Ingeborg crept away down the passage with the sound in her ears of the
key being turned in the lock behind her.
She was crushed. That Robert should think she had never loved him, that
he should not even let her tell him how much she had and did! She stared
out of the little window at the foot of the stairs at the untidy
vegetables in the garden. This was the quality of life--Brussels
sprouts, and a door being locked behind one. It was all grey and
difficult and tragic. She had hurt Robert, offended him. He was in there
thinking she didn't love him. What he had said was peculiarly shattering
coming from a mouth that had been always kind. Yet what was there to do
but this? The alternative, it seemed, was somebody's dying; and if the
children did live there would be the death of the spirit, the decay of
all lovely things in the home, the darkening of all light; there would
be neglect, apathy, an utter running to seed. But she felt guilty and
conscience-stricken. She was no longer sure she was right. Perhaps it
was indeed her duty to go on, perhaps she was indeed being wicked and
cruel. The clearness of vision that had been hers at Zoppot was blurred;
she was confused, infinitely distressed. Yet through the distress and
confusion there kept on jabbing something like a little spear of light,
and always it pointed in this one direction....
She stood leaning against the wall by the open window, a miserable
mixture of doubt and conviction, remorse and determination. All her life
she had been servile--servile with the sudden rare tremendous
insurrections that upheave certain natures brought up in servility,
swift tempests more devastating than the steady fighting of systematic
rebels. Her insurrections were epoch-making. When they occurred the
destiny of an entire family was changed. Fathers and husbands were not
prepared for anything but continued acquiescence in one so constantly
acquiescent. As far as she was concerned they felt they might sleep
peacefully in their beds. Then this obedient thing, this pliable
uncontradicting thing would return, for instance, from an illicit trip
abroad, betrothed to an unknown foreigner, and somehow in spite of
violent opposition marry him; or, as in this second volcanic upheaval,
with no preliminaries whatever, refuse point blank--the final effect on
Herr Dremmel's mind of her incoherence was a point blankness--to live
with her husband as his wife.
Behind the locked door his anger was as great as her distressed
confusion outside it. She was to be his wife but not his wife. Under his
roof. A perpetual irritation. She had decreed, this woman who had
nothing to decree, that there were to be no more Dremmels. The
indignation of the thwarted ancestor was heavy upon him. Her moral
obliquity shocked him, her disregard for the give and take necessary if
a civilised community is to continue efficient. How was he going to work
with that constant reminder about his house of his past placidities?
Already it had begun, the annoyance, the hindering, for here he was
sitting in front of his samples making mistakes in weighing, adding up
wrong, forced by humiliatingly different results each time to count the
grains over and over again.
Driven by the stress of the situation to unfairness, he remembered with
a kind of bitter affection those widows who had darkened his past so
soothingly before his marriage, the emotional peace their bony
dustiness, their bonneted dinginess had secured him. They had been, he
perceived, like a dark blind shading his eyes from the tormenting glare
of too much domesticity. The most infuriated of that black and blessed
band had been better than this threatening excess of relationship. Not
one had ever come between him and his steady reaching forward. Not one
had even once caused him to count his grains twice over. A man who
wishes to work, he told himself, must clear his life of women; of all
women, that is--for there are certain elementary actions connected with
saucepans and bedmaking that only women will do--except widows. A wife
who is not a wife and who yet persists in looking as if she were one,
can be nothing but a goad and a burden for an honest man. Either she
should look like some one used up and finished or she should continue to
discharge her honourable functions until such time as she developed the
physical unattractiveness that placed her definitely on the list of
women one respects. That Ingeborg should choose the moment when she
seemed younger and rounder than ever to revolt against Duty and
Providence appeared to him in his first wrath deliberately malicious. He
was amazed. He could not believe he was being called out of his
important and serious work, beckoned out of it just when it was going so
well, in order to be hurt, in order to be made acquainted with pain, and
by her of all people in the world whom he used to call--surely he had
been kind?--his little sheep. To be hit by one's sheep! To be hit
violently by it so that the blows actually shook one at the very moment
of greatest affection for it, of rejoicing over its return, of plunging
one's hands most confidently into the comfort of its wool!
