Being a wise man, Herr Dremmel lost no time in fidgeting or lamenting
over the inevitable, but having heard the doctor's summing up, which was
expressed in the one firm word repeated over and over again like a
series of blows, _ausgeschlossen_, he ruled Ingeborg out of his thoughts
as a wife and proceeded to train himself to contemplate her as a sister.
After a short period of solemnity, for he was not sure whether the
training would not be tormenting and grievously interfere with his work,
he became serene again, for to his satisfaction he found it easy. The
annoyance of having supposed his wife to be undutiful, the pain of
having believed her to be deliberately hurting him, was removed. He was
faced by a simple fact that had nothing to do with personalities. It was
unfortunate that he should have married some one who was so very, he
could not help thinking, easily killed, but on the other hand he was
less dependent on domestic joys than most members of that peculiarly
dependent profession, the Church, for he had his brains. He was
surprised how easy, once he recognised its inevitability, the
readjustment of the relationship was, how easily and comfortably he
forgot. She seemed to drop off him like a leaf off a tree in autumn, a
light thing whose detachment from the great remaining strength, the
reaching down and reaching up, was not felt. His mind became fitted with
wife-tight compartments. He ceased, he who had feared these things might
come to be an obsession, so much as to see that she was pretty, that she
was soft, that she was sweet. Just as when first he met her he had been
pleased and interested to find he could fall in love so now he was
pleased and interested to find, when it was a matter of reason and
necessity, he could fall out again. He was, it seemed, master of
himself. Passions were his servants, and came only as it were when he
rang the bell. All one had to do then was not to ring the bell. With
satisfaction he observed that in a crisis of the emotions (he supposed
one might fairly call it that) the training he had bestowed on his
reason, the attention he had given it from his youth up, was bearing
fruit not only abundant but ripe. Ingeborg was transformed in his eyes
with gratifying rapidity into a sister--a gentle maiden sister who on
the demise of his wife had taken over the housekeeping; and when in the
evenings he bade her a kind good-night he found himself doing it quite
naturally on her forehead. He did not tell her she had become a sister;
he merely rearranged his life on these new lines; and he did, as the
doctor had predicted, throw himself into his work with more zeal than
ever, and very soon was once again being pervaded by the blessed calms,
the serenities, the unequalled harmonies that are the portion of him who
diligently does what he is interested in.
But Ingeborg, who had neglected her reason in her youth and whose mind
consequently was strictly undisciplined, spent the first few weeks of
being a sister in a condition of what can only be described as fluffing
about. She took hold of an end of life here that seemed to be sticking
out and tugged it, and of an end of life there that seemed to be
sticking out and tugged it, and looked at them inquiringly and let them
go again. She did not quite know, so rich in liberty had she suddenly
become, where to begin. There were so many ends to life, and she was so
free to choose that she blinked a little. Here were her days, swept out
and empty for her at last. Here she was able to say magnificently, "Next
month I'll do this or that," sure of her months, sure of their being
arrangeable things, flexible to her will, not each just a great black
leaden weight holding her pinned down more and more heavily to a sofa.
And not only could she say confidently what she would do next month, but
also, and this small thing like many other small things of the sort
seemed curiously new and delightful, she could say confidently what she
would wear. All those dreary tea-gowns in which she had trailed through
the seven years of her marriage, dark garments whose sole function was
to hide, were given to Ilse, her first servant, who had married poverty
and who frugally turned them into trousers of assorted shapes for her
husband, embittering him permanently; and from long-forgotten cupboards
she got out small neat frocks again, portions of her unworn tremendous
trousseau, short things, washable and tidy, and was refreshed into
respect for herself as a decent human being by the mere putting of them
on.
Her days at first held any number of these new sensations or rather
recognitions of sensations that used in her girlhood to be a matter of
course, but now were seen to be extraordinarily precious. She spilt over
like a brimming chalice of gratefulness for the great common things of
life--sleep, hunger, power to move about, freedom from fear, freedom
from pain. Her returning health ran through her veins like some
exquisite delicate wine. She was now thirty, and had never felt so
young. Wonderful to wake up in the morning to another day of being well.
