Two days later the porter at the Meuk station beheld Frau Pastor Dremmel
trying to open the door of a third-class compartment in the early
afternoon train from Allenstein, and going to her assistance, there
being no other passenger to distract him, was surprised to find she had
no luggage. Yet only the week before with his own hands he had put in a
trunk for her and labelled it Berlin. With the interest of a lonely man
whose time is his own, he inquired whether she had lost it and was
surprised to find she did not answer. He then told her, or rather called
after her, for she was moving away, that the pastoral carriage had not
yet come for her, and was surprised again, for again she did not answer.
He stood watching her, wondering what was wrong. He was too much
accustomed to dilapidations and dirt in himself to see them in others,
so that these outer signs of exhaustion and prolonged travelling escaped
him. Puzzled, he shook his head as she disappeared through the station
door; then he remembered that the poor lady was an _Engländerin_, and
was able to turn away calmed, with the satisfaction of him who has found
the right label and stuck it on.
Meuk, as she passed through it, shook its head over her, too, consoling
itself when she returned no greetings, did not even seem to see
greetings, with the same explanation and shrug--_Engländerin_. Robertlet
and Ditti, walking along neatly to afternoon school, and suddenly aware
of the approach down the street towards them of a disordered parent who
not only did not stop but apparently did not see them, murmured to each
other, being by now well instructed by their grandmother, the same
explanation--_Engländerin_. Frau Dremmel, leaning on her window-sill to
watch her charges safely round the corner, and lingering a moment in the
mellow summer air, explained her daughter-in-law, who went by without a
glance, walking conspicuously in the middle of the road, with no parcel
in her hand to legitimise her being out and not so much as an umbrella
to give her a countenance, just with empty ungloved hands hanging down,
and a scandalous scarcity of hairpins, and her clothes all twisted, in
the same brief manner, _Engländerin_. Baroness Glambeck, driving towards
the town along the shade-flecked highroad, bent on one of those errands
of mercy that are forced at intervals upon the great, with a basket of
the properties, principally home-made jam and mittens, at her feet,
endeavoured though vainly to mitigate the shock she received on being
cut by her own pastor's wife, and a pastor's wife producing curiously
the effect of somehow being in tatters, by using the same word to the
female dependent who accompanied her on these occasions because somebody
had to carry the jam--_Engländerin_. The very birds in the branches,
being German birds, were no doubt singing it; the dogs, as they met her,
scented misfortune and barked furiously, instantly detecting the alien,
angered by her batteredness, discovering nothing in her clothes however
diligently they sniffed that an honest German dog could care about; and
when on a lonely stretch of the road she came to a tramp, instead of
begging he offered her a drink.
The lane turning off to Kökensee was so lovely that afternoon in the
bright bravery of early summer, and so glanced and shone and darted with
busy birds and insects and the glory of young leaves in the sun, that
the dingy human figure faltering along it seemed an indecency. In that
vigorous world what place was there for blind fatigue? In that world of
triumph what place for a failure? It was the sort of day that used to
make Ingeborg's heart lift up; now she saw nothing, felt nothing, except
that the sand was deep.
She began to cry presently because the sand was deep. It seemed to give
way on purpose beneath her feet, try on purpose to make her stumble and
not get home. The line of roofs up against the afternoon sky did not
appear to come any nearer, and yet she kept on trying to get home. The
tears fell down her face as she laboured along. She was afraid she
wouldn't get home in time before she had to leave off walking because
she couldn't walk any farther. It seemed to her a dreadful thing that
she who could walk so well should not be able to walk now and get home.
And this white sand--how fine it was, how it slid away on each side of
one's feet wherever one put them! And it got into one's shoes, and one
couldn't stop and empty them for fear if one sat down one wouldn't be
able to get up again, and then one wouldn't get home. Slower and more
slowly she laboured along. By the time she reached the steep part just
before the village she was crawling like a hurt insect. She had
forgotten to eat on the journey, and in Milan there had only been the
rusks.
The street was asleep, empty that fine afternoon, the inhabitants away
at work in the fields, and only the pig and the geese were visible in
the parsonage yard. Luckily the gate in the wire-netting fence that shut
off the house and garden was not latched, for she could not have opened
it, but would have stood there holding on to it and foolishly sobbing
till some one came and helped. The least obstacle now would be a thing
that in no way could be got over. The front door was shut, and sooner
than go up the steps and try to get it open, she went round the path to
the side of the house where the lilacs grew and Robert's window was.