Herr Dremmel was amazed.
He stayed in his laboratory in this condition till supper; then, during
the meal, he carefully read a book which he propped up in front of him
against the loaf, while Ingeborg, ministering to him with the eager
deftness of the conscience-stricken, watched for a sign of forgiveness
out of the corners of red eyes.
He stayed after supper in his laboratory till past midnight, still being
amazed, reduced indeed at last to walking up and down that calm temple
of untiring attempts to nail down ultimate causes, considering how best
he could bring his wife to reason.
The business of bringing a woman to reason had always seemed to him
quite the most extravagant way of wasting good time. To have to discuss,
argue, explain, threaten, adjure, only in order to get back to the point
from which nobody ought ever to have started, was the silliest of all
silly necessities. Again he fumed at the thought of an untractable,
undutiful wife about him, and recognised the acute need to be clear of
feminine childishness, egotism, unforeseeable resiliences, if a man
would work. In his stirred stale it appeared altogether monstrous that
the whole world should be blotted out, the great wide world of
magnificent opportunity and spacious interest, even for a day, even for
an hour, by the power to make him uncomfortable, by the power to make
him concentrate his brains on an irrelevant situation, of one small
woman.
He went to their room about half-past twelve determined to have no more
of the nonsense. He would bring her then and there, by the shortest
possible route, to reason. He would have it out even to the extent of
severity and have done with it. He was master, and if she forced him to
emphasize the fact he would.
Carrying the lamp he went to their room with the firm footsteps of one
who has ceased to be going to stand things.
But the room was empty. It was as chillily empty of wifely traces as it
had been since the beginning of June.
"This is paltry," thought Herr Dremmel, feeling the offence was now so
great as to have become ridiculous; and determined to discover into what
fastness she had withdrawn and fetch her out of it, he went lamp in hand
doggedly through the house looking for her, beginning with the thorough
patience of one accustomed to research in the kitchen, where shy
cockroaches peeped at him round the legs of tables, examining the
parlour, stuffy with the exhaustion of an ended day, penetrating into a
room in which Rosa and the cook reared themselves up in their beds to
regard him with horror unspeakable, and at last stumbling up the narrow
staircase to where Robertlet and Ditti slept the sleep of the
unvaryingly just.
Here, in a third small bed of the truckle type, lay his defaulting wife,
her face to the wall, her body composed into an excess of
motionlessness.
"Ingeborg!" he called, holding the lamp high over his head.
But she did not stir.
"Ingeborg!" he called again.
But never did woman sleep so soundly.
He walked across to the bed and bent over, searching her face by the
light of the lamp. Most of it was buried in the pillow, but the one eye
visible was tightly shut, more immensely asleep than any eye he had ever
seen.
The indifference that could sleep while her outraged husband was looking
for her revolted him. Without making any further attempt to wake her he
turned on his heel, and slamming the door behind him went downstairs
again.
"That is thieves at last," remarked Ditti, who had been expecting them
for years, brought out of her dreams--good dreams--by the noise of the
door.
"Yes," said Robertlet, also roused from dreams that did him credit.
"We must now get under the clothes," said Ditti, who had settled long
ago what would be the right thing to do.
"Yes," said Robertlet.
"You needn't," said Ingeborg out of the darkness--they both started,
they had forgotten she was there--"it was only Papa."
But the thought of Papa coming up to their room and banging the door in
the middle of the night filled them in its strangeness with an even
greater uneasiness; they would have preferred thieves; and after some
preliminary lying quiet and being good they one after the other withdrew
as silently as possible beneath the comfort of the clothes, where they
waited in neat patience for the next thing Papa might do until, stifled
but uncomplaining, they once more fell asleep.
There followed some days of strain in the Kökensee parsonage.
Herr Dremmel retired into an extremity of silence, made no allusion to
these regrettable incidents, became at meals a mere figure behind a
newspaper, and at other times was not there at all.
