell me, Robert," she said, giving his sleeve a slight pull,

"what it is you are _really_ talking about."

"You did not feel faint? You feel quite well? You do not feel ill after

all?"

Again the note of astonished disappointment.

"But why should I feel ill?"

"Then why did you ask to be taken home almost before we had arrived?"

For the first time she heard anger in his voice, anger and a great

aggrievedness.

"Almost before we'd arrived? We'd been there hours. You hadn't _told_ me

a call meant supper."

"Almighty Heaven," he cried, "am I to dwell on every detail of life? Am

I personally to conduct you over each of the inches of your steps? Do

you regard me as an elementary school? Can you not imagine? Can you not

calculate probabilities? Can you not construct some searchlight of

inference of your own, and illuminate with it the outline of at least

the next few hours?"

She gazed at him a moment in astonishment.

"_Well_," she said.

If her father had asked her only one of these questions in that sort of

voice she would have been without an answer, beaten down and crushed.

But Robert had not had the steady continuous frightening of her from

babyhood. He could not hold over her, like an awful rod, that she owed

her very existence to him. He could not claim perpetual gratitude for

this remote tremendous gift, bestowed on her in the days of her

unconsciousness. He was a kindly stranger appointed by the Church to

walk hand in hand with her along the path of grown-up life. He had

admired her, and kissed her, and quite often during their engagement had

abased himself at her feet. Also she had seen him at moments such as

shaving.

"I believe," she said after another astonished pause, "that you're

scolding me. And you're scolding me because you're angry with me, and

you're angry with me--Robert, is it possible you're angry with me

because I'm _not_ ill?"

He threw away his cigar and seized her in his arms and began to whisper

voluminously into her ear.

"What?" she kept on saying. "What? You're tickling me--what? I can't

hear--"

But she did in the end hear, and drew herself a little back from him to

look at him with a new interest. It seemed the oddest thing that he, so

busy, so nearly always somewhere else in thought, so deeply and

frequently absent from the surface of life, so entirely occupied by his

work that often he could hardly remember he had a wife, should want to

have yet another object of the kind added unto him, a child; and that

she who lived altogether on the surface, who knew, as it were, the very

taste of each of the day's minutes and possessed them all, who never

lost consciousness of the present and never for an instant let go of her

awareness of the visible and the now, should be without any such desire.

"But," she said, "we're so happy. We're so happy as we are."

"It is nothing compared to what we would be."

"But I haven't even begun to get used to _this_ happiness yet--to the

one I've got."

"You will infinitely prefer the one that is yet to come."

"But Robert--don't rush me along. Don't let us rush past what we've got.

Let us love all this thoroughly first--"

He looked at her very gravely. "We have now been married two months," he

said. "I become anxious. To-night--I cannot tell you how glad I was. And

then--it was nothing after all."

She gazed at him with a feeling of a new incumbency. He had said the

last words in a voice she did not know, with a catch in it.

"Robert--" she said quickly, putting out her hand and touching his with

a little soft stroking movement.

She wished above all things to make him perfectly happy. Always she had

loved making people happy. And she was so grateful to him, so grateful

for the freedom she had got through him, that just her gratitude even if

she had not loved him would have made her try to do and be everything he

wished. But she did love him. She certainly loved him. And here was

something he seemed to want beyond everything, and that she alone could

provide him with.

He turned his head away; and as he did this did she see something

actually glistening in his eyes, glistening like something wet?

In an instant she had put her arms round him. "Of course I do--of course

I want one," she said, rubbing her cheek up and down his mackintosh,

"some--heaps--of course we'll have them--everybody has them--of course

I'll soon begin--don't mind my not having been ill to-night--I'm so

sorry--I _will_ be ill--dear Robert--I didn't know I had to be ill--but

I will be soon--I'm sure I will be--I--I feel quite like _soon_ being

ill now--"

He patted her face, his face still turned away. "Good little wife," he

said; "good little wife."

She felt nearer to him than she had ever felt, so close in understanding

and sympathy. She had seen tears, a man's tears. Of what tremendous

depths of feeling were they not the signal? The sentence, _A strong

man's tears_, floated up from somewhere and hung about her mind. She

pressed him to her in a passion of desire to make him altogether happy,

to protect him from feeling too much. She held him like that, her cheek

against his arm, rubbing it up and down every now and then to show how

well she understood, till they got home. When he lifted her down from

the carriage at their door she slipped her hand round the back of his

neck and kept it there a moment with the tenderest lingering touch.

"Dear Robert," she whispered, her lips on his ear while he lifted her

down; and implicit in the words was the mother-assurance, the yearning

mother-promise, "Oh, little thing, little man thing, I'll take _care_ of

you."

She hung about the parlour and the passage while he went, as he said,

for a moment into his laboratory for a final look round, waiting for him

in a strangely warmed exalted state, entirely at one with him, suddenly

very intimate, sure that after letting her see things so sacred as tears

he would only want to spend the rest of the evening with her, being

comforted and reassured, held close to her heart, talking sweetly with

her in the quiet dark garden.

But there were six saucerfuls of differently treated last year's rye

ready on the laboratory table for counting and weighing. Herr Dremmel

beheld them, and forgot the world. He began to count and weigh. He

continued to count and weigh. He ended by counting and weighing them

all; and it was dawn before, satisfied and consoled for his lost

afternoon, it occurred to him that perhaps it might be bedtime.

CHAPTER XVII

The winter came before Ingeborg, after many false alarms due to her

extreme eagerness to give Robert the happiness he wanted, was able to

assure him with certainty that he would presently become a father. "And

I," she said, looking at him with a kind of surprised awe now that it

had really come upon her, "I suppose I will be a mother."

Herr Dremmel remarked with dryness that he supposed in that case she

would, and refused to become enthusiastic until there was more

certainty.

He had been disappointed during the summer so often. Her zeal to meet

his wishes made her pounce upon the slightest little feeling of not

being well and run triumphantly to his laboratory, daring its locked

door, defying its sacredness, to tell him the great news. She would

stand there radiantly saying things that sounded like paraphrases of the

Scripture, and almost the first German she really learned and used was

the German so familiar in every household for being of Good Hope, for

being in Blessed Circumstance.

For some time Herr Dremmel greeted these tidings with emotion and

excitement; but as the summer went on, he had become so incredulous that

she fainted twice in December before he was convinced. Then, indeed, for

nearly a whole day his joy was touching. One cannot, however, keep up

such joy, and Ingeborg found that things after this brief upheaval of

emotion settled back again into how they were before, except that she

felt extraordinarily and persistently ill.

Well, she had had the most wonderful summer; she had got that anyhow

tucked away up the sleeve of her memory, and could bring it out and look

at it when the days were wet and she felt cold and sick. The summer that

year in East Prussia had been a long drought, a long bath of sunshine,

and Ingeborg lived out in it in an ecstasy of freedom. Her body, light

and perfectly balanced, did wonders of exploration in the mighty forests

that began at the north of the Kökensee lake and went on without

stopping to the sea. She would get Robert's dinner ready for him early,

and then put some bread and butter and a cucumber into a knapsack with

her German grammar, and paddle the punt down the lake, tie it up where

the trees began, and start. Nothing seemed to tire her. She would walk

for miles along the endless forest tracks, just as much suited to her

environment, just as harmonious and as much a creature of air and

sunshine as the white butterflies that fluttered among the enormous pine

trunks. Every now and then, for sheer delight in these things, she would

throw herself down on the springy delicious carpet of whortleberries and

lie still watching the blue-green tops of the pine-trees delicately

swaying backwards and forwards far away over her head against the serene

northern sky. They made a gentle sighing noise in the wind. It was the

only sound, except the occasional cry of a woodpecker or the cry,

immensely distant, of a hawk.

Nobody but herself seemed to use the forests. It was the rarest thing

that she met a woodman, or children picking whortleberries. When she did

she was much stared at. The forests were quite out of the beat of

tourists or foreigners, and the indigenous ladies were too properly

occupied by indoor duties to wander, even if they liked forests, away

from their home anchorage; and for those whose business sent them into

these lonely places to come across somebody belonging to the class that

can have dinner every day regularly in a house if it likes and to the

sex that ought to be there cooking, it was an amazement.

The young lady, however, seemed so happy that they all smiled at her

when she looked at them. They supposed she must be some one grown white

in a town, and come to stay the summer weeks with one of the Crown

foresters. That would explain her detachment from duty, her knapsack,

and the colour of her skin. Anyhow, just her passing made their dull day

interesting; and they would watch her glinting in and out of the trees

till at last, hardly distinguishable from one of the white butterflies,

the distance took her.

When she was quite hot she would sit down in a carefully chosen spot

where, if possible, a deciduous tree, a maple or a bird cherry, splashed

its vivid green exquisitely against the peculiar misty bloom of pink and

grey that hung about the pine trunks, a tree that looked quite little

down among these giants, hardly as if it reached to their knees, and yet

when she stood under it it was almost as big as the lime-trees in the

Kökensee garden. She did not sit in its shade; she went some distance

away where she could look at it quivering in the light, and leaning her

back against a pine-tree she would eat her bread and cucumber and feel

utterly filled with the love and glory of God.

Impossible to reason about this feeling. It was there. It seemed in that

summer to go with her where-ever she went and whatever she did. She

walked in blessing. It was in the light, she thought, looking round her,

the wonderful light, the soft radiance of the forest; it was in the air,

warm and fresh, scented and pungent; it was in the feel of the pine

needles and the dry crisp last year's cones she crushed as she went

along; it was in the cushions of moss so green and cool that she stopped

to pat them, or in the hot lichen that came off in flakes when her feet

brushed a root; it was in being young and healthy and having had one's

dinner and sitting quiet and getting rested and knowing the hours ahead

were roomy; it was in all these things, everywhere and in everything.

