About March, when the snow that had been heaped on either side of the path to the gate all the winter began to dwindle dirtily, and at midday the eaves dripped melting icicles, and the sun had warmth in it, and great winds set the world creaking, things got better. She no longer felt the grip of faintness on her heart. She left off looking quite so plain and sharp-nosed. An increasing dignity attended her steps, which every week were slower and heavier. After months of not being able to look at food she grew surprisingly hungry, she became suddenly voracious, and ate and ate.

Ilse's amused interest continued. Her mother had had fourteen children and was still regularly having more, and Ilse was well acquainted with the stages. The Frau Pastor, it is true, took the stages more seriously, with more difficulty, with a greater stress on them than Ilse's mother or other Kokensee women, but roughly it was always the same story. "It will be easier next time," prophesied Ilse inspiritingly; though the thought of a next time before she had finished this one depressed rather than inspirited Ingeborg.

She had written home to Redchester to tell her great news, and received a letter from Mrs. Bullivant in return in which there was an extremity of absence of enthusiasm. Indeed, the coming baby was only alluded to sideways as it were, indirectly, and if written words could whisper, in a whisper. "_Your father is overworked_," the letter went on, getting away as quickly as possible from matters of such doubtful decency as an unborn German, "_he has too much to do. Delicate as I am, I would gladly help him with his correspondence if I could, but I fear the strain would be too much. He sadly needs a complete rest and change. Alas, shorthanded as he is and obliged now as we are to retrench, there is no prospect of one_."

Whereupon Ingeborg impulsively wrote suggesting in loving and enthusiastic terms a visit to Kokensee as the most complete change she could think of, and also as the most economical.

The answer to this when it did come was an extraordinarily dignified No.

In April Baroness Glambeck drove over one fine afternoon and questioned her as to her preparations, and was astonished to find there were none.

"But, my dear Frau Pastor!" she cried, holding up both her yellow kid hands.

"What ought there to be?" asked Ingeborg, who had been too busy wrestling with her daily tasks in her heavily handicapped state to think of further labours.

"Many things--necessary, indispensable things."

"What things?" asked Ingeborg faintly.

She had little spirit. She was more tired every day. Just the difficulty of keeping even with her housekeeping, of keeping herself tidy in dresses that seemed to shrink smaller each time she put them on, took up what strength she had. There was none left over. "What things?" she asked; and her hands, lying listlessly on her lap, were flaccid and damp.

Then the Baroness poured forth an endless and bewildering list with all the gusto and interest of health and leisure. When her English gave out she went on in German. Her list ended with a midwife.

"Have you spoken with her?" she asked.

"No," said Ingeborg. "I didn't know--where is she?"

"In our village. Frau Dosch. It is lucky for you she is not further away. Sometimes there is none for miles. She is a very good sort of person. A little old now, but at least she _has_ been very good. You ought to see her at once and arrange."

"Oh!" said Ingeborg, who felt as if the one blessedness in life would be to creep away somewhere and never arrange anything about anything for ever.

But it did after this become clear to her that certain preparations would undoubtedly have to be made, and she braced herself to driving into Meuk with Ilse and going by train to Konigsberg for a day's shopping.

With sandwiches in her pocket and doubt in her heart she went off to shop for the first time in German. Ilse, full of importance, and dressed astonishingly in stockings and new spring garments, sat by her side with an eye to right and left in search of some one to witness her splendour.

Herr Dremmel had laid many and strict injunctions on her to take care of her mistress, and in between these wandering glances she did her best by loud inquiries as to Frau Pastor's sensations. Frau Pastor's sensations were those of a perilously jolted woman. She held tight to the hand rail on one side while the Meuk cobbles lasted and to Ilse's arm on the other, and was thankful when the station was reached and she somehow, with a shameful clumsiness, got down out of the high carriage.

Incredible to remember that last time she had been at that station she had jumped up into the same carriage as lightly as a bird. She felt humiliated, ashamed of her awkward distorted body. She drew the foolish little cloak and scarf she had put on anxiously about her. People stared. She seemed to be the only woman going to have a child; all the others were free, unhampered, vigorous persons like Ilse. It was as though she had suddenly grown old, this slowness, this fear of not being able to get out of the way of trucks and porters in time.

In Konigsberg the noise in the streets where the shops were was deafening. All the drays of all the world seemed to be spending that day driving furiously over the stones and tram-lines filled with cases of empty beer bottles or empty milk cans or long, shivering, screaming iron laths, while endless processions of electric-trams rang their bells at them.

Ingeborg clung to Ilse's arm bewildered. After Kokensee alone in its fields, after the dignified tranquillities of Redchester, the noise hammered on her head like showers of blows. There were not many people about, but those there were stared to the extent of stopping dead in front of the two women in order not to miss anything. It was at Ingeborg they stared. Ilse was a familiar figure, just a sunburnt country girl with oiled hair, in her Sunday clothes; but Ingeborg was a foreigner, an astonishment. Men and women stopped, children loitered, half-grown youths whistled and called out comments that her slow German could not follow. She flushed and turned pale, and held on tighter to Ilse. She supposed she must be looking more grotesque even than she had feared.

She put it all down to her condition, not knowing on this her first walk in a German provincial town that it was her being a stranger, dressed a little differently, doing her hair a little differently, that caused the interest. She walked as quickly as she could to get away from these people into a shop, little beads of effort round her mouth, looking straight before her, fighting down a dreadful desire to cry; and it was with thankfulness that she sank on to a chair in the quiet midday emptiness of Berding and Kuhn's drapery and linen establishment.