Wonderful being allowed to be alive in a world so utterly beautiful, so
full of opportunity. She had all the thankfulness, the tender giving of
herself up confidently to joy of the convalescent. She was happy just to
sit on fine mornings on the doorstep in the sun drinking things in.
Robertlet and Ditti had never been so much kissed; Rosa and the cook had
never been asked so often after their ailing mothers; Kökensee had never
been so near having a series of entertainments arranged for it. The very
cat was stroked with a fresh sense of fellowship, the very watchdog, at
one time suspected of surliness, was loved anew; and when she passed
through the yard she did not fail to pause and gaze with a sunny
determined kindness at the pig.
But though she passionately wanted to make everybody and everything
happy in return for Robert's goodness to her, in return for the kind way
she thought he was accepting her decision and not once after that first
outbreak reproaching her, she had been anchored too long to one definite
behaviour not to feel a little unsteady when first let loose. She
hovered uncertainly round the edges of life, fingering them, trying to
feel the point where she could best catch hold and climb into its
fulness again.
It was oddly difficult.
Was it that she had been out of things for so many years? Had she then
become a specialist? As the weeks passed and the first sheer delight in
just being well was blunted by repetition, she began to be puzzled.
Everything began to puzzle her--herself, Robert, the children, the
servants. Robert puzzled her extremely. Whenever before she had been
happy, a cheerful singing thing, he had loved her. She knew he had. She
had only to be in a gay mood, in the mood that recklessly didn't mind
whether he liked it or not but sat on his knee and insisted on his
listening while she talked, half in earnest and half amused, about the
bigger, vaguer, windier aspects of life, for him to come up out of the
depths of his meditations and laugh and pet her. Now nothing fetched him
up. He was quite unresponsive. He seemed beyond her reach, in some
strange retreat where she could not get at him. She had never felt so
far away from him. He was not angry evidently; he was quite kind. She
could not guess that this steady unenthusiastic kindness was the natural
expression of a fraternal regard.
"But he does _love_ me," she said to herself, altogether unaware of the
smallness of the place in the world occupied by negative persons like
sisters--"he does _love_ me."
She said it several times a day, hugging it to herself as the weeks went
on in much the same way that a coachman, growing cold on his box, hugs
his chest, not having anything else to hug, at intervals to keep his
circulation going; and particularly she said it on her way up to the
attic after the administration of the good-night kiss.
In spite of this assurance, she found herself presently beginning to
hesitate before she spoke to him or touched him, wondering whether he
would like it. She tried to shake off these increasing timidities, and
once or twice intrepidly stroked his hair; but his head, bent over his
dinner or his book, seemed unconscious that she was doing it, and she
felt unable to go on.
"But he does _love_ me," she said to herself.
It was not long before she perceived definitely that she had ceased to
amuse him, and the moment she discovered this she ceased to be amusing:
her gaiety went out like a light.
"But he does _love_ me," she still said to herself.
He called her Ingeborg regularly, never wife or Little One, and it soon
came to be unthinkable that she should ever have been his treasure,
snail, or sheep. He did it, however, quite kindly, with no trace of the
rebuke it used invariably to contain.
"But he does _love_ me," she still said to herself.
Puzzled, she racked her brain to think of ways to please him, and tried
to make his house as comfortably perfect for him as possible, performing
every duty she could find or invent with a thoroughness that by eleven
o'clock in the morning had exhausted the supply. Herr Dremmel, however,
was not accessible by ways of order and good food; he had never noticed
their absence, and he did not now notice their presence. She saw after a
while herself that his sum of happiness was not in the least increased
by them. How could she make him happy, then? What could she do to make
his life the brightest serene thing?
It was a shock to her, an immense and shattering surprise, the day she
realised that all this time he was, in fact, being happy. She walked in
the garden long that day, staring hard at this new perception,
pondering, astonished.
"But he does _l_--" she began; and stopped.