He had decided that he would not waste his energies in anger. At the
earliest opportunity he would drive in to Meuk, call on the doctor, and
after explaining the effect of Zoppot, a place which was to have cured
her, on his wife, request him now to prescribe a cure for the cure. It
was Ingeborg's business to come to her husband and ask for forgiveness,
and he would give her these few days in which to do it. If she did not
he would know, after consultation with the doctor, what course to
take--whether of severity, or whether, setting aside his manhood, it was
not rather an occasion on which one ought to coax. He was, after all,
too humane to resort without medical sanction to scenes. Perhaps what
she needed was only a corrective to Zoppot. There was such a thing as
excess of salubriousness.
Having made up his mind, he found himself calmer, able to work again in
the knowledge that in a few days he would be clear, with the aid of the
doctor, as to what should be done; and Ingeborg had nothing to complain
of except that he would not speak. Several times she tried to reopen the
so hastily closed subject, but got no further in the face of his
monumental silence than "But, Robert--"
She took the children for outings in the forest, and while they did not
chatter merrily together and did not play at games she thought over all
the ways that were really tactful of luring him to reasonable
discussion. She knew she had made a lamentable first appearance in the
_rôle_ of a retiring mother, but how difficult it was when you felt
overwhelmingly to talk objectively. And then there were tears. A woman
cried, and what a handicap that was. Before the first semicolon in any
vital discourse with one's husband was reached one was dissolved in
tears, thought Ingeborg, ashamed and resentful; and Robert grew so calm
and patient, so disconcertingly calm and patient when faced by crying;
he sat there like some large god, untouched by human distress, waiting
for the return of reason. It is true he cried, too, sometimes, but only
about odd things like Christmas Eves and sons if they were sufficiently
new born--things that came under the category surely of cheerful, at
most of cheerfully touching; but he never cried about these great
important issues, these questions on which all one's happiness hung.
Life would run more easily, she thought, if husbands and wives had the
same taste in tears.
Four days after her return home she asked him to forgive her.
It was at the end of supper, and he had just removed his book from the
supporting loaf and was getting up to go when she ran across to him with
the quickness of despair and laid hold of him by both his sleeves and
said, "Forgive me."
He looked down at her with a gleam in his eye; he would not have to go
to Meuk after all.
"Do," she begged. "Robert! Do! You know I love you. I'm so miserable to
have hurt you. Do let's be friends. Won't we?"
"Friends?" echoed Herr Dremmel, drawing back. "Is that all you have to
say to me?"
"Oh, do be friends! I can't bear this."
"Ingeborg," he said with the severity of disappointment, pulling his
sleeves out of her hands and going to the door, "have you then not yet
discovered that a true husband and wife can never be friends?"
"Oh, but how dreadful!" said Ingeborg, dropping her hands by her side
and staring after him as he went out.
Toward the end of the week, when her unassisted meditations continued to
produce no suggestions of any use for removing the stain that
undoubtedly rested on her, she thought she would go in to Meuk and seek
the counsel of the doctor. He had always been good to her, kind and
understanding. She would go to him more in the spirit of one who goes to
a priest than to a doctor, and inquire of him earnestly what she should
do to be saved.
She found the position at home unendurable. If the doctor told her that
it was her duty to go on having children, and that it was mere chance
the two last had been born dead, she would resume her career. It was a
miserable career--a terrible, maimed thing--but less miserable than
doubt as to whether one were not being wicked and Robert was being
utterly right. Not for nothing was she the daughter of a bishop, and had
enjoyed for twenty-two years the privileges of a Christian home. Also
she well knew that the public opinion of Kökensee and Glambeck would be
against her in this matter of rebellion, and she felt too weak to stand
up alone against these big things. She had never been able to hold out
long against prolonged disapproval; nor had she ever been able to endure
that people round her should not be happy. By the end of the week she
was so wretched and so full of doubts that she decided to put her trust
in Meuk and abide by the decision of its doctor; and so it happened that
she set out on the five-mile walk to it on the same day on which Herr
Dremmel drove there.
