The doctor there said I'm still anaemic--"

"We will feed her on portions of the strongest ox."

"So you mustn't mind, if I--if I--"

"I mind nothing if only I once more have my little wife at home," said Herr Dremmel; and when he helped her down on to the parsonage steps, where stood Robertlet and Ditti in a stiff and proper row waiting motionless till their mother should have got near enough for them to present her with the nosegays they were holding, he kissed her again, and again pinched her ear, and praised G.o.d aloud that his widowerhood was over.

They had tea, a meal that had long before been subst.i.tuted for the heavier refreshment of coffee, in a parlour filled with flowers by Rosa and the cook, the very cake, baked for the occasion, being strewn with them. Herr Dremmel lounged on the sofa behind the table looking placidly content, with one arm round his wife, while Robertlet and Ditti, awed by the splendours of the decorations for their mother's home-coming and their own best clothes and spotless bibs, sat opposite, being more completely good than ever. From their side of the table they stared unflinchingly at the two people on the sofa--at their comfortably reclining, pleased-looking father, whom they knew so differently as a being always hurriedly going somewhere else, at their mother sitting up very straight, with her veil pushed up over her nose, pouring out tea and smiling at them and keeping on giving them more jam and more milk and more cake even after, aware from their sensations that overflowing could not be far off, they had informed her by anxious repet.i.tions of the word _satt_, which she did not seem to hear, that they were already in a dangerous condition. And they wondered dimly why, when she poured out the tea, her hand shook and made it spill.

"I will now," said Herr Dremmel when the meal was finished, getting up and brushing crumbs out of the many folds that were characteristic of his clothes, "retire for a s.p.a.ce into my laboratory."

He looked at Ingeborg and smiled. "Picture it," he said. "The only solace I have now had for two months and a half has been in the bony arms of my laboratory. I grow weary of them. It is well to have one's little wife home again. A man, to do his work, needs his life complete, equipped in each of its directions. His laboratory seems bony to him if he has not also a wife; his wife would seem not bony enough if he had not also a laboratory. Bony and boneless, bony and boneless--it is the swing of the pendulum of the wise man's life." And he bent over her and lifted her face up again by putting his finger under her chin. "Is it not so, Little One?" he asked, smiling.

"I--suppose so," said Ingeborg.

"Suppose so!"

He laughed, and pulled an escaping tendril of her hair, and went away in great contentment and immersed himself very happily in the saucers of new grain waiting to be weighed and counted.

It was a fine August afternoon, and his windows were open, for there was no wind to blow his papers about, and he was pleased when he presently became aware out of the corner of an eye withdrawn an instant from its work that his wife had come out on to the path below and was walking up and down it in the way she used to before the acuter period of the sofa and the interest in life beyond the grave had set in.

He liked to see her there. There was a gra.s.s bank sloping up from the path to beneath his windows, and by standing on tip-toe on the top of this and stretching up an arm as far as it would go one was just able to tap against the gla.s.s. He remembered how she used to do this when first they were married, on very fine days, to try to lure him out from his duties into dalliance with her among the lilacs. It amused him to find himself almost inclined to hope she would do it now, for it was long since there had been dalliance and he felt this was an occasion, this restoration to normality, on which some slight trifling in a garden would not be inappropriate.

But Ingeborg, though she loitered there nearly half an hour, did not even look up. She wandered up and down in the cool shade the house threw across the path in the afternoon, her hat off, apparently merely enjoying the beauty of a summer day bending towards its evening, and presently he forgot her in the vivid interest of what he was doing; so that it was the surprised expression of some one who has forgotten and is trying to recall that he looked at her when, after a knock at the door which he had not heard, he saw her come in and stand at the corner of his table waiting till he had done counting--a process he conducted aloud--to the end of the row of grains he was engaged upon.

His thoughts were still chiefly with them as he looked up at her when he had done and had written down the result, but there was room in them also for a slight wonder that she should be there. She had not penetrated into his laboratory for years. She had been tamed, after a period of recurring insurrections, into respect for its sanct.i.ty. But he did not mind being interrupted on this occasion; on the contrary, as soon as he had fully returned to consciousness he was pleased. There was a large warmth pervading Herr Dremmel that afternoon which made him inclined not to mind anything. "Well, Little One?" he said.

Immediately she began to deliver what sounded like a speech. He gazed at her in astonishment. She appeared to be in a condition of extreme excitement; she was addressing him rapidly in a trembling voice; she was much flushed, and was holding on to the edge of the table. It was so sudden and so headlong that it was like nothing so much as the gushing forth of the long corked-up contents of an over-full bottle, and he gazed at her in an astonishment that did not for some time permit him to gather the drift of what she was saying.

When he did she had already got to the word Ruins.

"Ruins?" repeated Herr Dremmel.

