Herr Dremmel, however, came out punctually and went up into the pulpit and opened his well-worn ma.n.u.script and read out the well-known text, and the congregation sat as nearly thrilled as it could be waiting for the moment when his eye would fall on to his own pew and what was in it.

Would he interrupt the service to go down and carry his wife out? Would the congregation have to wait till he came back again, or would it be allowed to disperse to its Christmas trees and rejoicings?

Herr Dremmel read on and on, expounding the innocent Christmas story, describing its white accessories of flocks and angels and virgins and stars with the thunderous vehemence near scolding that had become a habit with him when he preached. His text was _Peace on earth, goodwill among men_, and from custom he hit his desk with his clenched fist while he read it out and hurled it at his congregation as if it were a threat.

He did not look in his wife's direction. He was not thinking of her at all. He wondered a little at the stillness and attention of his listeners. n.o.body coughed. n.o.body shuffled. The school children hung over the edge of the organ loft, motionless and intent. Baron Glambeck remained awake.

At the end of the service Herr Dremmel had to stay according to custom in his wooden box till every one had gone, and it was not till he came out of that to go through the church to its only door that he perceived Ingeborg. For a moment he thought she was waiting for him in an att.i.tude of inappropriately childish laxity, and he was about to rebuke her when it flashed upon him that she had fainted, that it was the second time in ten days, and that he was indeed and without any doubt at last the happiest of men.

In spite of the bitter wind that was raking the churchyard every person who had been inside the church was waiting outside to see the pastor come out. The Glambecks and elders of the church would have waited in any case on Christmas Eve to wish him the compliments of the season and receive his in return, but on this occasion they waited with pleasure as well as patience, and the rest of the congregation waited, too.

They were rewarded by seeing him presently appear in the doorway in his gown and bands carrying the bundle that was the still unconscious Frau Pastor as if she were a baby, his face illuminated with joy and pride.

It was as entertaining as a funeral. Double congratulations were poured upon him, double and treble handshakes of the hand he protruded for the purpose from beneath Ingeborg's relaxed body, and his spectacles as he responded were misty, to the immense gratification of the crowd, with happy tears.

This was the first popular thing Ingeborg had done since her arrival.

She could not if she had planned it out with all her care and wits have achieved anything more dramatically ingratiating. The day was the most appropriate day in the whole year. It had been well worth waiting, thought her overjoyed Robert, in order to receive such a Christmas gift.

The Baroness, who with the Baron was most cordial, felt flattered, as if--only of course less perfectly, for she herself had produced her children in actual time for the tree--her example had been taken to heart and followed. The village was deeply gratified to see an unconscious Frau Pastor carried through its midst, and her limp body had all the prestige of a corpse. Everybody was moved and pleased; and when Ingeborg, after much persuasion, woke up to the world again on the sofa of the parsonage parlour it was to live through the happiest day she had yet had in her life, the day of Robert's greatest joy in her and devotion and care and pride and petting.

Once more and for this day she outstripped the fertilizers in interest, and the laboratory was a place forgotten. She was pampered. She lay on the sofa, feeling quite well again, but staying obediently on it because he told her to and she loved him to care, watching him with happy eyes as he tremendously hovered. He finished the arranging of the tree for her and fixed the candles on it, interrupting himself every now and then to come and kiss her hands and pat her. Beams seemed to proceed from him and penetrate into the remotest corners. In a land where all homes were glowing that Christmas night this little home glowed the brightest. The candles of the tree shone down on Ingeborg curled up in the sofa corner, talking and laughing gaily, but with an infinitely proud and solemn gladness in her heart that at last he believed, that at last she was fairly started on the road of the Higher Duty, that at last she was going to be able to do something back, something in return for all this happiness that had come to her through and because of him.

Ilse was called in, and came very rosy and shining from careful washing to be given her presents. There were surprises for Ingeborg--she had to shut her eyes while they were arranged--that touched and astonished her, so totally blind had Robert seemed to be for weeks past to anything outside his work--a pot of hyacinths twisted about with pink crinkly paper and satin bows that he must have got with immense difficulty and elaborate precautions to prevent her seeing it, a volume of Heine's poetry, a pair of fur gloves, a silver curb bracelet, and a smiling pig of marzipan with a label round its neck, _Ich bringe Gluck_. She, not realising what a German Christmas meant, had only a cigar-case for him; and when, her lap full of his presents and her wrist decorated with the bracelet in which he showed an honest pride, carefully explaining the trick of its fastening and a.s.suring her it was real silver and that little women, he well knew, liked being hung with these barbaric splendours, she put her arm round his neck and apologised for her dreadful ignorance of custom and want of imagination and solitary, unsurprising, miserable cigar-case--when she did this, with her cheek laid on his furry head, he drew her very close to him and blessed her, blessed her his little wife and that greatest of gifts that she was bringing him.