He had driven off in the middle of the morning with sandwiches for
himself and the coachman in the direction of the experiment ground,
telling her he would not be in till the evening, so she seized the
favourable opportunity and, also armed with sandwiches, started soon
after twelve o'clock for Meuk. The doctor's consulting hour was, she
knew, from two to three, and if she were there punctually at two she
could talk to him, have her fate decided, and be home again by four.
She walked along the edge of the harvested rye-fields eating her
sandwiches as she went, and refusing to think for this brief hour and a
half of the difficulties of life. Her mind was weary of them. She would
put them away from her for this one walk. It was the brightest of August
middays. The world seemed filled with every element of happiness. Some
people, probably friends of the Glambecks, were shooting partridges over
the stubble. The lupin fields were in their full glory, and their
peculiar orange scent met her all along the way. There was a mile of
sandy track to be waded through, and then came four good miles of hard
white highroad between reddening mountain ashes to Meuk. Walking in that
clear fresh warmth, so bright with colour, so sweet with scents, she
could not but begin gradually to glow, and by the time she arrived at
the doctor's house, however wan her spirits might be, the rest of her
was so rosy that the servant who opened the door tried to head her off
from the waiting-room to the other end of the passage, persuaded that
what she had come for could not be the doctor, but an animated call on
the doctor's wife. She entered the waiting-room, a dingy place, with
much the effect of a shaft of light piercing through a fog; and there,
sitting at the table, turning over the fingered and aged piles of
illustrated weeklies, she found Herr Dremmel. For a moment they stared
at each other.
There was no one else there. Through folding-doors could be heard the
murmur of a patient consulting in the next room. Meuk was not usually a
sick place, and nine times out of ten the doctor read his newspaper
undisturbed from two to three; this was the tenth time, and though it
had only just struck two a patient was with him already.
Herr Dremmel and Ingeborg stared at each other for a moment without
speaking. Then he said, suddenly angered by the realisation that she had
come in to Meuk without asking him if she might, "You did not tell me
you were coming here."
"No," said Ingeborg.
"Why have you come?"
She sat down as inconspicuously as she could on the edge of a chair in a
corner and clung to her umbrella. It was the awkwardest thing meeting
Robert there.
"I--I just thought I would," she murmured.
"You do not look ill. You were not ill this morning."
"It's--psychological," murmured Ingeborg unnerved, and laying hold of
the first word that darted into her undisciplined brain.
"Psycho--?"
"Are _you_ ill, Robert?" she asked, suddenly anxious. "Why have _you_
come?"
"My dear wife, that is my affair," said Herr Dremmel, who was
particularly annoyed and puzzled by her presence.
"Oh," murmured Ingeborg. She had never yet heard herself called his dear
wife, and felt the immensity of her relegation to her proper place.
He fluttered the pages of the _Fliegende Blätter_; she held on tighter
to what seemed to be her only friend, her umbrella.
"Did you walk?" he asked presently, letting off the question at her like
a gun.
"Yes--oh, yes," said Ingeborg, with hasty meekness.
What had she come for? thought Herr Dremmel, fluttering the pages
faster. Ridiculous to pretend she needed a doctor. She looked, sitting
there with her unusual pink cheeks, like a flourishing sixteen--at most
eighteen.
What had he come for? thought Ingeborg, wishing life would not deal so
upsettingly in coincidences, and keeping her eyes carefully on the
carpet. Then a swift fear jumped at her heart--suppose he were ill?
Suppose he had begun to have one of those large, determined, obscure
diseases that seem to mow down men and make the world so much a place of
widows? She had observed that for one widower in Kökensee and the
surrounding district there were ten widows. The women appeared to ail
through life, constantly being smitten down by one thing after the
other, but at least they stayed alive; while the men, who went year by
year out robustly to work, died after a single smiting. "Perhaps it's
want of practice in being smitten," she thought; and looked anxiously
under her eyelashes at Robert, struggling with a desire to go over and
implore him to tell her what was the matter. In another moment she would
have gone, driven across by her impulses, if the folding-doors had not
been thrown open and the doctor appeared bowing.
