Nevertheless, though she tried to face it squarely and help herself by
indignation at her own selfish vanity, she felt a great emptiness round
her, a great chill.
It was impossible to get used all at once to this new knowledge, so
astonishing after seven years of conviction that one was loved, and so
astonishing when one remembered that as recently as August--one could
positively count the days--just coming home again after an absence had
drawn forth from Robert any number of manifestations of it. It had the
suddenness and completeness of the switching off of light. A second
before, one was illuminated; another second, and one was groping in the
dark. For she did grope. She was groping for reasons. It seemed for a
long time so incredible that her entire importance and interest as a
human being should depend on whether she was or was not what he called a
true wife that she preferred to go on groping rather than take hold of
this as an explanation.
She had been so sure of Robert. She had been so familiar with him and
unafraid. When she thought of her days at home, of her abject fear of
her father, of her insignificance, she felt that Robert's love and
admiration had lifted her up from being a creeping thing to being a
creature with quite bright brave wings. He had come suddenly into her
life and told her she was a _süsses Kleines_: and behold she became a
_süsses Kleines_. And now he didn't think her even that any more; he had
dropped her again, and she was already falling back into the old state
of timidity towards the man in the house.
She turned to the children and the housekeeping and to a search for
something she could do in the parish, so that at least while she was
making efforts to clear her confusion about Robert she might not be
wasting time. If she was no use to him she might be of use to the less
independent. She was entirely humble at this moment, and would have
thanked a dog if it had been so kind as to allow her to persuade it to
wag its tail. It had always been her hope throughout each of her
illnesses that presently when that one was over she would get up and
begin to do good, and now here she was, finally up, with two children
who had not yet had much mother, two servants whose lives might perhaps
be made more interesting, a whole field outside her gates for practise
in deeds of mercy, and enormous tracts of time on her hands. All she had
to do was to begin.
But it was rather like an over-delayed resurrection. Things had filled
up. Everybody seemed used to being left alone, and such a thing as
district-visiting, so familiar to a person bred in Redchester, was
unknown in East Prussia. The wife of a country pastor had as many duties
in her own house as one woman could perform in a day, and nobody
expected to see her going about into other houses consoling and
alleviating. Also, the peasants thought, why should one be consoled and
alleviated? The social difference between the peasant and the pastor was
so small and rested so often only on education that it would have
appeared equally natural, if the thing could from any point of view have
been made natural, for the wife of the peasant to go and console and
alleviate the parsonage. Who wanted sympathy in Kökensee? Certainly not
the men, and the women were too busy with family cares, those many
crushing cares that yet kept them interested and alive, to have time for
consolations. And those with most cares, most children who died, most
internal complaints, most gloom and weariness, achieved just because of
these things almost as much distinction and popularity in the village as
those with most money. Ingeborg herself was popular so long as her
children were drowned out of punts, or died of mumps, or were stillborn;
but now that nothing happened to her and she went about, after having
had six of them, still straight and slender, Kökensee regarded her
coldly and with distrust. Doing nothing for anybody on a sofa in an
untidy black tea-gown she had been respected. Trim and anxious to be of
use she was disapproved of.
When she went round to try to interest the women in the getting up of
little gatherings that were to brighten the parish once a fortnight
during the winter months, they shook their heads over their washtubs and
told each other after she had gone that it was because she kept two
servants. _Hausfraus_ who did not do their own work, they said, shaking
their heads with many _ja, ja's_, were sure to get into mischief. All
they asked of the pastor's wife was that she should attend to her own
business and let them attend to theirs. They did not walk into her
living-room; why should she walk into theirs? They did not want to
brighten her winter; why should she want to brighten theirs? She should
take example from her husband, they said, who never visited anybody. But
a Frau who kept two servants and who after six children still wore
skirts shorter than a Confirmation candidate's--_ja, ja, das kommt
davon_.