She would pick up her German grammar in a quick desire to do something

in return, something that gave her real trouble--shall one not say

somehow Thank you?--and she engulfed huge tracts of it on these

expeditions, learning pages of it by heart and repeating them aloud to

the pine-trees and the woodpeckers.

When the sun began to go down she set out for home, sometimes losing her

way for quite a long while, and then she would hurry because of Robert's

supper, and then she would get very hot; and the combined heat and hurry

and cucumber, to which presently was added fatigue, would end in one of

those triumphal appearances later on in his laboratory to which he was

growing so much accustomed.

In January, when she was just a sick thing, she thought of these days as

something too beautiful to have really happened.

There was from the first no shyness about her on the subject of babies.

She had not considered it during her life at home, for babies were never

mentioned at the Palace--of course, she thought, remembering this

omission, because there were none, and it would be as meaningless to

talk about babies when there were none as it would be in Kökensee to

talk about bishops when there were none. She arrived, therefore, at

Kökensee with her mind a blank from prejudice, and finding the

atmosphere thick with babies immediately with her usual uninquiring

pliability adopted the prevailing attitude and was not shy either.

The neighbourhood did not wait till they were born to talk about its own

children. It did not think of its children as unmentionable until they

had been baptised into decency by birth. They were important things, the

most important of all in the life of the women, and it was natural to

discuss them thoroughly. The childless woman was a pitied creature. The

woman who had most children was proudest. She might be poor and

tormented by them, but it was something she possessed more of than her

neighbours. Ilse had early inquired which room would be the nursery.

That obvious pattern of respectability, Baroness Glambeck, talked of

births with a detail and interest only second to that with which she

talked of deaths. It seemed to her a most proper topic of conversation

with any young married woman; and on her returning the Dremmel call a

fortnight after it had been made she was quite taken aback and annoyed

to find it had become irrelevant owing to Ingeborg's being perfectly

well.

Indeed, this failure of Ingeborg's entirely spoilt the visit. The

Baroness, who had arrived friendly, withdrew into frost with the manner

of one who felt she had been thawed on the last occasion on false

pretences. Impossible to meet one's pastor's wife--and such an

odd-looking and free-mannered one, too--with any familiarity except on

the Christian footing of impending birth or death. A pastor's wife

belonged to the class one is only really pleasant with in suffering or

guilt. Offended, yet forced to continue the call, the Baroness confined

such conversation as she made to questions that had a flavour of

hostility: where was it possible to get such shoes, and did the Frau

Pastor think toes so narrow good for the circulation and the housework?

Ingeborg could not believe this was the motherly lady who had fussed

round her bed that day at Glambeck. She felt set away at a great

distance from her, on the other side of a gulf. For the first time it

was borne in upon her that her marriage made a difference to her

socially, that here in Germany the gulf was a wide one. She was a

pastor's wife; and when asked about her family, which happened early and

searchingly in the call, could only give an impression of more pastors.

"Ah, that is the same as what we call superintendent," said the

Baroness, nodding several times slowly on learning that Ingeborg's

father was a bishop; and after a series of questions as to the Frau

Pastor's sister's marriage nodded her head slowly several times again,

and informed Ingeborg that what her sister had married was a

schoolmaster. "Like Herr Schultz," said the Baroness--Herr Schultz being

the village schoolmaster.

There was a photograph of Judith on the table that caught and kept the

Baroness's eye and also, in an even greater but more careful degree, the

Baron's. It was Judith dressed in evening beauty, bare-necked, perfect.

Ingeborg took it up with a natural pride in having such a lovely thing

for her very own sister and handed it to the Baroness.

"Here she is," said Ingeborg, full of natural pride.

The Baroness stared in real consternation.

"What?" she said. "This is a schoolmaster's wife? This is our pastor's

sister-in-law? I had thought--"

She broke off, and with a firm gesture put the photograph on the table

again and said she could not stay to supper.

Since then there had been no intercourse with Glambeck, and the Baroness

did not know of the satisfactory turn things had taken at the parsonage

till on Christmas Eve, from her gallery in church to which she and the

Baron had decided to return on the greater festivals as a mark of their

awareness that Herr Dremmel desired to make amends, she beheld during

the drawn-out verses of the chorale Ingeborg drop sideways on the seat

in her pew below and remain motionless and bunched up, her hymn-book

pushed crooked on the desk in front of her, and her attitude one of

complete indifference to appearances.

The Baroness did not nudge the Baron, because in her position one does

not nudge, but her instinct was all for nudging.

Herr Dremmel could not see what had happened, custom concealing him

during the singing in a wooden box at the foot of the pulpit where he

was busy imagining agricultural experiments. Till he came out the

singing went on; and suppose, thought the Baroness, he were to forget to

come out? Once he had forgotten, she had heard, and had stayed in his

box, having very unfortunately been visited there by a revelation

concerning potash that caught him up into oblivion for the best part of

an hour, during which the chorale was gone through with an increasing

faintness fifteen times. She knew about the hour, but did not know it

was potash. Suppose he once again fell into a meditation? There was no

verger, beadle, pew-opener, or official person of any sort to take

action. The congregation would do nothing that was outside the customary

and the prescribed. There was no female relative such as the Frau Pastor

would have had staying with her over Christmas if she had been what she

ought to have been, and what every other pastor's wife so felicitously

was, a German. And for her herself to descend and help in the eyes of

all Kökensee would have been too great a condescension, besides

involving her in difficulties with the wife of the forester, and the

wife of the Glambeck schoolmaster, who was also the postman, both of

whom were of the same social standing as the younger Frau Dremmel and

would jealously resent the least mark of what they would interpret as

special favour.

Herr Dremmel, however, came out punctually and went up into the pulpit

and opened his well-worn manuscript and read out the well-known text,

and the congregation sat as nearly thrilled as it could be waiting for

the moment when his eye would fall on to his own pew and what was in it.

Would he interrupt the service to go down and carry his wife out? Would

the congregation have to wait till he came back again, or would it be

allowed to disperse to its Christmas trees and rejoicings?

Herr Dremmel read on and on, expounding the innocent Christmas story,

describing its white accessories of flocks and angels and virgins and

stars with the thunderous vehemence near scolding that had become a

habit with him when he preached. His text was _Peace on earth, goodwill

among men_, and from custom he hit his desk with his clenched fist while

he read it out and hurled it at his congregation as if it were a threat.

He did not look in his wife's direction. He was not thinking of her at

all. He wondered a little at the stillness and attention of his

listeners. Nobody coughed. Nobody shuffled. The school children hung

over the edge of the organ loft, motionless and intent. Baron Glambeck

remained awake.

At the end of the service Herr Dremmel had to stay according to custom

in his wooden box till every one had gone, and it was not till he came

out of that to go through the church to its only door that he perceived

Ingeborg. For a moment he thought she was waiting for him in an attitude

of inappropriately childish laxity, and he was about to rebuke her when

it flashed upon him that she had fainted, that it was the second time in

ten days, and that he was indeed and without any doubt at last the

happiest of men.

In spite of the bitter wind that was raking the churchyard every person

who had been inside the church was waiting outside to see the pastor

come out. The Glambecks and elders of the church would have waited in

any case on Christmas Eve to wish him the compliments of the season and

receive his in return, but on this occasion they waited with pleasure as

well as patience, and the rest of the congregation waited, too.

They were rewarded by seeing him presently appear in the doorway in his

gown and bands carrying the bundle that was the still unconscious Frau

Pastor as if she were a baby, his face illuminated with joy and pride.

It was as entertaining as a funeral. Double congratulations were poured

upon him, double and treble handshakes of the hand he protruded for the

purpose from beneath Ingeborg's relaxed body, and his spectacles as he

responded were misty, to the immense gratification of the crowd, with

happy tears.

This was the first popular thing Ingeborg had done since her arrival.

She could not if she had planned it out with all her care and wits have

achieved anything more dramatically ingratiating. The day was the most

appropriate day in the whole year. It had been well worth waiting,

thought her overjoyed Robert, in order to receive such a Christmas gift.

The Baroness, who with the Baron was most cordial, felt flattered, as

if--only of course less perfectly, for she herself had produced her

children in actual time for the tree--her example had been taken to

heart and followed. The village was deeply gratified to see an

unconscious Frau Pastor carried through its midst, and her limp body had

all the prestige of a corpse. Everybody was moved and pleased; and when

Ingeborg, after much persuasion, woke up to the world again on the sofa

of the parsonage parlour it was to live through the happiest day she had

yet had in her life, the day of Robert's greatest joy in her and

devotion and care and pride and petting.

Once more and for this day she outstripped the fertilizers in interest,

and the laboratory was a place forgotten. She was pampered. She lay on

the sofa, feeling quite well again, but staying obediently on it because

he told her to and she loved him to care, watching him with happy eyes

as he tremendously hovered. He finished the arranging of the tree for

her and fixed the candles on it, interrupting himself every now and then

to come and kiss her hands and pat her. Beams seemed to proceed from him

and penetrate into the remotest corners. In a land where all homes were

glowing that Christmas night this little home glowed the brightest. The

candles of the tree shone down on Ingeborg curled up in the sofa corner,

talking and laughing gaily, but with an infinitely proud and solemn

gladness in her heart that at last he believed, that at last she was

fairly started on the road of the Higher Duty, that at last she was

going to be able to do something back, something in return for all this

happiness that had come to her through and because of him.