"_Darf ich bitten_?" said the doctor to Herr Dremmel, not perceiving
Ingeborg, who was shuttered out of sight by the one half of the door he
had opened. "Ah--it is the Herr Pastor," he added less officially on
recognising him, and advanced holding out his hand. "I hope, my friend,
there is nothing wrong with you?"
Herr Dremmel did not answer, but seizing his hat made a movement of a
forestalling character towards the consulting room; and the doctor
turning to follow him beheld Ingeborg in her corner behind the door.
"Ah--the Frau Pastor," he said, bowing again and again advancing with an
extended hand. "Which," he added, looking from one to the other, "is the
patient?"
But Herr Dremmel's back, disappearing with determination into the next
room, suggested an acute need of assistance not visible in his wife's
retiring attitude.
"You'll tell me the _truth_ about him, won't you?" she whispered,
anxiously. "You won't hide things from me?"
The doctor looked grave. "Is it so serious?" he asked; and hurried after
Herr Dremmel and shut the door.
Ingeborg sat and waited for what seemed a long time. She heard much
murmuring, and often both voices murmured together, which puzzled her.
Sometimes, indeed, they ceased to be murmurs and rose to a point at
which they became distinct--"You forget I am a Christian pastor," she
heard Robert say--but they dropped again, though never into a pause,
never into those moments of silence during which Robert might be guessed
to be putting out his tongue or having suspect portions of his person
prodded. She sat there worried and anxious, all her own affairs
forgotten in this fear of something amiss with him; and when at last the
door opened again and both men came out she got up eagerly and said,
"Well?"
Herr Dremmel was looking very solemn; more entirely solemn than she had
ever seen him; almost as though he had already attained to that crown of
a man's career, that final touch of all, that last gift to the world, a
widow and orphans. The doctor's face was a careful blank.
"Well?" said Ingeborg again, greatly alarmed.
"Does the Frau Pastor also wish to consult me?" asked the doctor.
"Yes. I did. But it doesn't really matter now. Robert--"
Herr Dremmel was putting on his hat very firmly and going towards the
outer door without saying good-bye to the doctor. "I will wait for you
outside and drive you home, Ingeborg," he said, not looking round.
She stared after him. "Is he very ill?" she asked, turning to the
doctor.
"No."
"No?"
"No," said the doctor, with a stress on it.
"But--"
"And you look very well, too. Pray, keep so. It is not necessary,
judging from your appearance, to consult me further. I will conduct you
to your carriage."
"But--" said Ingeborg, who found herself being offered an arm and led
ceremoniously after Robert.
"Take your tonic, be much in the sun, and alter nothing in your present
mode of life," said the doctor.
"But Robert--"
"The Herr Pastor enjoys excellent health, and will throw himself with
more zeal than ever into his work."
"Then why--"
"And the Frau Pastor will do her duty."
"Yes."
She stopped and faced him. "Yes," she said, "I'm going to, but--what is
my duty?"
"My dear Frau Pastor, there is only one left. You have discharged all
the others. Your one duty now is to keep well in body and mind, provide
your two children with a capable mother, and your husband with a
companion possessed of the intelligent amiability that springs from good
health."
"But Robert--?"
"He has been consulting me about you. I will not allow you to turn him,
who deserves so well of fate, into that unhappy object, a widower."
"Oh? So really--?"
He opened the front door. "Yes," he said, "really."
And he handed her up into the seat next to Herr Dremmel and waved them
off on their homeward journey with friendly gestures.
And Ingeborg, now aware that the real cause of Robert's preternatural
gloom was the dread of losing her, not the dread of leaving her, was
deeply touched and full of a desire to express her appreciation. She
slid her hand through his arm and spent the time between Meuk and
Kökensee earnestly endeavouring to reassure him. He was not, after all,
she eagerly explained, going to be a widower.
He bore her comforting in silence.