Both of them had wet eyes when this blessing, solemnly administered and received, was over. It was done in the presence of Ilse, who looked on benevolently and at the end came and shook their hands and joined to her thanks for what she had been given her congratulations on the happy event of the coming summer.

"July," said Ilse, after a moment's reflection. "We must furnish that room," she added.

Ingeborg felt as though her very bones were soft with love.

CHAPTER XVIII

But these high moments of swimming in warm emotion do not last, she found; they are not final, they are not, as she had fondly believed, a state of understanding and cloudless love at last attained to and rested in radiantly. She discovered that the littlest thing puts an end to them, just such a little thing as its being bedtime, for instance, is enough, and the mood does not return, and not only does it not return but it seems forgotten.

She became aware of this next morning at breakfast, and it caused at first an immense surprise. She had got the coffee ready with the glow of the evening before still warming her rosily, she was still altogether thinking _dear_ Robert, and wondering, her head on one side as she cut the bread--Ilse was a little cross after the marzipan--and a smile on her lips, at the happiness the world contains; and when he came in she ran to him, shiningly ready to take up the mood at the exact point where bedtime had broken it off the night before.

But Herr Dremmel had travelled a thousand miles in thought since then.

He hardly saw her. He kissed her mechanically and sat down to eat. To him she was as everyday and usual again as the bread and coffee of his breakfast. She was his wife who was going presently to be a mother. It was normal, ordinary, and satisfactory; and the matter being settled and the proper first joy and sentiment felt, he could go on with more concentration than ever with his work, for there would not now be the perturbing moments so frequent in the last six months when his wife's condition, or rather negation of condition, had thrust itself with the annoyance of an irrepressible weed up among his thinking. The matter was settled; and he put it aside as every worker must put the extraneous aside. Just on this morning he was profoundly concerned with the function of potash in the formation of carbohydrates. He had sat up late--long after Ingeborg, feeling as if she were dissolved in stars and happily certain that Robert felt just as liquidly starry, had gone to bed--considering potash. He wanted more starch in his grain, more woody-fibre in his straw. She was not across the pa.s.sage into their bedroom before his mind had sprung back to potash. More starch in his grain, more woody-fibre in his straw, less fungoid disease on his mangels....

At breakfast his thoughts were so sticky with the glucose and cane sugar of digestible carbohydrates that he could not even get them free for his newspaper, but sat quite silently munching bread and b.u.t.ter, his eyes on his plate.

"Well, Robert?" said Ingeborg, smiling at him round the coffee pot, a smile in which lurked the joyful importance of the evening before.

"Well, Little One?" he said absently, not looking at her.

"Well, Robert?" she said again, challengingly.

"What is it, Little One?" he asked, looking up with the slight irritation of the interrupted.

"What? You're not pleased any more?" she asked, pretending indignation.

"Pleased about what?"

She stared at him at this without pretending anything.

"About what?" she repeated, her lips dropping apart.

He had forgotten.

She thought this really very extraordinary. She poured herself out a cup of coffee slowly, thinking. He had forgotten. The thing he had said so often that he wanted most was a thing he could forget, once he had the certain promise of it, in a night. The candles on the Christmas tree in the corner were not more burned out and finished than his tender intensity of feeling of the evening before.

Well, that was Robert. That was the way, of course, of clever men.

But--the tears? He had felt enough for tears. It was without a doubt that he had felt tremendously. How wonderful then, she thought, slowly dropping sugar into her cup, for even the memory of it to be wiped out!

Well, that, too, was Robert. He did not cling as she did to moments, but pa.s.sed on intelligently; and she was merely stupid to suppose any one with his brains would linger, would loiter about with her indefinitely, gloating over their happiness.

She left her coffee and got up and went over to him and kissed him.

"Dear Robert," she murmured, accommodating herself to him, proud even, now, that he could be so deeply preoccupied with profound thoughts as to forget an event so really great: for after all, a child to be born, a new life to be launched, was not that something really great? Yet his thoughts, her husband's thoughts, were greater.

"Dear Robert," she murmured; and kissed him proudly.