Ilse was called in, and came very rosy and shining from careful washing

to be given her presents. There were surprises for Ingeborg--she had to

shut her eyes while they were arranged--that touched and astonished her,

so totally blind had Robert seemed to be for weeks past to anything

outside his work--a pot of hyacinths twisted about with pink crinkly

paper and satin bows that he must have got with immense difficulty and

elaborate precautions to prevent her seeing it, a volume of Heine's

poetry, a pair of fur gloves, a silver curb bracelet, and a smiling pig

of marzipan with a label round its neck, _Ich bringe Glück_. She, not

realising what a German Christmas meant, had only a cigar-case for him;

and when, her lap full of his presents and her wrist decorated with the

bracelet in which he showed an honest pride, carefully explaining the

trick of its fastening and assuring her it was real silver and that

little women, he well knew, liked being hung with these barbaric

splendours, she put her arm round his neck and apologised for her

dreadful ignorance of custom and want of imagination and solitary,

unsurprising, miserable cigar-case--when she did this, with her cheek

laid on his furry head, he drew her very close to him and blessed her,

blessed her his little wife and that greatest of gifts that she was

bringing him.

Both of them had wet eyes when this blessing, solemnly administered and

received, was over. It was done in the presence of Ilse, who looked on

benevolently and at the end came and shook their hands and joined to her

thanks for what she had been given her congratulations on the happy

event of the coming summer.

"July," said Ilse, after a moment's reflection. "We must furnish that

room," she added.

Ingeborg felt as though her very bones were soft with love.

CHAPTER XVIII

But these high moments of swimming in warm emotion do not last, she

found; they are not final, they are not, as she had fondly believed, a

state of understanding and cloudless love at last attained to and rested

in radiantly. She discovered that the littlest thing puts an end to

them, just such a little thing as its being bedtime, for instance, is

enough, and the mood does not return, and not only does it not return

but it seems forgotten.

She became aware of this next morning at breakfast, and it caused at

first an immense surprise. She had got the coffee ready with the glow of

the evening before still warming her rosily, she was still altogether

thinking _dear_ Robert, and wondering, her head on one side as she cut

the bread--Ilse was a little cross after the marzipan--and a smile on

her lips, at the happiness the world contains; and when he came in she

ran to him, shiningly ready to take up the mood at the exact point where

bedtime had broken it off the night before.

But Herr Dremmel had travelled a thousand miles in thought since then.

He hardly saw her. He kissed her mechanically and sat down to eat. To

him she was as everyday and usual again as the bread and coffee of his

breakfast. She was his wife who was going presently to be a mother. It

was normal, ordinary, and satisfactory; and the matter being settled and

the proper first joy and sentiment felt, he could go on with more

concentration than ever with his work, for there would not now be the

perturbing moments so frequent in the last six months when his wife's

condition, or rather negation of condition, had thrust itself with the

annoyance of an irrepressible weed up among his thinking. The matter was

settled; and he put it aside as every worker must put the extraneous

aside. Just on this morning he was profoundly concerned with the

function of potash in the formation of carbohydrates. He had sat up

late--long after Ingeborg, feeling as if she were dissolved in stars and

happily certain that Robert felt just as liquidly starry, had gone to

bed--considering potash. He wanted more starch in his grain, more

woody-fibre in his straw. She was not across the passage into their

bedroom before his mind had sprung back to potash. More starch in his

grain, more woody-fibre in his straw, less fungoid disease on his

mangels....

At breakfast his thoughts were so sticky with the glucose and cane sugar

of digestible carbohydrates that he could not even get them free for his

newspaper, but sat quite silently munching bread and butter, his eyes on

his plate.

"Well, Robert?" said Ingeborg, smiling at him round the coffee pot, a

smile in which lurked the joyful importance of the evening before.

"Well, Little One?" he said absently, not looking at her.

"Well, Robert?" she said again, challengingly.

"What is it, Little One?" he asked, looking up with the slight

irritation of the interrupted.

"What? You're not pleased any more?" she asked, pretending indignation.

"Pleased about what?"

She stared at him at this without pretending anything.

"About what?" she repeated, her lips dropping apart.

He had forgotten.

She thought this really very extraordinary. She poured herself out a cup

of coffee slowly, thinking. He had forgotten. The thing he had said so

often that he wanted most was a thing he could forget, once he had the

certain promise of it, in a night. The candles on the Christmas tree in

the corner were not more burned out and finished than his tender

intensity of feeling of the evening before.

Well, that was Robert. That was the way, of course, of clever men.

But--the tears? He had felt enough for tears. It was without a doubt

that he had felt tremendously. How wonderful then, she thought, slowly

dropping sugar into her cup, for even the memory of it to be wiped out!

Well, that, too, was Robert. He did not cling as she did to moments, but

passed on intelligently; and she was merely stupid to suppose any one

with his brains would linger, would loiter about with her indefinitely,

gloating over their happiness.

She left her coffee and got up and went over to him and kissed him.

"Dear Robert," she murmured, accommodating herself to him, proud even,

now, that he could be so deeply preoccupied with profound thoughts as to

forget an event so really great: for after all, a child to be born, a

new life to be launched, was not that something really great? Yet his

thoughts, her husband's thoughts, were greater.

"Dear Robert," she murmured; and kissed him proudly.

But the winter, in spite of these convictions of happiness and of having

every reason for pride, was a time that she dragged through with

difficulty. She who had never thought of her body, who had found in it

the perfect instrument for carrying out her will, was forced to think of

it almost continuously. It mastered her. She had endlessly to humour it

before she could use it even a little. She seemed for ever to be having

to take it to a sofa and lay it down flat and not make it do anything.

She seemed for ever to be trying to persuade it that it did not mind the

smell of the pig, or the smell that came across from Glambeck when the

wind was that way of potato spirits being made in the distillery there.

When these smells got through the window chinks she would shut her eyes

and think hard of the scent of roses and pinks, and of that lovely

orange scent of the orange-coloured lupin she had seen grown everywhere

in the summer; but sooner or later her efforts, however valiant, ended

in the creeping coldness, the icy perspiration, of sick faintness.

As the months went on her body became fastidious even about daily

inevitable smells such as the roasting of coffee and the frying of

potatoes, which was extremely awkward when one had to see to these

things oneself; and it often happened that Ilse, coming out of the

scullery or in from the yard fresh and energetic with health, would find

her mistress dropped on a chair with her head on the kitchen table in

quite an absurd condition considering that everybody assured her it was

not an illness at all of feeling as though it were one.

Ilse would look at her with a kind of amused sympathy. "The Frau Pastor

will be worse before she is better," she would say cheerfully; and if

things were very bad and Ingeborg, white and damp, clung to her in a

silent struggle to feel not white and damp, she used the formula first

heard on the lips of Baroness Glambeck and nodded encouragingly, though

not without a certain air of something that was a little like pleasure,

and said, "_Ja, ja_, those who have said A must also say B."

When Ingeborg's spirit was at its lowest in these unequal combats she

would droop her head and shut her eyes and feel she hated--oh, she

faintly, coldly, sicklily hated--B.

The fun of housekeeping, of doing everything yourself, wore extremely

thin during the next few months. She no longer jumped out of bed eager

to get to her duties again and bless the beginning of each new day by a

charming and cheerful breakfast table for her man. She felt heavy;

reluctant to face the business of dressing; sure that no sooner would

she be on her feet than she would feel ill again. She talked of getting

another servant, a cook; and Herr Dremmel, who left these arrangements

entirely to her, agreed at once. But when it came to taking the

necessary steps, to advertising or journeying in to Königsberg to an

agency, she flagged and did nothing. It was all so difficult. She might

faint on the way. She might be sick. And she could not ask Robert to

help her because she did not know what problem nearing a triumphant

solution she might not disastrously interrupt.

It seemed to her monstrous to take a man off his thinking, to tear its

threads, perhaps to spoil for good that particular line of thought, with

demands that he should write advertisements for a cook or go with her in

search of one. And as no cook was to be found locally, every wife and

mother except ladies like Baroness Glambeck carrying out these higher

domestic rites herself, she did nothing. She resigned herself to a fate

that was, after all, everybody else's in Kökensee. It was easier to be

resigned than to be energetic. Her will grew very flabby. Once she said

prayers about cooking, and asked that she might never see or smell it

again; but she broke off on realising suddenly and chillily that only

death could get her out of the kitchen.

Herr Dremmel was, as he had always been, good and kind to her. He saw

nothing, as indeed there was nothing, but the normal and the

satisfactory in anything she felt, yet he did what he could, whenever he

remembered to, to cheer and encourage. When, coming out of his

laboratory to meals, he found her not at the table but on the sofa, her

face turned to the wall and buried in an orange so that the dinner smell

might be in some small measure dissembled and cloaked, he often patted

her before beginning to eat and said, "Poor little woman." One cannot,

however, go on saying poor little woman continuously, and of necessity

there were gaps in these sympathies; but at least twice he put off his

return to work for a few minutes in order to hearten her by painting the

great happiness that was in store for her at the end of these tiresome

months, the marvellous moment not equalled, he was informed, by any

other moment in a human being's life, when the young mother first beheld

her offspring.

"I see my little wife so proud, so happy," he would say; and each time

the picture dimmed his eyes and brought him over to her to stroke her

hair.

Then she would forget how sick she felt, and smile and be ashamed that

she had minded anything. The highest good--what would not one practise

in the way of being sick to attain the highest good?

"And he'll be full of brains like yours," she would say, pulling down

his hand from her hair and kissing it and looking up at him smiling.

"And I shall have to double the size of my heart," Herr Dremmel would

say, "to take in two loves."