That way she could reach the kitchen, whose door stood always open and
was level with the garden. Robert would be out in his fields. She would
go into his laboratory and wait for him. Nobody but Robert _knew_ yet.
She had come back before the end of her leave. His shame was not yet
public property. If he just beat her, she thought, in a disinterested
weak way, and there was an end of it, wouldn't that do? Then no one need
ever know, and he could stay on in Kökensee and go on with his work, and
she wouldn't have ruined him. It was the thought of having ruined Robert
that clove her heart in two. To have ruined him, when all her ambition
and all her hope had been to make him so happy....
Well did she know that a pastor whose wife had broken the seventh
commandment would be driven out, would be impossibly scandalous in any
parish. And her not having broken it was quite beside the point; it
didn't matter what you didn't do so long as you looked as though you had
done it. And if Robert killed her it wouldn't help him, either; he would
have done the only decent thing, as the Baroness and her son Hildebrand
had said that time long ago, and avenged his honour in the proper German
way, but there were drawbacks to avenging one's honour--one was,
illogically, punished for doing it, and even though it were mild
punishment, any punishment ended a pastor's career.
She crept round the corner of the house. She was so tired that if she
had to wait for him long in his laboratory she felt sure she wouldn't be
able to keep awake. Well, if he came in and killed her while she was
asleep it would be for her the pleasantest thing; she was so very tired
that it would be nice, she thought vaguely, to wake up afterwards, and
find oneself comfortably dead. But Robert was not in his fields. From
the path beneath his window she could see his head, as she had seen it
hundreds of times, bending over his desk.
At the sight she stopped, and her heart seemed to shrink into quite a
little, scarcely beating thing. There he was, her dishonoured husband,
the being who in her life had been kindest to her, had loved her most,
still working, still going on doggedly among the ruins she had created,
up to the last moment when public opinion, brutal and stupid, making her
the chief thing when she so utterly was not, while it thrust her and her
wishes and intimate knowledge aside as not mattering when, as in the
question of more children, or no more children, they so utterly did,
would on her sole account, on the sole account of what seemed to her at
that moment the most profoundly naturally unimportant thing in life, a
woman who had been silly, put a stop to his fine work and refuse to give
the world a chance to profit by his brains.
Well, she couldn't think about that now. She couldn't hold on to any of
her thoughts for more than an instant. She only knew that the moment had
come for facing him, and that she was very tired. She really was
extraordinarily tired. Her mind was just as dim and reluctant to move as
her body. Whatever Robert was going to do to her she would cling to him
with her arms round his neck while he did it. She was so tired that she
thought if he didn't mind her just putting her arms round his neck she
would very likely go to sleep while he beat her. But poor Robert, she
thought--how hot it was going to make him to have to be violent, to have
to beat! It was not at all good beating weather.... And it was almost a
pity to waste punishment on somebody too tired to be able properly to
appreciate it, to take it, as it were, properly in.
She moved along down the path towards the back door. When one came to
think of it it was a strange thing to be going in to Robert to be hurt.
Well, but she had deserved it; she perfectly understood about his honour
and its needs. Oh, yes, she perfectly understood that. A man has
to--what had she just been going to think? What does a man have to? Oh,
well. If only what he did to her could blot out every consequence of
what she had done to him, be a full, perfect, and sufficient--no, that
was profane; tiresome how one thought in the phrases of the Prayer-book
and how difficult it was if one had had much to do with prayer-books not
to be profane. As it was, her punishment wouldn't do anybody any good
that she could see. Funny, the punishment idea. Of what use was it
really? The consequences of the things one did were surely enough in
their devastating effect; why increase devastation? And forgiveness
didn't seem to be of much use, either. It blotted out the past, she had
heard people in pulpits say, but it didn't blot out the future, that
daily living among consequences which she perceived was going to be so
dreadful.
Well, she couldn't think now. And here was the kitchen door; and
here--yes, wasn't that Klara, staring at her open-mouthed, arrested in
the middle of emptying a bucket? Why did she stare at her? Did she then
_know_?
"_Allmächtiger Gott_" exclaimed Klara, dropping the bucket.