Did he? What was the good of saying he did if he didn't? Was everything
with him, and perhaps with other husbands--she knew so little about
husbands--bound up with parenthood? Was it true, what he said to her the
day she begged him to be friends, that a husband and wife could never be
friends? She felt so entirely able to love Robert, to love him tenderly
and deeply, without perpetually being somebody's mother. Perhaps wives
could be friends and husbands couldn't. She wished she knew more about
these things. She felt she did not rightly understand; and suspected,
walking up and down the damp October garden, that being a bishop's
daughter was an inefficient preparation for being anybody's wife. It
kept one's mind muffled. You were brought up not to look. If you wanted
to see you had to be furtive and peep at life over the edge, as it were,
of your Prayer-book, which made you feel wicked and didn't give you any
sort of a view. All bishops' daughters, she said to herself walking
fast, for her thoughts became tumultuous on this subject, ought to be
maiden ladies; or, if they couldn't manage that as St. Paul would say,
they should at least only marry more bishops. Not curates, not vicars,
not mysterious elusivenesses like German pastors, but bishops. People
they were used to. People they understood. Continuations. Second
volumes. Sequels. Aprons. Curates might have convulsive moments that
would worry souls blanched white by the keeping out of the light, souls
like celery, no whiter than anybody else's if left properly to
themselves, but blanched by a continual banking up round them of
episcopal mould; and even a vicar might conceivably sometimes be
headlong; while as for a German pastor.... She flung out her hands.
Well, Robert was not headlong. No one could accuse him of anything but
the most steady sequence in his steps. But he was, she thought, not
having the clue to Herr Dremmel's conduct, incomprehensible. With the
simple faith of women, that faith that holds out against so many
enlightenments and whose artless mainspring is vanity, she had believed
quite firmly that every sweet and admiring assurance he had ever given
her would go on changelessly and indefinitely holding good, she had
believed she knew and understood him better than he did himself, and
that at any time she wanted to she had only to reach out her hand to be
able to help herself to more of his love. This faith in herself and in
her power, if she really wished, to charm him, she called having faith
in him. It took six weeks of steadily continued mild indifference on
Herr Dremmel's part, of placid imperviousness to all approaches of an
affectionate nature, of the most obvious keen relish in his work, keener
than he had yet shown, to reveal the truth at last to her; and greatly
was she astonished. He was happy, and he was happy without her! "And
that," said Ingeborg, unable to resist the conclusion pressed upon her,
"isn't love."
She stopped a moment beneath the gently dripping trees and took off her
knitted cap and shook it dry, for she had inadvertently brushed against
an overhanging branch on which last summer's leaves still wetly clung.
She pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed her cap thoughtfully. It had
been raining all the morning, and now late in the afternoon the garden
was a quiet grey place of fallen leaves and gathering dusk and
occasional small shakings of wet off the trees when a silent bird
perched on the sodden branches. Some drops fell on her bare head while
she was drying her cap. She put up her hand mechanically and rubbed them
off. She stood wiping her cap long after it was dry, absorbed in
thought.
"I don't know what it is," she said presently, half aloud, "but I do
know what it isn't."
She put on her cap again, pulling it over her ears with both hands and
much care, and staring while she did it at a slug in the path in front
of her.
"And what it isn't," she said after another interval, shaking her head
and screwing up her face into an expression of profoundest negation, "is
love."
"_Well_," she added, deeply astonished.
Then, with a flash of insight, "It's because he works."
Then, with a quick desire to cover up the wound to her vanity, "If he
didn't get lost in his work he'd _remember_ he loves me--it's only that
he _forgets_."
Then, with a white flare of candour, "He's a bigger thing than I am."
Then, with the old eagerness to help, "So it's my business to see that
he can be big in happy peace."
Then, remembrance smiting her with its flat, cold hand, "But he _is_
happy."
Then, "So where do I come in?"
Then, with a great, frank acceptance of the truth, "I don't come in."
Then, swept by swift, indignant honesty, "Why should I _want_ to come
in? What is all this coming in? Oh"--she stamped her foot--"the simple
fact, the naked fact when I've pulled all the silly clothes off, is that
I only want him to be happy if it's I who make him happy, and I'm
nothing but a--I'm just a--" She twisted round on her heels, her arms
flung out, in search of the exact raw word--"I'm nothing but just a
common tyrant."
At tea-time her condition can best, though yet imperfectly, be described
as chastened.