Then Ingeborg would laugh for joy, and for quite a long while manage

very nearly to glory in feeling sick.

About March, when the snow that had been heaped on either side of the

path to the gate all the winter began to dwindle dirtily, and at midday

the eaves dripped melting icicles, and the sun had warmth in it, and

great winds set the world creaking, things got better. She no longer

felt the grip of faintness on her heart. She left off looking quite so

plain and sharp-nosed. An increasing dignity attended her steps, which

every week were slower and heavier. After months of not being able to

look at food she grew surprisingly hungry, she became suddenly

voracious, and ate and ate.

Ilse's amused interest continued. Her mother had had fourteen children

and was still regularly having more, and Ilse was well acquainted with

the stages. The Frau Pastor, it is true, took the stages more seriously,

with more difficulty, with a greater stress on them than Ilse's mother

or other Kökensee women, but roughly it was always the same story. "It

will be easier next time," prophesied Ilse inspiritingly; though the

thought of a next time before she had finished this one depressed rather

than inspirited Ingeborg.

She had written home to Redchester to tell her great news, and received

a letter from Mrs. Bullivant in return in which there was an extremity

of absence of enthusiasm. Indeed, the coming baby was only alluded to

sideways as it were, indirectly, and if written words could whisper, in

a whisper. "_Your father is overworked_," the letter went on, getting

away as quickly as possible from matters of such doubtful decency as an

unborn German, "_he has too much to do. Delicate as I am, I would gladly

help him with his correspondence if I could, but I fear the strain would

be too much. He sadly needs a complete rest and change. Alas,

shorthanded as he is and obliged now as we are to retrench, there is no

prospect of one_."

Whereupon Ingeborg impulsively wrote suggesting in loving and

enthusiastic terms a visit to Kökensee as the most complete change she

could think of, and also as the most economical.

The answer to this when it did come was an extraordinarily dignified No.

In April Baroness Glambeck drove over one fine afternoon and questioned

her as to her preparations, and was astonished to find there were none.

"But, my dear Frau Pastor!" she cried, holding up both her yellow kid

hands.

"What ought there to be?" asked Ingeborg, who had been too busy

wrestling with her daily tasks in her heavily handicapped state to think

of further labours.

"Many things--necessary, indispensable things."

"What things?" asked Ingeborg faintly.

She had little spirit. She was more tired every day. Just the difficulty

of keeping even with her housekeeping, of keeping herself tidy in

dresses that seemed to shrink smaller each time she put them on, took up

what strength she had. There was none left over. "What things?" she

asked; and her hands, lying listlessly on her lap, were flaccid and

damp.

Then the Baroness poured forth an endless and bewildering list with all

the gusto and interest of health and leisure. When her English gave out

she went on in German. Her list ended with a midwife.

"Have you spoken with her?" she asked.

"No," said Ingeborg. "I didn't know--where is she?"

"In our village. Frau Dosch. It is lucky for you she is not further

away. Sometimes there is none for miles. She is a very good sort of

person. A little old now, but at least she _has_ been very good. You

ought to see her at once and arrange."

"Oh!" said Ingeborg, who felt as if the one blessedness in life would be

to creep away somewhere and never arrange anything about anything for

ever.

But it did after this become clear to her that certain preparations

would undoubtedly have to be made, and she braced herself to driving

into Meuk with Ilse and going by train to Königsberg for a day's

shopping.

With sandwiches in her pocket and doubt in her heart she went off to

shop for the first time in German. Ilse, full of importance, and dressed

astonishingly in stockings and new spring garments, sat by her side with

an eye to right and left in search of some one to witness her splendour.

Herr Dremmel had laid many and strict injunctions on her to take care of

her mistress, and in between these wandering glances she did her best by

loud inquiries as to Frau Pastor's sensations. Frau Pastor's sensations

were those of a perilously jolted woman. She held tight to the hand rail

on one side while the Meuk cobbles lasted and to Ilse's arm on the

other, and was thankful when the station was reached and she somehow,

with a shameful clumsiness, got down out of the high carriage.

Incredible to remember that last time she had been at that station she

had jumped up into the same carriage as lightly as a bird. She felt

humiliated, ashamed of her awkward distorted body. She drew the foolish

little cloak and scarf she had put on anxiously about her. People

stared. She seemed to be the only woman going to have a child; all the

others were free, unhampered, vigorous persons like Ilse. It was as

though she had suddenly grown old, this slowness, this fear of not being

able to get out of the way of trucks and porters in time.

In Königsberg the noise in the streets where the shops were was

deafening. All the drays of all the world seemed to be spending that day

driving furiously over the stones and tram-lines filled with cases of

empty beer bottles or empty milk cans or long, shivering, screaming iron

laths, while endless processions of electric-trams rang their bells at

them.

Ingeborg clung to Ilse's arm bewildered. After Kökensee alone in its

fields, after the dignified tranquillities of Redchester, the noise

hammered on her head like showers of blows. There were not many people

about, but those there were stared to the extent of stopping dead in

front of the two women in order not to miss anything. It was at Ingeborg

they stared. Ilse was a familiar figure, just a sunburnt country girl

with oiled hair, in her Sunday clothes; but Ingeborg was a foreigner, an

astonishment. Men and women stopped, children loitered, half-grown

youths whistled and called out comments that her slow German could not

follow. She flushed and turned pale, and held on tighter to Ilse. She

supposed she must be looking more grotesque even than she had feared.

She put it all down to her condition, not knowing on this her first walk

in a German provincial town that it was her being a stranger, dressed a

little differently, doing her hair a little differently, that caused the

interest. She walked as quickly as she could to get away from these

people into a shop, little beads of effort round her mouth, looking

straight before her, fighting down a dreadful desire to cry; and it was

with thankfulness that she sank on to a chair in the quiet midday

emptiness of Berding and Kühn's drapery and linen establishment.

The young lady behind the counter stared, too, but then there was only

one of her. She very politely called Ingeborg _gnädiges Fräulein_ and

inquired whether her child was a boy or a girl.

"Lord God!" cried Ilse, "how should we know?"

But Ingeborg, with dignity and decision, said it was a boy.

"Then," said the young lady, "you require blue ribbons."

"Do I?" said Ingeborg, very willing to believe her.

The young lady sorted out small garments from green calico boxes

labelled _For Firsts_. There were little jackets, little shirts, little

caps, everything one could need for the upper portion of a baby.

"So," said the young lady, pushing a pile of these articles across the

counter to Ingeborg.

"God, God!" cried Ilse in an ecstasy at such tininess, thrusting her red

thumb through one of the diminutive sleeves and holding it up to show

how tightly it fitted.

"_Nicht wahr_?" agreed the young lady, though without excitement.

"But," said Ingeborg, laboriously searching out her words, "the baby

doesn't leave off there, at its middle. It'll go on. It'll be a whole

baby. It'll have legs and things. What does one put on the rest of it?"

The young lady looked at Ilse for enlightenment.

"It'll _have_ a rest, Ilse," said Ingeborg, also appealing to her.

"These things are just clothes for cherubs."

"_Ach so_," said the young lady, visited by a glimmer of understanding,

and turning round she dexterously whipped down more green boxes, and

taking off the lids brought out squares of different materials, linen,

flannel, and a soft white spongy stuff.

"Swaddle," she said, holding them up.

"Swaddle?" said Ingeborg.

"Swaddle," confirmed Ilse.

And as Ingeborg only stared, the young lady gradually plumbing her

ignorance produced a small mattress in a white and frilly linen bag, and

diving down beneath the counter, brought up a dusty doll which she

deftly rolled up to the armpits in the squares, inserted it into the bag

with its head out, and tied it firmly with tapes. "So," she said, giving

this neat object a resounding slap: and picking it up she pretended to

rock it fondly in her arms. "Behold the First Born," she said.

After that Ingeborg put herself entirely into these experienced hands.

She bought all she was told to. She even bought the doll to practise

on--"It will not do _everything_ of course," explained the young lady.

The one thing she would not buy was a sewing machine to make her own

swaddle with, as Ilse economically counselled. The young lady was

against this purchase, which could only be made in another shop; she

said true ladies always preferred Berding and Kühn to do such work for

them. Ilse said true mothers always did it for themselves, and it was

one of the chief joys of this blessed time, Ilse said, seeing the house

grow fuller and fuller of swaddle.

At this the young lady pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders and

assumed an air of waiting indifference.

Ilse, resenting her attitude, inquired of her heatedly what, then, she

knew of _Mutterglück_.

The young lady, for some reason, was offended at this, though nothing

was more certain than that knowledge of _Mutterglück_ would have meant

instant dismissal from Berding and Kühn's. It became a wrangle across

the counter, and was only ended by Ingeborg's altogether siding with the

young lady and the interests of Berding and Kühn, and ordering, as the

Baroness had directed, ten dozen each of the ready-made squares. "I'd

die if I had to hem ten dozen of anything," she explained apologetically

to Ilse.

And it was very bitter to Ilse, who meant well, to see the young lady

look at her with a meditative comprehensiveness down her nose; it left

no honourable course open to her but to sulk, and in her heart she would

rather not have sulked on this exciting and unusual excursion. She was

forced to, however, by her own public opinion, and she did it

vigorously, thoroughly, blackly, all the rest of the day, all the way

home; and neither cakes nor chocolate nor ices earnestly and

successively applied to her by Ingeborg at the pastrycook's were allowed

to lighten the gloom.

"But I suppose," Ingeborg said to herself as she crept into her bed that

night in the spiritless mood called philosophical, for Ilse was her stay

and refuge, and to have her not speaking to her, to feel she had hurt

her, was a grievous thing, a thing when one is weary very like the last

straw--"I suppose it's all really only a part of B. Oh, oh," she added

with a sudden flare of rebellion that died out immediately in shame of

it, "I don't think I _like_ B--I don't think I _like_ B...."