The young lady behind the counter stared, too, but then there was only one of her. She very politely called Ingeborg _gnadiges Fraulein_ and inquired whether her child was a boy or a girl.

"Lord G.o.d!" cried Ilse, "how should we know?"

But Ingeborg, with dignity and decision, said it was a boy.

"Then," said the young lady, "you require blue ribbons."

"Do I?" said Ingeborg, very willing to believe her.

The young lady sorted out small garments from green calico boxes labelled _For Firsts_. There were little jackets, little shirts, little caps, everything one could need for the upper portion of a baby.

"So," said the young lady, pushing a pile of these articles across the counter to Ingeborg.

"G.o.d, G.o.d!" cried Ilse in an ecstasy at such tininess, thrusting her red thumb through one of the diminutive sleeves and holding it up to show how tightly it fitted.

"_Nicht wahr_?" agreed the young lady, though without excitement.

"But," said Ingeborg, laboriously searching out her words, "the baby doesn't leave off there, at its middle. It'll go on. It'll be a whole baby. It'll have legs and things. What does one put on the rest of it?"

The young lady looked at Ilse for enlightenment.

"It'll _have_ a rest, Ilse," said Ingeborg, also appealing to her.

"These things are just clothes for cherubs."

"_Ach so_," said the young lady, visited by a glimmer of understanding, and turning round she dexterously whipped down more green boxes, and taking off the lids brought out squares of different materials, linen, flannel, and a soft white spongy stuff.

"Swaddle," she said, holding them up.

"Swaddle?" said Ingeborg.

"Swaddle," confirmed Ilse.

And as Ingeborg only stared, the young lady gradually plumbing her ignorance produced a small mattress in a white and frilly linen bag, and diving down beneath the counter, brought up a dusty doll which she deftly rolled up to the armpits in the squares, inserted it into the bag with its head out, and tied it firmly with tapes. "So," she said, giving this neat object a resounding slap: and picking it up she pretended to rock it fondly in her arms. "Behold the First Born," she said.

After that Ingeborg put herself entirely into these experienced hands.

She bought all she was told to. She even bought the doll to practise on--"It will not do _everything_ of course," explained the young lady.

The one thing she would not buy was a sewing machine to make her own swaddle with, as Ilse economically counselled. The young lady was against this purchase, which could only be made in another shop; she said true ladies always preferred Berding and Kuhn to do such work for them. Ilse said true mothers always did it for themselves, and it was one of the chief joys of this blessed time, Ilse said, seeing the house grow fuller and fuller of swaddle.

At this the young lady pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders and a.s.sumed an air of waiting indifference.

Ilse, resenting her att.i.tude, inquired of her heatedly what, then, she knew of _Muttergluck_.

The young lady, for some reason, was offended at this, though nothing was more certain than that knowledge of _Muttergluck_ would have meant instant dismissal from Berding and Kuhn's. It became a wrangle across the counter, and was only ended by Ingeborg's altogether siding with the young lady and the interests of Berding and Kuhn, and ordering, as the Baroness had directed, ten dozen each of the ready-made squares. "I'd die if I had to hem ten dozen of anything," she explained apologetically to Ilse.

And it was very bitter to Ilse, who meant well, to see the young lady look at her with a meditative comprehensiveness down her nose; it left no honourable course open to her but to sulk, and in her heart she would rather not have sulked on this exciting and unusual excursion. She was forced to, however, by her own public opinion, and she did it vigorously, thoroughly, blackly, all the rest of the day, all the way home; and neither cakes nor chocolate nor ices earnestly and successively applied to her by Ingeborg at the pastrycook's were allowed to lighten the gloom.

"But I suppose," Ingeborg said to herself as she crept into her bed that night in the spiritless mood called philosophical, for Ilse was her stay and refuge, and to have her not speaking to her, to feel she had hurt her, was a grievous thing, a thing when one is weary very like the last straw--"I suppose it's all really only a part of B. Oh, oh," she added with a sudden flare of rebellion that died out immediately in shame of it, "I don't think I _like_ B--I don't think I _like_ B...."

CHAPTER XIX

There was nevertheless an absorption and an excitement about this new strange business that did not for a moment allow her to be dull. She might feel ill, wretched, exhausted, but she was always interested. A tremendous event was ahead of her, and all her days were working up to it. She lived in preparation. Each one of her sensations was a preparation, an advance. There was a necessity for it; something was being made, was growing, had to be completed; life was full of meaning, and of plain meaning; she understood and saw reasons everywhere for what happened to her. Things had to be so if one wanted the supreme crown, and her part of the work was really very easy, it was just to be patient. She was often depressed, but only because the month seemed so endless and she was so tired of her discomfort--never because she was afraid. She had no fears, for she had no experience. She contemplated the final part of the adventure, the part Ilse alluded to cheerfully as her Difficult Hour, with the perfect tranquillity of ignorance. On the whole she was very free from the moods Herr Dremmel had braced himself to bear, and continued right through not to be exacting. She had no examples of more fussed over and tended women before her eyes to upset her contentment, and saw for herself how the village women in like condition worked on at their wash-tubs and in the fields up to the end.

Besides, she had been trained in a healthy self-effacement.