And things had filled up at home. Rosa and the cook had been used so
long to managing alone, and were so completely obsessed by the idea that
the Frau Pastor was half dead and that her one real function was to lie
down, that they regarded her suddenly frequent appearances in the
kitchen with the uneasiness and discomfort with which they would have
regarded the appearances of a ghost. No more than if she had been a
ghost did they know what to do with her. She did not seem real,
separated from her bedroom and her beef-tea. They could not work with
her. She would make them jump when, on looking up, they saw her in their
midst, having come in unheard with her strange lightness of movement.
Their nerves were shaken when they discovered her on her knees in odd
corners of the house doing things with dusters. To see her prodding
potatoes over the fire, and weighing meat, and approaching onions
familiarly made them creep.
It was like some dreadful miracle.
It was like, said Rosa, whispering, being obliged to cook dinners and
make beds with the help of--side by side with--
"With what then?" cried the cook, pretending courage but catching fear
from Rosa's face.
"_Mit einem Lazarus_," whispered Rosa, behind her hand.
The cook shrieked.
They did not, however, give notice, being good girls and prepared to
bear much, till they saw their names in red ink in one of the squares
ruled on a sheet of paper the Frau Pastor pinned up on the sitting-room
wall above her writing-table.
For a day or two they were filled with nameless horror because the ink
was red. Then, when they discovered what the numbers against the square,
3--4, meant, the horror was swept away in indignation, for it was the
hour in the afternoon in which they usually mended or knitted and
gossiped together, and it appeared that the Frau Pastor intended to come
and sit with them during this hour and read aloud.
"Nice books are so--so nice," said Ingeborg, explaining her idea. "Don't
you think you'll like nice books?"
She faltered a little, because of the expression on their faces.
"There is the pig," said the cook desperately.
"The pig?"
"It has to be fed between three and four."
"Oh, but we're not going to mind things like _pigs_!" said Ingeborg with
a slightly laboured brightness.
The next day they gave notice.
But the plan pinned up in the parlour had nothing, except during this
one hour, to do with Rosa and the cook; it had been drawn up solely on
behalf of Robertlet and Ditti.
Ingeborg had pored over it for days, making careful squares with a ruler
and doing all the principal words in red ink, her hair touzled by the
stresses of thinking out, and her cheeks flushed. The winter was upon
them, and already rain and gales made being out of doors impossible
except for one daily courageous trudge after dinner with the children in
waterproofs and goloshes, and she thought that with a little arranging
she might shorten and brighten the long months to the spring. The
children were so passive. They seemed hardly conscious, she thought, of
the world round them. Wouldn't they enjoy themselves more if they could
be taught to look at things? Their resemblance to the elder Frau Dremmel
was remarkable, it is true, but of course only superficial. Why they
were apathetic was because they had had so little mother in their lives.
She had only been able to teach them their prayers and their grace, and
beyond that had had to leave them to God. Now, however, she could take
over her charge again, and teach them things that would make them
lissom, quick, interested, and gay.
What would make Robertlet and Ditti lissom, quick, interested, and gay?
She pored profoundly over this question, and was steeped in red ink and
with the end of her pen bitten off and the floor white with torn-up
plans before she had answered it.
At the end of the winter she thought she could not have answered it
right. There was something wrong with education. The children had been
immensely patient. They had borne immensely with their mother. Yet by
the end of a whole winter's application of the plan they knew only how
cats and dogs were spelt, and the sole wonder that they felt after six
months' parental effort to stir them to that important preliminary to
knowledge was a dim surprise that such familiar beasts should need
spelling.
It was very unfortunate, but they could not be got, for instance, to
like the heavenly bodies. Useless for their mother to press them upon
their notice on clear evenings when all the sky was a-blink. From first
to last they saw nothing in the sunsets that lit the white winter world
into a vast cave of colour except a sign that it must be tea-time. Not
once could they be induced to shudder at the thought, on great starry
nights, of infinite space. They were unmoved by the information that
they were being hurled at an incredible speed through it; and they
didn't mind the moon being all those miles away. In the dancing class it
was Ingeborg who danced. In the gymnastic class it was she who grew
lissom. The _English and German Chatting_, owing to an absence in
Robertlet and Ditti of any of the ingredients of chat, was a monologue;
and for the course on _Introductions to Insects Collected in the House_
it was Ingeborg who caught the flies.