CHAPTER XIX

There was nevertheless an absorption and an excitement about this new

strange business that did not for a moment allow her to be dull. She

might feel ill, wretched, exhausted, but she was always interested. A

tremendous event was ahead of her, and all her days were working up to

it. She lived in preparation. Each one of her sensations was a

preparation, an advance. There was a necessity for it; something was

being made, was growing, had to be completed; life was full of meaning,

and of plain meaning; she understood and saw reasons everywhere for what

happened to her. Things had to be so if one wanted the supreme crown,

and her part of the work was really very easy, it was just to be

patient. She was often depressed, but only because the month seemed so

endless and she was so tired of her discomfort--never because she was

afraid. She had no fears, for she had no experience. She contemplated

the final part of the adventure, the part Ilse alluded to cheerfully as

her Difficult Hour, with the perfect tranquillity of ignorance. On the

whole she was very free from the moods Herr Dremmel had braced himself

to bear, and continued right through not to be exacting. She had no

examples of more fussed over and tended women before her eyes to upset

her contentment, and saw for herself how the village women in like

condition worked on at their wash-tubs and in the fields up to the end.

Besides, she had been trained in a healthy self-effacement.

She only cried once, but then it was February and enough to make anybody

cry, with the sleet stinging the windows and the wind howling round the

dark little house. She put it down to February, a month she had never

thought anything of, and hid from herself as she hurriedly wiped away

her tears--where did they all come from?--that she was disgracefully

crying because she had been alone so long, and Ilse had gone out

somewhere without asking, and Robert hadn't spoken to her for days, and

there was nobody to bring in the lamp if she didn't fetch it herself,

and she couldn't fetch it because she felt so funny and might drop it,

and what she wanted most in the world was a mother. Not a mother

somewhere else, away in Redchester, but a real soft warm mother sitting

beside her in that room, with her (the mother's) arm under her

(Ingeborg's) head, and her (Ingeborg's) face against her (the mother's)

bosom. A mother with feathers all over her like a kind hen would be very

ideal, but short of that there was a soft black dress she remembered her

mother used to wear with amiable old lace on it that wouldn't scratch,

and the comfort it would be, the _comfort_, if for half an hour she

might put her cheek against this and keep it there and say nothing.

And she cried more and more, and told herself more and more eagerly,

with a kind of rage, that February was no sort of month at all.

When Herr Dremmel came out of his laboratory to ask why his lamp had not

been brought, and found no light anywhere and no Ilse when he shouted,

he was vexed; but when he had fetched a lamp himself and put it on the

table where it shone on to Ingeborg's swollen and blinking eyes, he was

still more vexed.

"This is foolish," he said, staring down at her a moment. "You will only

harm my child."

She did not cry again.

The spring had dried up the roads, but she did not for all that take

walks that obliged her to pass through the village; instead, she spent

hours in the budding garden up and down on one of the two available

paths, the one at the end on the edge of the rye-fields which were now

the vividest green, or the one on the east side of the house beneath

Robert's laboratory windows where the lilacs grew.

His table was at right angles to the end window, and she often stood on

the path watching him, his head bent over his work in an absorption that

went on hour after hour. He kept the windows shut because the spring

disturbed him. It had a way of coming in irrepressibly and wantoning

among his papers, or throwing a handful of lilac blossoms into his rye

samples, or sending an officious bee to lumber round him.

Ingeborg walked up and down, up and down on this path every day, taking

the exercise Baroness Glambeck had recommended, and for three weeks just

this path was the most beautiful thing in the world, for it was planted

on either side with ancient lilac bushes and they were a revelation to

her when they came out after the spare and frugal lilacs in the gardens

at home. Above their swaying scented loveliness of light and colour and

shape she could see Robert's tow-coloured head inside the window bending

over his table every time she came to the end of her tramp and turned

round again. It was the best part of the whole nine months, these three

weeks of lilacs and fine weather on that scented path, with Robert busy

and content where she could see him. She loved being able to see him; it

was a companionable thing.

By June everything was ready. The nursery was furnished, the cradle

trimmed, a pale blue perambulator blocked the passage, neat stacks of

little clothes filled the cupboards, and Frau Dosch, a hoary person of

unseemly conversation, interviewed and told to be on the alert. The idea

of arranging for a doctor to be on the alert too would not of itself

have entered Ingeborg's head, and nobody put it there. Such a being was

indeed mentioned once by Baroness Glambeck, whose interest, increasing

with the months, brought her over several times, but only vaguely as

some one who had to be sent for when the midwife judged the patient to

have reached the stage. Then, apparently, the law obliged the midwife to

send for a doctor.

"There is much difference, however," said the Baroness, "between

thinking one is in extremity and really being in it," and the patient

was apt to be biassed on these occasions, she explained, and inclined

rashly to jump to conclusions. Therefore wisdom dictated the leaving of

such a decision to the midwife.

"Yes," said Ingeborg placidly.

"Of course," said the Baroness, "all this is different from other

illnesses, because it is not one."

"Yes," said Ingeborg, placidly.

"And when I speak of the patient I do not mean the patient, because

without an illness there cannot be a patient."

"No," said Ingeborg, placidly.

"Nor without a patient can there be an illness."

"No," said Ingeborg, placidly.

She was leaning back in a low chair watching the sun shining on the tops

of the lime-trees over her head, for it was the end of June and they

were in the garden. It all seemed very satisfactory. Nobody was ill,

nobody was going to be ill. There would be rather a troublesome moment

that would be met and got over with patience and Frau Dosch, but no

illness, just nature having its way, and then--it really seemed

altogether too wonderful that then, quite soon now, perhaps in a week or

two, any day really, there would be a baby. And she was going to love it

with this passion of love that only mothers know, and it was going to

fill her life most beautifully to the brim, and it would make her so

happy that she would never want anything but just it.

That is what they had told her. On her own account she had added to this

that the baby would be every bit as clever as Robert but with more

leisure; that it would have his brains but not his laboratory; that it

wouldn't be able, it wouldn't want, to get out of its perambulator and

go and lock itself up away from her and weigh rye grains; and that it

wouldn't mind, in fact it would prefer, being fetched out of its

thoughts to come and be kissed.

For ages, for years, it was going to be her dear and close companion,

her fellow-paddler in the lake, her fellow-wanderer in God's woods. Her

eyes were soft with joy at the thought of how soon now she was going to

be able to tuck this precious being under her arm and take it with her

lightly and easily into the garden, restored to her own slim nimbleness

again, and point out the exceeding beauty of the world to its new,

astonished eyes. She would show it the rye-fields, and the great

heaped-up sky. She would make it acquainted with the frogs, and

introduce it to the bittern. She would draw its attention to the delight

of lying face downwards on hot grass where tufts of thyme grew and

watching the busy life among the blades and roots. She would insist on

its observing the storks standing in their nest on the stable roof and

how the light lay along their white wings, and how the red of their legs

was like the red of the pollard willows in March. And at night, if it

were so ill-advised as not to sleep, she would pick it up and take it to

the window and impress its soft mind all over with shining little stars.

Wonderful to think that before the orange-coloured lupins, those August

glories, had done flowering, she would be out among them again, only

with her son this time, her flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood,

her Robertlet.

Baroness Glambeck watched her face curiously as she lay looking up at

the sunny tree-tops with the amused smile of these thoughts on it. It

was clear the Frau Pastor had forgotten her presence; and even her being

so near her Difficult Hour did not explain or excuse a social lapse.

Indeed, the Frau Pastor received her visits with an absence of

excitement and of realisation of the honour being done her that was

almost beyond the limits of the forgivable. Always she behaved as though

she were an equal, and a particularly equal equal. Much, however, could

be excused in a person who was not only English--a nation the Baroness

had heard described as rude--but so near her first confinement. When

this was over there would be a severe readjustment of relationships, but

meanwhile one could not really be angry with her; just her amazing and

terrible ignorance of the simplest facts connected with child-bearing

made it impossible to be angry with her. She reminded the Baroness of a

sheep going tranquilly to the slaughter, quite pleased with the

promenade, quite without a thought of what lay at the end of it. Did

English mothers then all keep their daughters in such darkness on the

one great subject for a woman?

For some subtle reason the expression of extreme placidness on

Ingeborg's face as she lay silently watching the tree-tops and planning

what she would do with her baby annoyed the Baroness.

"It will hurt, you know," she said.

Ingeborg brought her gaze slowly down to earth again, and looked at her

a moment.

"What?" she said.

"It will hurt," repeated the Baroness.

"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg. "I know. But it's all natural."

"Certainly it is natural. Nevertheless--"

The Baroness stopped grimly, screwed up her mouth, and shook her head

three times with an awful suggestiveness.

Ingeborg looked at her, and then suddenly some words out of her

cathedral-going days at Redchester flashed into her mind. She had

totally forgotten them, and now her memory began jerking them together.

They came, she knew, in the Prayer-book somewhere; was it in the Litany?

No; but anyhow they were in that truthful book, the Book of Common

Prayer, and they were--yes, that was it: _The great danger of

child-birth._ Yes; and again: _The great pain and peril of child-birth._

A quick flush came into her face, and for the first time a look of fear

into her eyes. She sat up, leaning on both her hands, and stared at the

Baroness.

"Is it so very dreadful?" she asked.

The Baroness merely shook her head.

"It can't be _very_" said Ingeborg, watching the Baroness's expression

in search of agreement, "or there wouldn't be any mothers left."