Yes, evidently Klara knew, she thought, dragging her dusty feet across
the kitchen into the passage, and _allmächtiger Gott_ was what one said
in Germany when one's disgraced mistress came back, instead of _guten
Tag_. Well, it didn't matter. The dark little passage; one almost had to
grope one's way along it when the front door was shut. And it had not
been aired apparently since she went away, and it was heavy and choked
with kitchen smell. She supposed it must be this thickness of atmosphere
that made her, on Robert's doormat with her hand on the latch, feel
suddenly so very like fainting. And it really was dark; surely it didn't
only seem dark because she suddenly couldn't see? Alarmed, she
remembered how she had fainted after her conscience-stricken journey
back from Lucerne. Was she then to go through life making at intervals
conscience-stricken journeys back, and fainting at the critical moment
at their end?
In terror lest she should do it now if she waited a moment longer, and
so twist things round in that dishonourable womanly way which commits
the wrong and then bringing in the appeal of bodily weakness secures the
comforting, secures, almost, the apology, she seized all her courage,
swept its fragments together into a firm clutching, and opened the door.
Herr Dremmel was at his table, writing. He did not look up.
"Robert," she said faintly, her back against the door, her hands behind
her spread out and clinging to it, here I am.
Herr Dremmel continued writing. He was, to all appearances, absorbed;
and his forehead, that hot afternoon, was covered with the drops of
concentration.
"Robert," she said at last again, in a voice that shook however hard she
tried to keep it steady, "here I am."
Herr Dremmel finished his sentence. Then he raised his head and looked
at her.
Staring back at him in misery and fear, and yet beside the fear with a
dreadful courage, she recognised the look. It was the look he had when
he was collecting his attention, bringing it up from distant deep places
to the surface, to herself. How strange that he should at this moment
have to collect it, that it did not instantly spring at her, that she
and the havoc she had brought into his life should not be soaked into
every part of his consciousness!
"What did you say, Ingeborg?" he said, looking at her with that so
recognisable look.
For all her study of him she felt she did not yet know Robert.
"I only said," she stammered, "that I--that here--that here I _was_."
He looked at her for a further space of silence. Then it flashed upon
her that he was, dreadfully, pretending. He was acting. He was going to
torment her before punishing her. He was going to be slowly cruel.
Herr Dremmel, as though he were gathering himself together--gathering
himself, she thought watching him and growing cold at his uncanniness,
for a horrible spring--inquired of her if she had walked.
"Yes," said Ingeborg even more faintly, her eyes full of watchful fear.
He continued to look at her, but his hand while he did so felt about on
the table for the pen he had laid down.
She recognized this look, too--amazing, horrible, how he could act--it
was the one he had when, talking to somebody, a new illumination of the
subject he was writing about came into his mind.
She felt sure now that the worst was going to happen to her; but first
there was to be torture, a long playing about. These revealed depths of
cunning cruelty in him, of talent for cleverest acting, froze her blood.
Where was Robert, the man of large simplicities she believed she had
known? It was a strange man, then, she had been living with? He had
never, through all the years, been the one she thought she had married.
"Please--" she said, holding out both her hands, "Robert--don't. Won't
you--won't you be natural?"
He still looked at her in silence. Then he said with a sudden air of
remembering, "Did you get your boots, Ingeborg?"
This was dreadful. That he should even talk about the boots! Throw in
her face that paltry preliminary lying.
"You _know_ I didn't," she said, tears of shame for him that he could be
so cruel coming into her eyes.
Again Herr Dremmel looked at her as though collecting, as though
endeavouring to remember and to find.
"I know?" he repeated, after a pause of reflective gazing during which
Ingeborg had flushed vividly and gone white again, so much shocked was
she at the glimpse she was getting into inhumanity. It was devilish, she
thought. But Robert devilish? Her universe seemed tumbling about her
ears.
"I think," she said, lifting her head with the pride he ought to have
felt and so evidently, so lamentably, didn't, "one should give one's
punishment like a man."
There was another pause, during which Herr Dremmel, with his eyes on
hers, appeared to ruminate.
Then he said, "Did you have a pleasant time?"
This was fiendish. Even when acting, thought Ingeborg, there were depths
of baseness the decent refused to portray.