They were, however, very good. Nothing to which they were subjected
altered that. When their mother in spite of discouragements went on
bravely, so did they. When out of doors she snowballed them they stood
patiently till she had done. She showed them how to make a snow man, and
they did not complain. She gave them little sledges at Christmas, and
explained the emotions to be extracted from these objects by sliding on
them swiftly down slopes, and they bore her no ill-will when, having
slid, they fell off, but quietly preferred the level garden paths and
drew each other in turn on one sledge up and down them, while their
mother on the other sledge did the sorts of things they had come to
expect from mothers, and kept on disappearing over the brink of the
slope to the frozen lake head first and face downward.
"It's very _difficult_," thought Ingeborg sometimes, as the winter
dragged on.
There she was, heavy with facts about flies and stars and distances
extracted in the evenings during her preparation hours from the
"Encyclopædia Britannica" which had been procured from London for the
purpose--the parsonage groaned beneath it--and longing to unload them,
and she was not able to because the two vessels which ought to have
received them were fitted so impenetrably with lids.
They seemed to grow, if anything, more lidded. Quieter and quieter. The
hour at the end of the day, marked on the plan Lap, an hour she had
thought might easily become beautiful, something her children would
remember years hence, which was to have been all white intimacy, with
kisses and talks about angels and the best and quickest ways of getting
to heaven while Robertlet sat in the lap on Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays, and Ditti sat in it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays
(there being scarcity in laps), was from the beginning an hour of
semi-somnolence for the children, of staring sleepily into the glow of
the stove, resting while they waited for what their mother would do or
say next.
Ingeborg was inclined to be disheartened at this hour. It was the last
one of the children's day, and the day had been long. There was the
firelight, the mother's lap and knee, the mother herself ready to kiss
and be confided in and more than ready to confide in her turn those
discoveries she had made in the regions of science, and nothing
happened. Robertlet and Ditti either stared fixedly at the glow from the
open stove door or at Ingeborg herself; but whichever they stared at
they did it in silence.
"What are you thinking of?" she would ask them sometimes, disturbing
their dreamless dream, their happy freedom from thought. And then
together they would answer, "Nothing."
"No, but tell me really--you can't _really_ think of nothing. It's
impossible. Nothing is"--she floundered--"is always _something_--."
But the next time she asked the same question they answered with one
voice just as before, "Nothing."
Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were having too much mother.
This also happened in the hour called Lap.
"A mother," she reflected, both her arms round her children according to
plan, "must often be rather a nuisance."
She looked down with a new sympathy at Ditti's head reposing, also
according to plan, on her shoulder.
"Especially if she's a devoted mother."
She laid her cheek on the black smooth hair, parted and pigtailed and as
unlike Robert's fair furry stuff or her own as it was like the elder
Frau Dremmel's.
"A devoted mother," continued Ingeborg to herself, her eyes on the
glowing heart of the stove and her cheek on Ditti's head, "is one who
gives up all her time to trying to make her children different."
"_I'm_ a devoted mother," she added, after a pause in which she had
faced her conscience.
"How dreadful!" she thought.
She began to kiss Ditti's head very softly.
"How, too, dreadful to be in the power of somebody different; of
somebody quick if you're not quick, or dull if you're not dull, and
anyhow so old, so very old compared to you, and have to be made like
her! How would I like being in my mother-in-law's power, with years and
years for her to work at forcing me to be what she'd think I ought to
be? And what she'd think I ought to be would be herself, what she tries
to be. Of course. You can't think outside yourself."
She drew the children tighter. "You _poor_ little things!" she exclaimed
aloud, suddenly overcome by the vision of what it must be like to have
to put up with a person so fundamentally alien through a whole winter;
and she kissed them one after the other, holding their faces close to
hers with her hands against their cheeks in a passion of apology.
Even to that exclamation, a quite new one in a quite new voice, they
said nothing, but waited patiently for what would no doubt happen next.