"Ruins, ruins. It _must_ stop--it _can't_ go on. Oh, I saw it so clearly the last part of the time in Zoppot. I suppose it was the sea wind blew me clear. Our existence, Robert, our decently happy existence in a decently happy home with properly cared-for children--"

"But," interrupted Herr Dremmel, raising his hand, "one moment--what is it that must stop?"

"Oh, don't you see all that will be in ruins about us--but in _ruins_, Robert--all our happy life--if I go on in this--in this wild career of--of unbridled motherhood?"

Herr Dremmel stared. "Unbridled--?" he began; then he repeated, so deep was his astonishment, "Wild career of--Ingeborg, did you say unbridled motherhood?"

"Yes," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together, evidently extraordinarily agitated. "I learned that by heart at Zoppot, on purpose to say to you. I knew if I didn't directly I got into this room I'd forget everything I meant to say. I know it sounds ridiculous, the way I say it--"

"Unbridled motherhood?" repeated Herr Dremmel. "But--are you not a pastor's wife?"

"Oh, yes, yes--I know, I know. I know there's Duty and Providence, but there's me, too--there is me, too. And, Robert, won't you see? We shall be happy again if I'm well, we shall be two real people instead of just one person and a bit of one--you and a battered thing on a sofa--"

"Ingeborg, you call a wife and a mother engaged in carrying out her obligations a battered thing on a sofa?"

"Yes," said Ingeborg, hurrying on to the princ.i.p.al sentence of those she had prepared at Zoppot and learned by heart, desperately clutching at it before Robert's questions had undermined her courage and befogged the issues. "Yes, and I've come to the conclusion after ripe meditation--after ripe yes--the production of the--of the--yes, of the already extinct"--(dead seemed an unkind word, almost rude) "is wasteful, and that--and that--....Oh, Robert," she cried, flinging out her hands and letting go all the rest of the things she had learned to say, "don't you think this persistent parenthood might end now?"

He stared at her in utter amazement.

"It--it _disagrees_ with me," she said, tears in her voice and in her anxious, appealing eyes.

"Am I to under--"

"Anyhow _I_ can't go on," she cried, twisting her fingers about in an agony. "There's so little of me to go on _with_. I'm getting stupider every day. I've got no brains left. I've got no anything. Why, I can hardly get together enough courage to tell you this. Oh, Robert," she appealed, "it isn't as though it made you _really_ happier--you don't really _particularly_ notice the children when they're there--it isn't as though it made anybody _really_ happier--and--and--I'm dreadfully sorry, but I've done."

And she dropped on to the floor beside him and put her cheek against his sleeve and tried to make up by kissing it and clinging to it for her subversion of that strange tremendous combination of Duty and Providence that so bestrode her life. "If only you wouldn't _mind_--" she kept on saying.

But Herr Dremmel, for the first time since he had known her, was deeply offended, deeply hurt. She had pierced his armour at the one vulnerable spot. His manhood was outraged; his kindness, his patience, his affection were forgotten and spurned. He looked down at the head against his arm with a face in which wounded pride, wrath, shockedness at so great a defiance of duty, and the amazed aggrievement of him whose gifts and blessings are not wanted, struggled together. Then, as she still went on clinging and incoherently suggesting that he should not mind, he rose up, took her by the hand, helped her to her feet, and led her to the door; and there, after facing her a moment in silence with it opened in his hand while she stood blinking up at him with appealing eyes, he said dreadfully: "Evidently you do not and never have loved me."

CHAPTER XXIII

Ingeborg crept away down the pa.s.sage with the sound in her ears of the key being turned in the lock behind her.

She was crushed. That Robert should think she had never loved him, that he should not even let her tell him how much she had and did! She stared out of the little window at the foot of the stairs at the untidy vegetables in the garden. This was the quality of life--Brussels sprouts, and a door being locked behind one. It was all grey and difficult and tragic. She had hurt Robert, offended him. He was in there thinking she didn't love him. What he had said was peculiarly shattering coming from a mouth that had been always kind. Yet what was there to do but this? The alternative, it seemed, was somebody's dying; and if the children did live there would be the death of the spirit, the decay of all lovely things in the home, the darkening of all light; there would be neglect, apathy, an utter running to seed. But she felt guilty and conscience-stricken. She was no longer sure she was right. Perhaps it was indeed her duty to go on, perhaps she was indeed being wicked and cruel. The clearness of vision that had been hers at Zoppot was blurred; she was confused, infinitely distressed. Yet through the distress and confusion there kept on jabbing something like a little spear of light, and always it pointed in this one direction....

