Ingeborg did not make the obvious reply, but said she thought if she might talk to somebody, to Robert, for instance, and with her hand in his, rather _tight_ in his while she talked, so that she might feel safe, feel not quite so loose and unheld together in an enormous, awful world--

Herr Dremmel looked at his watch and said perhaps he would have time to hold her hand next week.

A few days later she said, equally without supplying him with the context, "It's blessing disguising itself, that's what it is."

Herr Dremmel, who again was supping, said nothing, preferring to wait.

"Blessing only pretending to be cruelty. Not really cruelty at all."

Herr Dremmel still preferred to wait.

"I thought at first it was cruelty," she said, "but now I think perhaps--perhaps it's blessing."

"What did you think was cruelty, Ingeborg?" asked Herr Dremmel, who disliked the repet.i.tion of such a word.

"Having this next baby so quickly--without time to forget."

Her eyes grew bright.

"Cruelty, Ingeborg?"

Herr Dremmel said one did not, when one was a pastor's wife, call Providence names.

"That's what I'm saying," she said. "I thought at first it was cruel, but now I see it's really ever so much better not to waste time between one's children, and then be well for the rest of one's days. It--it will make the contrast afterwards, when one has done with pain, so splendid."

She looked at him and pressed her hands together. Vivid recollections lit her eyes. "But I'd give up these splendid contrasts very _willingly_," she whispered, her face gone suddenly terror-stricken.

Herr Dremmel said that family life had always been praised not only for its beauty but for its necessity as the foundation of the State.

"You told me," said Ingeborg, who had a trick which good men sometimes found irritating of remembering everything they had ever said, "the foundation of the State was manure."

Herr Dremmel said so it was. And so was family life. He would not, he informed her, quibble over terms. What he wished to make clear was that there could not be family life without a family to have it in.

"And don't you call you and me and Robertlet a family?" she asked.

"One child?" said Herr Dremmel. "You would limit the family to one child? That is a highly unchristian line of conduct."

"But the Christian lines of conduct seem to _hurt_ so," murmured Ingeborg. "Oh, I know there have to be brothers and sisters," she added quickly before he could speak, "and it _is_ best to get it over and have done with it. It's only when I'm--it's only sometimes that I think Robertlet would have been enough family till--till I'd had time to forget--"

Again the light of terror came into her eyes. She knew it was there. She looked down at her plate to hide it.

Twice after that she came back from her thinking down by the lake and attempted to talk to him about questions of life and death. Herr Dremmel was bored by questions of life and death unless they were his own ones.

He met them, however, patiently. She arrived panting, for it was uphill back to the house, desperately needing her vision rubbed a little clearer against his so that she might reach out to rea.s.surance and courage, and he took on an air of patience almost before she had begun.

In the presence of that premature resignation she faltered off into silence. Also what she had wanted to say got tangled into the silliest sentences--she heard them being silly as they came out. No wonder he looked resigned. She could have wept with chagrin at her inarticulateness, her want of real education, her incapacity for getting her thoughts torn away from their confusion and safely landed into speech. And there stood Robert, waiting, with that air of patience....

But how odd it was, the difference between his talk before she was going to have a baby and his silence--surely resigned silence--when she was!

She wished she knew more about husbands. She wished that during the years at home instead of writing all those diocesan letters she had ripely reflected on the Conjugalities.

As the days went by her need of somebody to talk to, her dread of being alone with her imagination and its flashes, became altogether intolerable. She went at last, driven by panic, to the village mothers, asking anxious questions about how they had felt, how they had managed, going round on days when she was better to the cottages where families were longest. But nothing came of this; the att.i.tude everywhere was a dull acceptance, a shrug of the shoulder, a tiredness.

Then she sought out the postman's wife, who looked particularly motherly and bright, and found that she was childless.

Then she met the forester one day in the woods, and was so far gone in need that she almost began to ask him her anxious questions, for he looked more motherly even than the postman's wife.

Then she thought of Baroness Glambeck, who before Robertlet's birth had been helpful in practical ways--would she not be helpful now in these spiritual stresses?--and she walked over there with difficulty one afternoon in November through the deep wet sand, approaching her as one naked soul delivered by its urgencies from the web of reticence and convention approaches another. But nothing could be less naked that day than the Baroness's soul. It was dressed even to gloves and a bonnet. It had no urgencies; and Hildebrand von Glambeck was there, the only son in the family of six, the member of it who had married most money, and his mother was proudly pouring out coffee for him in festal silk.