The Baroness went on screwing up her mouth and shaking her head.

"It must be _bearable_," said Ingeborg again, anxiously.

The Baroness would not commit herself.

"They'd die, you see, if it wasn't--the mothers all would. But there

seem"--her voice trembled a little in her desire for the Baroness's

agreement--"there seem to be lots of mothers still about."

She paused, but the Baroness continued not to commit herself.

"I can bear anything," said Ingeborg, with a great show of pride and a

voice that trembled, "if it's--if it's reasonable."

"It is not reasonable," said the Baroness. "It is the Will of God."

"Oh, that's the same thing, the same thing," said Ingeborg, throwing

herself back on her cushions and nervously pulling some white pinks she

had been smelling to pieces.

She was ashamed of her terror. But all that evening she was restless and

nervous, struggling with this new feeling of fear. She could not keep

still, but walked about the sitting-room while Robert ate his supper at

the table, pressing her cold hands together, trying to reason herself

into tranquillity again.

She stood still a moment watching Robert's quiet black back as he bent

over his supper. Then she went over to him impulsively and rubbed both

her hands quickly through his hair, which had not been cut for some

time, making it stand up on ends.

"There!" she said. "Now you look _really_ sweet." And she bent and

kissed him, lingeringly, on the back of his neck. He was near her, he

was alive, she could hold on to him for a little before she went alone

into whatever it was of icy and awful and unknown that waited for her.

"Good little wife," he said, still going on eating, but putting his left

arm round her while his right continued to do what was necessary with

the supper, and not looking up.

His affection at this time had watered down into a mild theory. She was

not a wife to him, though he called her so; she was a _werdende Mutter_.

This, Herr Dremmel told himself when he, too, felt bored by the length

of the months, is a most honourable, creditable, and respectable

condition; but no man can feel warm towards a condition. His little

sheep had disappeared into the immensities of the _werdende Mutter_. He

would be glad when she was restored to him.

The next day she got a letter from Mrs. Bullivant, dated from the

Master's House, Ananias College, Oxford.

"_It may interest you to hear_," wrote Mrs. Bullivant, "_that your

sister has a little daughter. The child was born at daybreak this

morning. I am worn out with watching. It is a very fine little girl, and

both mother and child are doing well. I am not doing well at all. We had

that excellent Dr. Williamson, I am thankful to say, or I don't know

what would have happened. Of course our darling Judith was mercifully

spared knowing anything about it, for she was kept well under

chloroform, but I knew and I feel very upset. I only wish I, too, could

have been chloroformed during those anxious hours. As it is I am

suffering much from shock, and it will be a long while before I recover.

Dr. Williamson says that on these occasions he always pities most the

mothers of the mothers. Your father_--"

But here Ingeborg let the letter drop to the floor and sat thinking.

When Robert came in to dinner late that day, hot and pleased from his

fields which were doing particularly well after the warm rains of

several admirably timed thunderstorms, she gave him his food and waited

till he had eaten it and begun to smoke, and then asked him if she were

going to have chloroform.

"Chloroform?" he repeated, gazing at her while he fetched back his

thoughts from their pleasurable lingering among his fields. "What for?"

"So that I don't know about anything. Mother writes Judith had some.

She's got a little girl."

Herr Dremmel took his cigar out of his mouth and stared at her. She was

leaning both elbows on the table at her end and, with her chin on her

hands, was looking at him with very bright eyes.

"But this is cowardice," he said.

"I'd _like_ some chloroform," said Ingeborg.

"It is against nature," said Herr Dremmel.

"I'd _like_ some chloroform," said Ingeborg.

"You have before you," said Herr Dremmel, endeavouring to be patient,

"an entirely natural process, as natural as going to sleep at night and

waking up next morning."

"It may be as natural," said Ingeborg, "but I don't believe it's as

nice. I'd _like_ some chloroform."

"What! Not nice? When it is going to introduce you to the supreme--"

"Y'es, I know. But I--I have a feeling it's going to introduce me rather

roughly. I'd _like_ some chloroform."

"God," said Herr Dremmel solemnly, "has arranged these introductions

Himself, and it is not for us to criticise."

"That's the first time," said Ingeborg, "that you've talked like a

bishop. You might be a bishop."

"When it comes to the highest things," said Herr Dremmel severely, "and

this is the holiest, most exalted act a human being can perpetrate, all

men are equally believers."

"I expect they are," said Ingeborg. "But the others--the ones who're not

men--they'd _like_ some chloroform."

"No healthy, normally built woman needs it," said Herr Dremmel, greatly

irritated by this persistence. "No doctor would give it. Besides, there

will not be a doctor, and the midwife may not administer it. Why, I do

not recognise my little wife, my little intelligent wife who must know

that nothing is being required of her but that which is done by other

women every day."

"I don't see what being intelligent has to do with this," said Ingeborg,

"and I'd _like_ some chloroform."

Herr Dremmel looked at her bright eyes and flushed cheeks in

astonishment. Up to now she had rejoiced in her condition whenever he

mentioned it, and indeed he could see no reason for any other attitude;

she had apparently felt very little that was not pleasant during the

whole time, known none of those distresses he had heard that women

sometimes endure, been healthily free from complications. There had been

moods, it is true, and he had occasionally found her lounging on sofas,

but then women easily become lazy at these times. It had all been normal

and would no doubt continue normal. What, then, was this shrinking at

the eleventh hour, this inability to be as ordinarily courageous as

every peasant woman in the place? It was a most unfortunate, unpleasant

whim, the most unfortunate she could have had. He had been prepared for

whims, but had always supposed they would be tinned pine apples. Of

course he was not going to humour her. Too much was at stake. He had

heard anæsthetics were harmful on these occasions, harmful and entirely

unnecessary. The best thing by far for the child was the absence of

everything except nature. Nature in this matter should be given a free

hand. She was not always wise, he knew from his experience with his

fields, but in this department he was informed she should be left

completely to herself. If his wife was so soft as not to be able to bear

a little pain what sort of sons was she likely to give him? A breed of

shrinkers; a breed of white-skinned hiders. Why, he had not asked for

gas even when he had three teeth out at one sitting two years before--it

was the dentist who had insisted he should have it--and that was only

teeth, objects of no value afterwards. But to have one's son handicapped

at the very beginning because his mother was not unselfish enough to

endure a little for his sake....

Ingeborg got up and came and put her arms round his neck and whispered.

"I'm--frightened," she breathed. "Robert, I'm--frightened."

Then he took her to the sofa, and made her sit down beside him while he

reasoned with her.

He reasoned for at least twenty minutes, taking great pains and being

patient. He told her she was not really frightened, but that her

physical condition caused her to fancy she thought she was.

Ingeborg was interested by this, and readily admitted that it was

possible.

He told her about the simple courage of the other women in Kökensee, and

Ingeborg agreed, for she had seen it herself.

He told her how God had arranged she should bring forth in sorrow, but

she fidgeted and began again to talk of bishops.

He told her it would only be a few hours' suffering, perhaps less, and

that in return there was a lifetime's joy for them in their child.

She listened attentively to this, was quite quiet for a few minutes,

then slid her hand into his.

He told her she might, by letting herself go to fear, hurt her child,

and would she not in that case find difficulty afterwards in forgiving

herself?

This completed her cure. An enormous courage took the place of her

misgivings. She rose up from the sofa so superfluously brave, so glowing

with enterprise, that she wanted to begin at once that she might show

how much she could cheerfully endure. "As though," she said, lifting her

chin, "I couldn't stand what other women stand--as though I wouldn't

stand _anything_ sooner than hurt my baby!" And she flung back her head

in the proudest defiance of whatever might be ahead of her.

Her baby, her husband, her happy home--to suffer for these would be

beautiful if it were not such a little thing, almost too little to offer

up at their dear altar. She would have been transfigured by her shining

thoughts if any thing could have transfigured her, but no thoughts

however bright could pierce through that sad body. Her outlines were not

the outlines for heroic attitudes. She not only had a double chin, she

seemed to be doubled all over. She looked the queerest figure, heavy,

middle-aged, uncouth, ugly, standing there passionately expressing her

readiness to begin; and Herr Dremmel unconsciously seeing this, and

bored by having had to explain the obvious at such length and spend a

valuable half hour bringing a woman to reason--why could they never go

to it by themselves?--wasted no more words having got her there, but

brushed a hasty kiss across her hair and went away looking at his watch.

And next day, just as she was putting the potatoes into that dinner-pot

that so much simplified her cooking, she uttered a small exclamation and

turned quickly to Ilse with a look of startled questioning.

"_Geht's los_?" asked Ilse, pausing in the wiping dry of a wooden ladle.

"I--don't know," said Ingeborg, gasping a little. "No," she added after

a minute, during which they stood staring at each other, "it wasn't

anything."

And she went on with the potatoes.

But when presently there was another little fluttering exclamation,

Ilse, with great decision, laid down her gloomy drying-cloth and sought

out Johann, Herr Dremmel not having come in, and bade him harness the

horses and fetch Frau Dosch.

"The first thing," said Frau Dosch, arriving two hours later,

surprisingly brisk and business-like considering her age and the heat,

"the first thing is to plait your hair in two plaits."

And still later, when Ingeborg had left off pretending or trying to be

anything at all, when courage and unselfishness and stoicism and a

desire to please Robert--who was Robert?--were like toys for

drawing-room games, shoved aside in these grips with death, Frau Dosch

nodded her head philosophically while she ate and drank from the trays

Ilse kept on bringing her, and said at regular intervals, "_Ja, ja_--was

sein muss sein muss."