But the winter, in spite of these convictions of happiness and of having every reason for pride, was a time that she dragged through with difficulty. She who had never thought of her body, who had found in it the perfect instrument for carrying out her will, was forced to think of it almost continuously. It mastered her. She had endlessly to humour it before she could use it even a little. She seemed for ever to be having to take it to a sofa and lay it down flat and not make it do anything.

She seemed for ever to be trying to persuade it that it did not mind the smell of the pig, or the smell that came across from Glambeck when the wind was that way of potato spirits being made in the distillery there.

When these smells got through the window c.h.i.n.ks she would shut her eyes and think hard of the scent of roses and pinks, and of that lovely orange scent of the orange-coloured lupin she had seen grown everywhere in the summer; but sooner or later her efforts, however valiant, ended in the creeping coldness, the icy perspiration, of sick faintness.

As the months went on her body became fastidious even about daily inevitable smells such as the roasting of coffee and the frying of potatoes, which was extremely awkward when one had to see to these things oneself; and it often happened that Ilse, coming out of the scullery or in from the yard fresh and energetic with health, would find her mistress dropped on a chair with her head on the kitchen table in quite an absurd condition considering that everybody a.s.sured her it was not an illness at all of feeling as though it were one.

Ilse would look at her with a kind of amused sympathy. "The Frau Pastor will be worse before she is better," she would say cheerfully; and if things were very bad and Ingeborg, white and damp, clung to her in a silent struggle to feel not white and damp, she used the formula first heard on the lips of Baroness Glambeck and nodded encouragingly, though not without a certain air of something that was a little like pleasure, and said, "_Ja, ja_, those who have said A must also say B."

When Ingeborg's spirit was at its lowest in these unequal combats she would droop her head and shut her eyes and feel she hated--oh, she faintly, coldly, sicklily hated--B.

The fun of housekeeping, of doing everything yourself, wore extremely thin during the next few months. She no longer jumped out of bed eager to get to her duties again and bless the beginning of each new day by a charming and cheerful breakfast table for her man. She felt heavy; reluctant to face the business of dressing; sure that no sooner would she be on her feet than she would feel ill again. She talked of getting another servant, a cook; and Herr Dremmel, who left these arrangements entirely to her, agreed at once. But when it came to taking the necessary steps, to advertising or journeying in to Konigsberg to an agency, she flagged and did nothing. It was all so difficult. She might faint on the way. She might be sick. And she could not ask Robert to help her because she did not know what problem nearing a triumphant solution she might not disastrously interrupt.

It seemed to her monstrous to take a man off his thinking, to tear its threads, perhaps to spoil for good that particular line of thought, with demands that he should write advertis.e.m.e.nts for a cook or go with her in search of one. And as no cook was to be found locally, every wife and mother except ladies like Baroness Glambeck carrying out these higher domestic rites herself, she did nothing. She resigned herself to a fate that was, after all, everybody else's in Kokensee. It was easier to be resigned than to be energetic. Her will grew very flabby. Once she said prayers about cooking, and asked that she might never see or smell it again; but she broke off on realising suddenly and chillily that only death could get her out of the kitchen.

Herr Dremmel was, as he had always been, good and kind to her. He saw nothing, as indeed there was nothing, but the normal and the satisfactory in anything she felt, yet he did what he could, whenever he remembered to, to cheer and encourage. When, coming out of his laboratory to meals, he found her not at the table but on the sofa, her face turned to the wall and buried in an orange so that the dinner smell might be in some small measure dissembled and cloaked, he often patted her before beginning to eat and said, "Poor little woman." One cannot, however, go on saying poor little woman continuously, and of necessity there were gaps in these sympathies; but at least twice he put off his return to work for a few minutes in order to hearten her by painting the great happiness that was in store for her at the end of these tiresome months, the marvellous moment not equalled, he was informed, by any other moment in a human being's life, when the young mother first beheld her offspring.

"I see my little wife so proud, so happy," he would say; and each time the picture dimmed his eyes and brought him over to her to stroke her hair.

Then she would forget how sick she felt, and smile and be ashamed that she had minded anything. The highest good--what would not one practise in the way of being sick to attain the highest good?

"And he'll be full of brains like yours," she would say, pulling down his hand from her hair and kissing it and looking up at him smiling.

"And I shall have to double the size of my heart," Herr Dremmel would say, "to take in two loves."

Then Ingeborg would laugh for joy, and for quite a long while manage very nearly to glory in feeling sick.