It was entirely contrary to custom for one's pastor's wife to walk in without having first inquired whether her visit would be acceptable; and when the Baroness perceived the sandy and disordered figure coming towards her down the long room she was not only annoyed but dismayed.

She had not seen this dearest of her children for six months, and it was the first opportunity she had had since his arrival the evening before of being alone with him, for he had brought a friend with him from Berlin, and not till after luncheon had the friend, who painted, been satisfactorily disposed of out of doors in the park, where he announced his intention of staying as long as the sun stayed on a certain beech-tree. She wanted to ask her boy questions. She had sent the Baron out riding round his farms so as to be able to ask questions. She wanted to know about his life in Berlin, to her so remote and so full of drawbacks that yet glittered, a high, dangerous, less truly aristocratic life than this of lofty stagnation in G.o.d's provinces, but shone upon after all by the presence of her Emperor and King. In her heart she believed that the Almighty had also some years ago, probably about the time of her marriage when she, too, retired into them, withdrawn into the provinces, and there particularly presided over those best of the Fatherland's n.o.bles who stayed with a pure persistency in the places where they happened to have been born. On His departure for the country, the Baroness decided, He had handed over Berlin and Potsdam to the care of the First of His children, her Emperor and King; and so it was that the provinces were higher and more truly aristocratic than Berlin and Potsdam, and so it was that Berlin and Potsdam nevertheless ran them very close.

And now, just as she had so cleverly contrived this hour with Hildebrand for getting at all those intimate details of his life that a mother loves but does not care to talk about before her husband, this hour for hearing about his children, his meals, his money, his dear wife's success in society and appearances, thanks to her having married into the n.o.bility, at Court, his own health, his indigestion--that ancient tormentor of his peace, _armer Junge_--and whether he had seen or heard anything of poor Emmi, his eldest sister, who had miserably married six thousand marks a year and lived impossibly at Spandau and could not be got to admit she did not like it--just as she was going to be satisfied on all these points came that eccentric and pushing Frau Pastor and spoilt it all. Also Hildebrand was in the very middle of one of those sad stories of scandal that one wishes one had not to listen to but naturally wants to hear the end of.

So great was the Baroness's disappointment that she found it impossible to stop herself from affecting inability to recognise the Frau Pastor till she was actually touching the coffee table. "Ah," she then said, not getting up but slowly putting out her hand to take the hand that was being offered, and staring as though she were trying to remember where and when she had seen her before, "Ah--Frau Pastor? This is indeed an honour."

"Present me, mamma," said Hildebrand, who had got on to his feet the instant Ingeborg appeared in the doorway.

The ceremony performed he sank again into his chair and did nothing more at all, being waited on by his mother and leaving it to her to see that the visitor was given cream and sugar and cake, until the moment arrived when Ingeborg, made abundantly and elaborately aware that she was interrupting, prepared crest-fallen to go away again. Then once more he started up, alert and with his heels together.

"Well, and what did her husband do?" asked the Baroness, turning again to Hildebrand as soon as Ingeborg had been got quiet on a chair with coffee, determined to hear the end of the story.

"My dear mother," said Hildebrand, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears, "what could he do?"

"He shot her?"

"Of course."

"Naturally," said the Baroness, nodding approval. "Was she killed?"

"No. Badly wounded. But it was enough. His honour was avenged."

"And she will not," said the Baroness grimly, "begin these tricks again."

Ingeborg roused herself with an effort to say something. She was extraordinarily disappointed and unnerved by not finding the Baroness alone. "Why did he shoot her?" she asked. It seemed to her in her tiredness so very energetic of him to have shot her.

The Baroness turned a cold eye on her. "Because, Frau Pastor," she said, "she was his sinning wife."

"Oh," said Ingeborg; and added an inquiry, in a nervous desire to make for a brief s.p.a.ce agreeable small talk before going away again, whether in Germany they always shot each other when they sinned.

"Not each other," said the Baroness severely. "At least, not if it is a husband and his wife. He alone shoots."

"Oh," said Ingeborg, considering this.

She was sitting inertly on her chair, holding her cup of coffee slanting, too much dejected to drink it.

"And then does that make her love him again?" she asked, in her small tired voice.

The Baroness did not answer.

"Only blood," said Hildebrand, "can wipe out a husband's dishonour."