Such were the consolations of Frau Dosch.

CHAPTER XX

These things began on Tuesday at midday; and on Wednesday night, so late

that bats and moths were busy in the garden and often in the room, Frau

Dosch, grown very wispy about the hair and abandoned in the dress,

dabbed a bundle of swaddle with a small red face emerging from it down

on to the bed beside Ingeborg and said, tired but triumphant, "There!"

The great moment had come: the supreme moment of a woman's life. Herr

Dremmel was present, dishevelled and moist-eyed; Ilse was present,

glowing and hot. It was a boy, a magnificent boy, Frau Dosch pronounced,

and the three stood watching for the first ray of _Mutterglück_, the

first illumination that was to light the face on the pillow.

"There!" said Frau Dosch; but Ingeborg did not open her eyes.

"There!" said Frau Dosch again, picking up the bundle and laying it

slantwise on Ingeborg's breast and addressing her very loudly. "Frau

Pastor--rouse yourself--behold your son--a splendid boy--almost a man

already."

She took Ingeborg's arm and laid it round the bundle.

It slid off and hung over the edge of the bed as before.

"Tut, tut!" said Frau Dosch, becoming scandalised: and stooping down she

shouted into Ingeborg's ear: "Frau Pastor--wake up--look at your son--a

magnificent fellow--with a chest, I tell you--oh, but he will break the

hearts of the maidens he will--"

Still the blankest indifference on the face on the pillow.

Herr Dremmel knelt down so as to be on a level with it, and took the

limp damp hand hanging down in his and patted it.

"Little wife," he said in German, "it is all over. Open your eyes and

rejoice with me in our new happiness. You have given me a son."

"_Ja eben_," said Frau Dosch emphatically.

"You have filled my cup with joy."

"_Ja eben_," said Frau Dosch, still louder.

"Open your eyes, and welcome him to his mother's heart."

"_Ja eben_" said Frau Dosch indignantly.

Then Ingeborg did slowly open her eyes--it seemed as if she could hardly

lift their heavy lids--and looked at Robert as though she were looking

at him from an immense distance. Her mouth remained open; her face was

vacant.

Frau Dosch seized the bundle, and with clucking sounds jerked it up and

down between the faces of the parents so that its mother's eyes must

needs fall upon it. Its red contents began to cry.

"Ah--there now--now we shall see," exclaimed Frau Dosch, who had been

secretly perturbed by the newborn's absence of comment while it was

being washed and swaddled.

"The first cry of our son," said Herr Dremmel, kissing Ingeborg's hand

with deep emotion.

"_Now_ we will try," said Frau Dosch, once more laying the baby on

Ingeborg's chest and folding her arm round it. This time she took the

precaution to hold the mother's arm firmly in position herself. "Oh, the

splendid fellow!" she exclaimed. "Frau Pastor, what do you say to your

eldest son?"

But Frau Pastor said nothing. Her eyelids drooped over her eyes again,

and shut the world and all its vigours out. The sound of these people

round her bed came to her from far away. There was a singing in her

ears, a black remoteness in her soul. Somewhere from behind the vast sea

of nothingness in which she seemed to sink, through the constant singing

in her ears, came little faint voices with words. She wanted to listen,

she wanted to listen, why would these people interrupt her--the same

words over and over again, faintly throbbing in a rhythm like the rhythm

of the wheels of the train that had brought her through the night long

ago across Europe to her German home, only very distant, tiny,

muffled--"From battle and murder"--yes, she had caught that--"from all

women labouring with child"--yes--"from all sick persons"--yes--"and

young children"--yes, go on--"Good Lord deliver us"--oh, yes--please....

Good Lord deliver us--please--please--deliver us....

"Perhaps a little brandy?" suggested Herr Dremmel, puzzled.

"Brandy! If her own son cannot cheer her--Does the Herr Pastor then not

know that one gives nothing at first to a lady lying-in but water-soup?"

Herr Dremmel, feeling ignorant, let go the idea of brandy. "Her hand is

rather cold," he said, almost apologetically, for who knew but what it

was cold because it ought to be?

Frau Dosch expressed the opinion that it was not, and that if it were it

was not so cold as her heart. "See here," she said, "see this beautiful

boy addressing his mother in the only language he knows, and she not

even looking at him. Come, my little fellow--come, then--we are not

wanted--come with Aunt Dosch--the old Aunt Dosch--"

And she took the baby off Ingeborg's passive chest, and after a few

turns with it up and down the room slapping the underside of its swaddle

in a way experience had taught choked out crying, put it in the pale

blue cradle that stood ready on two chairs.

"Well, well," said Herr Dremmel getting up, for his knees were hurting

him, and looking at his watch, "it is bedtime for all of us. It is past

midnight. To-morrow, after a sleep, my wife will be herself again."

He went towards the door, followed by Ilse with one of the two lamps

that were adding to the stifling heat in the room, then paused and

looked back.

Ingeborg was lying as before.

"You are sure only water-soup?" he said, hesitating. "Is that--will that

by the time it reaches my son nourish him?"

For all answer Frau Dosch advanced heavily and shut the door.

She was tired to death. She was not, at that hour of the night, going to

defend her methods to a husband. She locked the door and began pulling

off her dress. She could hardly stand. It had been one of those

perfectly normal births that yet are endless and half kill an honest

midwife who is not as young as she used to be. Before dropping on to the

bed provided for her she took a final look at the object in the cradle,

which was noiselessly sleeping, and then at the other object on the bed,

which was lying as before. Well, if the Frau Pastor preferred behaving

like a log instead of a proud mother--Frau Dosch shrugged her shoulder,

put on a coloured dimity jacket over her petticoat, kicked off her

slippers, and went, stockinged and hairpinned, to bed and to instant

sleep.

But the life in the parsonage puzzled Herr Dremmel during the next few

weeks. He had expected the simple joys of realised family happiness to

succeed the act of birth. It was a reasonable expectation. It occurred

in other houses. He had been patient for nine months, supported during

their interminableness by the thought that what he bore would be amply

made up to him at the end of them by a delighted young wife restored to

him in her slenderness and health, running singing about the house with

a healthy son in her arms. The son was there and seemed satisfactory,

but where was the healthy young wife? And as for running about the

house, when the fifth day came, the day on which the other women in the

parish got up and began to be brisk again, Ingeborg made no sign of even

being aware it was expected of her. She looked at him vaguely when he

suggested it, with the same vagueness and want of interest in anything

with which she lay for hours staring out of the window, her mouth always

a little open, her position always the same, unless Ilse came and

changed it for her.

Frau Dosch had left the morning after the birth according to the custom

of midwives, returning on each of the three following mornings to wash

the mother and child, and after that Ilse had taken over these duties,

and as far as he could see performed them with zeal and vigour.

Everything was done that could be done; why then did Ingeborg remain

apathetic and uninterested in bed, and not take the trouble even to shut

her mouth?

He was puzzled and disappointed. The days passed, and nothing was

changed. He could not but view these manifestations of want of backbone

with uneasiness, occurring as they did in the mother of his children.

The least thing that was demanded of her in the way of exertion made her

break out into a perspiration. She had not yet, so far as he knew,

voluntarily put her arms once round her son--Ilse had to hold them round

him. She had not even said anything about him. He might have been a girl

for any pride she showed. And that holiest function of a mother, the

nursing of her child, instead of being a recurring joy was a recurring

and apparently increasing difficulty.

He had pointed out to her that it was not only the greatest privilege of

a mother to nurse her child but it was an established fact that it gave

her the deepest, the holiest satisfaction. In all pictures where there

is a mother, he had reminded her, she is invariably either nursing or

has just been doing so, and on her face is the satisfied serenity that

attends the fulfilment of natural functions.

She had not answered, and her face remained turned away and flushed,

with beads rolling down it. Ilse held the baby, he observed; there was a

most regrettable want of hold in his wife.

And she appeared to have odd fancies. She imagined, for instance, that

the pieces of buttered bread Ilse put on a plate and laid beside her on

her bed at tea-time were stuck to the plate. He had found her struggling

one afternoon and becoming hot endeavouring to lift one of these pieces

up off the plate. He had asked her, Ilse not being in the room, what she

was doing. As usual she had whispered--it was another of her fancies

that she had lost her voice--and when he bent down he found that she was

whispering the word _stuck_.

He had taken up the piece to show her she was mistaken, and had shaken

the plate and made all the pieces on it spring about, and she had

watched him and then begun over again to behave as if she could not lift

one.

Then she dropped her hands down on to the sheet and looked up at him and

began to whisper something else. "_Heavy_," she whispered, but not, he

was glad to say, without at least some sort of a slight smile indicating

her awareness that she was conducting herself childishly, and Ilse,

coming in, had taken the bread and fed her as if it were she who were

the baby and not his son.

Herr Dremmel, therefore, was both puzzled and worried. He was still more

puzzled and worried when, on the very day week after the birth, Ilse

came to him and said that Frau Pastor was shaking her bed about and that

she feared if she did not soon stop the bed, which was enfeebled as Herr

Pastor knew by having two mended legs among its four, might break. She

had reminded Frau Pastor of this, but she did not seem to care and

continued to shake it.

"The good bed," said Ilse, "the excellent bed. The best we have in the

house. Would Herr Pastor step across?"

Herr Pastor stepped across, and found Ingeborg shivering with such

astonishing energy that the bed did, as Ilse had described, rattle

threateningly.

In reply to his questions Ilse told him, for Ingeborg was too busy

shaking to explain, that nothing had happened except that Frau Pastor

said she was thirsty and would like a glass of cold water, and she had

fetched it fresh from the pump and Frau Pastor had asked to be held up

to drink it and had drunk it all at one draught and immediately fallen

back and begun this shaking.