She stood leaning against the wall by the open window, a miserable mixture of doubt and conviction, remorse and determination. All her life she had been servile--servile with the sudden rare tremendous insurrections that upheave certain natures brought up in servility, swift tempests more devastating than the steady fighting of systematic rebels. Her insurrections were epoch-making. When they occurred the destiny of an entire family was changed. Fathers and husbands were not prepared for anything but continued acquiescence in one so constantly acquiescent. As far as she was concerned they felt they might sleep peacefully in their beds. Then this obedient thing, this pliable uncontradicting thing would return, for instance, from an illicit trip abroad, betrothed to an unknown foreigner, and somehow in spite of violent opposition marry him; or, as in this second volcanic upheaval, with no preliminaries whatever, refuse point blank--the final effect on Herr Dremmel's mind of her incoherence was a point blankness--to live with her husband as his wife.

Behind the locked door his anger was as great as her distressed confusion outside it. She was to be his wife but not his wife. Under his roof. A perpetual irritation. She had decreed, this woman who had nothing to decree, that there were to be no more Dremmels. The indignation of the thwarted ancestor was heavy upon him. Her moral obliquity shocked him, her disregard for the give and take necessary if a civilised community is to continue efficient. How was he going to work with that constant reminder about his house of his past placidities?

Already it had begun, the annoyance, the hindering, for here he was sitting in front of his samples making mistakes in weighing, adding up wrong, forced by humiliatingly different results each time to count the grains over and over again.

Driven by the stress of the situation to unfairness, he remembered with a kind of bitter affection those widows who had darkened his past so soothingly before his marriage, the emotional peace their bony dustiness, their bonneted dinginess had secured him. They had been, he perceived, like a dark blind shading his eyes from the tormenting glare of too much domesticity. The most infuriated of that black and blessed band had been better than this threatening excess of relationship. Not one had ever come between him and his steady reaching forward. Not one had even once caused him to count his grains twice over. A man who wishes to work, he told himself, must clear his life of women; of all women, that is--for there are certain elementary actions connected with saucepans and bedmaking that only women will do--except widows. A wife who is not a wife and who yet persists in looking as if she were one, can be nothing but a goad and a burden for an honest man. Either she should look like some one used up and finished or she should continue to discharge her honourable functions until such time as she developed the physical unattractiveness that placed her definitely on the list of women one respects. That Ingeborg should choose the moment when she seemed younger and rounder than ever to revolt against Duty and Providence appeared to him in his first wrath deliberately malicious. He was amazed. He could not believe he was being called out of his important and serious work, beckoned out of it just when it was going so well, in order to be hurt, in order to be made acquainted with pain, and by her of all people in the world whom he used to call--surely he had been kind?--his little sheep. To be hit by one's sheep! To be hit violently by it so that the blows actually shook one at the very moment of greatest affection for it, of rejoicing over its return, of plunging one's hands most confidently into the comfort of its wool!

Herr Dremmel was amazed.

He stayed in his laboratory in this condition till supper; then, during the meal, he carefully read a book which he propped up in front of him against the loaf, while Ingeborg, ministering to him with the eager deftness of the conscience-stricken, watched for a sign of forgiveness out of the corners of red eyes.

He stayed after supper in his laboratory till past midnight, still being amazed, reduced indeed at last to walking up and down that calm temple of untiring attempts to nail down ultimate causes, considering how best he could bring his wife to reason.

The business of bringing a woman to reason had always seemed to him quite the most extravagant way of wasting good time. To have to discuss, argue, explain, threaten, adjure, only in order to get back to the point from which n.o.body ought ever to have started, was the silliest of all silly necessities. Again he fumed at the thought of an untractable, undutiful wife about him, and recognised the acute need to be clear of feminine childishness, egotism, unforeseeable resiliences, if a man would work. In his stirred stale it appeared altogether monstrous that the whole world should be blotted out, the great wide world of magnificent opportunity and s.p.a.cious interest, even for a day, even for an hour, by the power to make him uncomfortable, by the power to make him concentrate his brains on an irrelevant situation, of one small woman.

He went to their room about half-past twelve determined to have no more of the nonsense. He would bring her then and there, by the shortest possible route, to reason. He would have it out even to the extent of severity and have done with it. He was master, and if she forced him to emphasize the fact he would.

Carrying the lamp he went to their room with the firm footsteps of one who has ceased to be going to stand things.

But the room was empty. It was as chillily empty of wifely traces as it had been since the beginning of June.

"This is paltry," thought Herr Dremmel, feeling the offence was now so great as to have become ridiculous; and determined to discover into what fastness she had withdrawn and fetch her out of it, he went lamp in hand doggedly through the house looking for her, beginning with the thorough patience of one accustomed to research in the kitchen, where shy c.o.c.kroaches peeped at him round the legs of tables, examining the parlour, stuffy with the exhaustion of an ended day, penetrating into a room in which Rosa and the cook reared themselves up in their beds to regard him with horror unspeakable, and at last stumbling up the narrow staircase to where Robertlet and Ditti slept the sleep of the unvaryingly just.

Here, in a third small bed of the truckle type, lay his defaulting wife, her face to the wall, her body composed into an excess of motionlessness.

"Ingeborg!" he called, holding the lamp high over his head.