"I think," she said in a trembling voice, "if you wouldn't mind leaving
off pretending--oh," she broke off, pressing her hands together, "what's
the good, Robert? What's the _good_? Don't let us waste time. Don't make
it worse, more hideous--you got my letter--you know all about it--"
"Your letter?" said Herr Dremmel.
She begged him, she entreated him to leave off pretending. "Don't, don't
keep on like this," she besought--"it's such a dreadful way of doing
it--it's so unworthy--"
"Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "will you not cultivate calm? _You_ have
journeyed and you have walked, but you have done neither sufficiently to
justify intemperateness. Perhaps, if you must be intemperate, you will
have the goodness to go and be so in your own room. Then we shall
neither of us disturb the other."
"No," said Ingeborg, wringing her hands, "no. I won't go. I won't go
into any other room till you've finished with me."
"But," said Herr Dremmel, "I have finished with you. And I wish," he
added, pulling out his watch, "to have tea. I am driving to my fields at
five o'clock."
"Oh, Robert," she begged, inexpressibly shocked, he meant to go on
tormenting her then indefinitely? "please, please do whatever you're
going to do to me and get it over. Here I am only _waiting_ to be
punished--"
"Punished?" repeated Herr Dremmel.
"Why," cried Ingeborg, her eyes bright with grief and shame for this
steady persistence in baseness, "why, I don't think you're to punish me!
You're not _fit_ to punish a decent woman. You're contemptible!"
Herr Dremmel stared. "This," he then said, "is abuse. At least," he
added, "it bears a close resemblance to that which in a reasonable human
being would be abuse. However, Ingeborg, speech in you does not, as I
have often observed, accurately represent meaning. I should rather say,"
he amended, "a meaning."
She moved across to the table to him, her eyes shining. He held his pen
ready to go on writing so soon as she should be good enough to leave off
interrupting.
"Robert," she said, leaning with both hands on the table, her voice
shaking, "I--I never thought I'd have to be _ashamed_ of you. I could
bear anything but having to be _ashamed_ of you--"
"Perhaps, then, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "you will have the
goodness to go and be ashamed of me in your own room. Then we shall
neither of us disturb the other."
"You are being so horrible that you're twisting things all wrong, and
putting me in the position of having to forgive _you_ when it's _you_
who've got to forgive _me_--"
"Pray, then, Ingeborg, go and forgive me in your own room. Then we shall
neither of us--"
"You're being cruel--oh, but it's unbelievable--you, my husband--you're
playing with me like a cat with a miserable mouse, a miserable, sorry
mouse, something helpless that can't do anything back and wouldn't if it
could--and see how you make me talk, when it's you who ought to be
talking! Do, do, Robert, begin to talk--begin to say things, do things,
get it over. You've had my letter, you know perfectly what I did--"
"I have had no letter, Ingeborg."
"How dreadful of you to say that!" she cried, her face full of horror at
him. "When you know you have and you know I know you have--that letter I
left for you--on this table--"
"I have seen no letter on this table."
"But I _put_ it here--I put it _here_--"
She lifted her hand to point out passionately the very spot to him; and
underneath her hand was the letter.
Her heart gave one great bump and seemed to stop beating. The letter was
where she had put it and was unopened.
She looked up at Herr Dremmel. She turned red; she turned white; she
tasted the very extremity of shame. "I--beg your pardon," she whispered.
Herr Dremmel wore a slight air of apology. "One omits, occasionally, to
notice," he said.
"Yes," breathed Ingeborg.
She stood quite still, her eyes on his face.
He pulled out his watch. "Perhaps now, Ingeborg," he said, "you will be
so good as to see about tea. I am driving to my fields--"
"Yes," breathed Ingeborg.
He bent over his work and began writing again.
She put out her hand and slowly took up the letter. Tradition, copious
imbibing of the precepts of bishops, were impelling her towards that
action frequently fatal to the permanent peace of families, the making
of a clean breast.
"Do you--do you--do you want to--" she began tremblingly, half holding
out the letter.
Then her voice failed; and her principles failed; and the precepts of a
lifetime failed; and she put it in her pocket.
"It's--stale," she whispered, explaining.
But Herr Dremmel went on writing. He had forgotten the letter.
She turned away and went slowly towards the door.
In the middle of the room she hesitated, and looked back. "I--I'd _like_
to kiss you," she faltered.
But Herr Dremmel went on writing. He had forgotten Ingeborg.
THE END