What happened next was that they went to school.
Just as Ingeborg was beginning to ask herself rather shy questions--for
she was very full of respects--about the value of education and the
claims of free development, the State stepped in and swept Robertlet and
Ditti away from her into its competent keeping. In an instant, so it
seemed to her afterward when in the empty house she had nothing to do
but put away their traces, she was bereft.
"You never told me _this_ is what happens to mothers," she said to Herr
Dremmel the day the brief order from the Chief Inspector of Schools
arrived.
Herr Dremmel, who was annoyed that he should have forgotten his parental
and civic duties, and still more annoyed, it being April and his fields
needing much attention as a new-born infant, or a young woman one
wishes, impelled by amorous motives, to marry, that there should be
parental and civic duties to forget, was short with her.
"Every German of six has to be educated," he said.
"But they _are_ being educated," said Ingeborg, her mind weighted with
all she herself had learned.
He waved her aside.
"But, Robert--my children--surely there's some way of educating them
besides sending them away from me?"
He continued to wave her aside.
There was no doubt about it: the children had to go, and they went.
Of the alternatives, their being taught at home by a person with
Government certificates, or attending the village school, Herr Dremmel
would not hear. He was having differences of a personal nature with the
village schoolmaster, who refused with a steadiness that annoyed Herr
Dremmel to recognise that he was a _Schafskopf_, while Herr Dremmel
held, and patiently explained, that a person who is born a _Schafskopf_
should be simple and frank about it, and not persist in behaving as if
he were not one; and as for a teacher in the house, that was altogether
impossible, because there was no room.
"There's the laboratory," said Ingeborg recklessly, to whom anything
seemed better than letting her children go.
"The lab--?"
"Only to sleep in," she eagerly explained, "just sleep in, you know. The
teacher needn't be there at all in the daytime, for instance."
"Ingeborg--" began Herr Dremmel; then he thought better of it, and
merely held out his cup for more tea. Women were really much to be
pitied. Their entire inability to reach even an elementary conception of
values...
The children went to school in Meuk. They lodged with their grandmother,
and were to come home on those vague Sundays when the weather was good
and Herr Dremmel did not require the horses. Ingeborg could not believe
in such a complete sweep out of her life. She loved Robertlet and Ditti
with an extreme and odd tenderness. There was self-reproach in it, a
passionate desire to protect. It was the love sometimes found in those
who have to do all the loving by themselves. It was an acute and
quivering thing. After her experiences in the winter she had doubts
whether education at present was what they wanted. It was not school
they wanted, she thought, but to run wild. She knew it would have been
perhaps difficult to get them to run in this manner, but thought if she
had had them a little longer and had thoroughly revised her plan,
purging it of science and filling them up instead with different forms
of wildness, she might eventually have induced them to. There could have
been a carefully graduated course in wildness, she thought, beginning
quietly with weeding paths, and going on by steps of ever-increasing
abandonment to tree-climbing, bird-nesting, and midnight raids on
apples.
And while she wandered about the deserted garden and was desolate,
Robertlet and Ditti, safe in their grandmother's house, were having the
most beautiful dumplings every day for dinner that seemed to fit into
each part of them as warmly and neatly as though they were bits of their
own bodies come back, after having been artificially separated, to fill
them with a delicious hot contentment, and their grandmother was saying
to them at regular intervals with a raised forefinger: "My children,
never forget that you are Germans."
There was now nothing left for Ingeborg but, as she told Herr Dremmel
the first Sunday Robertlet and Ditti had been coming home and then for
some obscure reason did not come, thrusting the information tactlessly
at tea-time between his attention and his book, her own inside.
"After all," she said, as usual quite suddenly, breaking a valuable
silence, "there's still me."
Herr Dremmel said nothing, for it was one of those statements of fact
that luckily do not require an answer.
"Nobody," said Ingeborg, throwing her head back a little, "can take that
away."
Herr Dremmel said nothing to that either, chiefly because he did not
want to. He had no time nor desire to guess at meanings which were, no
doubt, after all not there.
"Whatever happens," she said, "I've still got my own inside."
"Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "I will not ask you what you mean in case
you should tell me."
There was a drought going on, and Herr Dremmel, who justly prided
himself on his sweetness of temper, was not as patient as usual; so
Ingeborg, silenced, went into the garden where the drought was making
the world glow and shimmer, and reflected that on the object she called
her inside alone now depended her happiness.
It was useless to depend on others; it was useless to depend, as she had
done in her ridiculous vanity, on others depending on her. After all,
each year had a May in it and the birds sang. She would send away the
extra servant and do the work herself, as she used to at first. She
would begin again to develop her intelligence, and write that evening to
London for the _Spectator_. Something, she remembered, had warmed and
quickened her all those years ago after her meeting with Ingram--was it
the _Spectator_? She would make plans. She would draw up plans in red
ink. There were a thousand things she might study. There were languages.
She walked up and down the garden. If she let herself be beaten back
this time into neglect of herself and indifference she would be done
for. There was no one to save her. She would lapse and lapse; and not
into fatnesses and peace like other women in Germany lopped of their
children, and of a class above the class that stood at that instrument
of salvation, its own washtub, not into afternoon slumbers and
benevolences of a woolly nature that kept one's hand knitting while
one's brains went to sleep till presently one was dead, but into
something fretful and nipped, with a little shrivelled, skinny, steadily
dwindling mind.
Her eyes grew very wide at this dreadful picture. Now was the moment,
she thought, turning away from it quickly, now that there had come this
pause in her life, to go over to England for a visit and see her
relations and talk and come back refreshed to a new chapter of existence
in Kökensee. She had not been out of Kökensee, except to Zoppot, since
her marriage, and her throat tightened at the thought of England. But
the Bishop had never forgiven her marriage; and her having had six
children had also, it seemed from her mother's letters when there used
to be letters, made an unfavourable impression on him. It had, in fact,
upset him. He had considered such conduct too distinctively German to be
passed over; and when she added to the error in taste of having had them
the further error or rather negligence--it must have been criminal,
thought the Bishop--of not being able to keep them alive, the Palace,
after having four times with an increasing severity condoled, withdrew
into a disapproval so profound that it could only express itself
adequately by silence.
And a stay with Judith was out of the question. One had for a stay with
Judith to have clothes, and she had no clothes; at least, none newer
than eight years old--her immense unworn trousseau dogged her through
the years--for Judith gave many parties at the Master's Lodge, brilliant
gatherings, her mother called them in her rare letters, where London,
come down on purpose and expressed in Prime and other ministers as well
as in the fine flower of the aristocracy and a few selected fragrances
from the world of literature and art--once her mother wrote that Ingram,
the great painter, had been at the last party, and was so much enslaved
by Judith's loveliness that he had asked as a favour to be allowed to
paint her--sat at Judith's feet.
No; England was not for her. Her place was in Kökensee, and her business
now was to do what her governesses used to call improve her mind.
Perhaps if she improved it enough Robert would talk to her again
sometimes, and this time not on the Little Treasure basis but on the
solid one of intellectual companionship. Might she not end by being a
real helpmeet to him? Somebody who would gradually learn to be quiet and
analytical and artful with grains?
She went indoors and wrote then and there to London, renewing the
long-ended subscriptions to the _Times_, _Spectator_, _Clarion_,
_Hibbert's Journal_, and the rest. She asked for a catalogue of the
newest publications that were not novels--her determination was too
serious just then for novels--ordered Herbert Spencer's "First
Principles," for she felt she would like to have some principles,
especially first ones, and said she would be glad of any little hint the
news-agent could give her as to what he thought a married lady ought to
know; and she spent the rest of the evening and the two following days
laying the foundations of intellectual companionship by looking up the
article _Manure_ in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" and paraphrasing it
into conversational observations that sounded to her so clever when she
tried them on Herr Dremmel three days later at tea-time that she was
astonished herself.
She was still more astonished when Herr Dremmel, having listened,
remarked that her facts were wrong.
"But they can't _possibly_--" she began; then broke off, feeling the
awkwardness of a position in which one was unable to argue without at
once revealing the "Encyclopædia."