"Ingeborg, what is this?" said Herr Dremmel with a show of severity, for

he had heard severity acted as a sedative on those who, for instance,

shake.

When, however, Ingeborg, instead of replying like a reasonable being,

continued to shake and seem unaware of his presence, and when on

touching her he found that in spite of the shivering she was extremely

hot, he sent Johann for Frau Dosch, who on seeing her could only suggest

that Johann should drive on into Meuk and bring out the doctor.

And so it was that Ingeborg, coming suddenly out of a thin, high

confusion in which she seemed to have been hurrying since the world

began, found it was night, for lamps were alight, and people--many

people--were round her bed, and one was a man she did not know with a

short black beard. But she did know him. It was the doctor. It flashed

across her instantly. Then she had really got to being in extremity.

That woman had said so, that big woman who used to come and see her in

the garden long ago. And Ilse--that was Ilse at the foot of the bed

crying. When one was in extremity Ilse did cry. She found herself

stroking the doctor's beard and begging him not to let go of her. She

was reminded that it was unusual to stroke the doctor's beard by his

drawing back, but she thought it silly not to let one's beard be stroked

if somebody wanted to. She heard herself saying, "Don't let go of

me--please--don't let go of me--please--" but it seemed that he could

not hold her, for she was caught away almost immediately again into that

thin, hot, hurrying confusion, high up in the treble, high up at the

very top, where all the violins were insisting together over and over

again on one thin, quivering, anxious note....

"It is impossible," said the doctor, a Jew from Königsberg, lately

married and set up at Menk, looking at Frau Dosch, "that this should

have happened."

And he proceeded to explain to Herr Dremmel that the child in future

would have to seek its nourishment in tins.

"What?" exclaimed Herr Dremmel.

"Tins," said the doctor.

"Tins? For my son? When there are cows in the world? Cows, which at

least more closely resemble mothers than tins?"

"Tins," repeated the doctor firmly. "Herr Pastor, cows have moods just

as frequently as women. They are fed unwisely, and behold immediately a

mood. Not having the gift of tongues they cannot convey their mood by

speech, and baffled at one end they fall back upon the other and express

their malignancies in milk."

Herr Dremmel was silent. The complications and difficulties of family

life were being lit up into a picture at which he could only gaze in

dismay. On the bed Ingeborg was ceaselessly turning her head from one

side to the other and rubbing her hands weakly up and down, up and down

over the sheet. While he talked the doctor was watching her. Frau Dosch

stood looking on with a locked-up mouth. Ilse wept. The baby whimpered.

The doctor said he would send some tins of patent food out by Johann on

his return journey; if there should be much delay and the baby was

noisy, said the doctor, a little water--

"Water! My son fed on water?" exclaimed Herr Dremmel. "Heavens above us,

what diet is this for a good German? Tins and water in the place of

blood and iron?"

The doctor shrugged his shoulder, and gently putting down Ingeborg's

hand which he had been holding for a moment to see if he could quiet it,

prepared to go away, saying he would also send out a nurse.

"Ahh," said Herr Dremmel, greatly relieved, "you know of a thoroughly

healthy wet one?"

"Completely dry. For Frau Pastor. Impossible to leave her unnursed.

There will be bandages. There must be punctuality and care"--he looked

at Frau Dosch--"cleanliness, efficiency"--at each word he looked at Frau

Dosch. "I will come out to-morrow. Perfectly normal, perfectly normal,"

he said, as he got into the carriage while Herr Dremmel stood ruefully

on the doorstep.

The illness went its perfectly normal course. A nurse came out from the

principal Königsberg hospital and the disordered house at once became

perfectly normal, too. Ilse returned to her kitchen, the baby was

appeased by its scientific diet, Ingeborg's bed grew smooth and

spotless, her room was quiet, nobody knocked any more against the foot

of the bed in passing or shook the floor and herself by heavy treading;

she was no longer tended with the same vigour that made the kitchen

floor spotless and the pig happy; bandages, unguents, and disinfectants

stood neatly in rows, clean white cloths covered the tables, the windows

were wide open day and night, and lamps left off burning exactly where

they shone into her eyes. Everything was normal, including the behaviour

of the abscess, which went its calm way, unhurried and undisturbed by

anything the doctor tried to do to it, ripening, reaching its

perfection, declining, in an order and obedience to causation that was

beautiful for those capable of appreciating it. Everything was normal

except the inside of Ingeborg's mind.

There, in a black recess, crouched fear. She suspected life. She had

lost, on that awful night and day and night again of birth, confidence

in it. She knew it now. It was all death. Death and cruelty. Death and

nameless horror. Death pretending, death waiting, waiting to be cruel

again, to get her again, and get her altogether next time. What was this

talk of life? It was only just death. The others didn't know. She knew.

She had seen it and been with it. She had been down into the valley of

the shadow of it uncomforted. Her eyes had been wide open while she

went. Each step of the way was cut into her memory. They had let her

miss nothing. She knew. Out there in the garden the rustling leaves

looked gay, and the sun looked cheerful, and the flowers she had so

confidently loved looked beautiful and kind. They were death dressed up.

Oh, she was not to be taken in any more. She knew the very sound of him.

Often, while she was in that fever, she had heard him coming across the

yard, up the steps, along the passage, pausing just outside the door,

going back each time, but only for a little while. He would come again.

The horror of it. The horror of living with that waiting. The horror of

knowing that love ended in this, that new life was only more death.

Fearfully she lay staring at the realities that she alone in that house

could see. And she could hear her heart beating--if only she needn't

have to hear her heart beating--it beat in little irregular beats,

little flutters, and then a pause--and then a sudden _ping_--oh, the

weak, weak helplessness--nothing to hold on to anywhere in all the

world--even the bed hadn't an underneath--she was always dropping

downwards, downwards, through it, away....

Sometimes the nurse came and stood beside her, and with a big wholesome

hand smoothed back the hair from her absorbed and frowning forehead.

"What are you thinking about?" she would ask, bending down and smiling.

But Ingeborg never told.

To Herr Dremmel the nurse counselled patience.

He said he had been having it for ten months.

"You must have some more," said the nurse, "and it will come right."

And so it gradually did. Slowly Ingeborg began to creep up the curve of

life again. It was a long and hesitating creeping, but there did come a

time when there were definite and widening gaps in her vision of the

realities. The first day she had meat for dinner she lost sight of them

for several hours. The next day she had meat she shut her mouth. The day

after, a feeling of shame for her black thoughts crept into her mind and

stayed there. The day after that, when she not only had meat but began a

new tonic, she asked for Robertlet and put her arms round him all by

herself.

Then the nurse slipped out and called Herr Dremmel; and he, hurrying in

and finding her propped on pillows, holding his baby and smiling down at

him just as he had pictured she would, went down once more on his knees

beside the bed and took the whole group, mother, baby, and pillows, into

his arms, and quite frankly and openly cried for joy.

"Little sheep ... little sheep,..." he kept on saying. And Ingeborg,

having reached that point in convalescence where one never misses a

chance of crying, at once cried, too; and Robertlet beginning to cry,

the nurse, who laughed, broke up the group.

After that things grew better every day. Ingeborg visibly improved;

every hour almost it was possible to see some new step made back to her

original self. She clung to the nurse, who stayed on long after the

carrying into the next room stage had been passed and who did not leave

her till she was walking about quite gaily in the garden and beginning

to do the things with Robertlet that she had planned she would. She

seemed, after the long months of ugliness, to be prettier than before.

She was so glad, so grateful, to be back again, and her gladness lit her

up. It was so wonderful to be back in the bright world of free movement,

to be presently going to punt, and presently be off for a day in the

forests, to be able to arrange, to be in clear possession of her time

and her body. The deliciousness of health, the happiness of being just

normal made her radiant.

The September that year was one of ripe days and glowing calms. Neither

Herr Dremmel nor Ingeborg had ever been quite so happy. He loved her as

warmly as before their marriage. He found himself noticing things like

the fine texture of her skin, and observing how pretty the back of her

neck was and the way her hair behaved just at that point. She was the

brightest adornment and finish to a man's house, he said to himself,

independently busy with her baby and her housekeeping, not worrying him,

not having to be thought about in his laboratory when he wished to work,

absorbed in womanly interests, cheerful, affectionate, careful of her

child. It was delightful to have her sit on his knee again, delightful

to hear her talk the sweet and sometimes even amusing nonsense with

which her head seemed full, delightful to see her sudden solemnity when

there was anything to be done for the personal comfort of Robertlet.

"Aren't we _happy_," said Ingeborg one evening when they were strolling

after supper along the path through the rye-field, all the old

fearlessness and confidence in life surging in her again. "Did you ever

_know_ anything like it?"

"It is you, my little sun among sheep," said Herr Dremmel, standing

still to kiss her as energetically as though he had been beneath the

pear-tree in the Bishop's garden, "it is all you."

"And presently," she said, "I'm going to do such things--Robert, such

things. First, I'm going to be a proper pastor's wife at last and turn

to in the village thoroughly. And besides that I'm going to--"

She stopped and flung out her hands with a familiar gesture.

"Well, little hare?"

"Oh, I don't know--but it's fun being alive, isn't it? I feel as if I'd

only got to stretch up my hands to all those stars and catch as many of

them as I want to."

And hardly had the nurse left and the household had returned to its

normal arrangements, and the parlour was no longer disfigured by Herr

Dremmel's temporary bed, and life was clear again, and all one had to do

was to go ahead praising the dear God who had made it so spacious and so

kind, than she began to have her second child.

PART III