But she did not stir.

"Ingeborg!" he called again.

But never did woman sleep so soundly.

He walked across to the bed and bent over, searching her face by the light of the lamp. Most of it was buried in the pillow, but the one eye visible was tightly shut, more immensely asleep than any eye he had ever seen.

The indifference that could sleep while her outraged husband was looking for her revolted him. Without making any further attempt to wake her he turned on his heel, and slamming the door behind him went downstairs again.

"That is thieves at last," remarked Ditti, who had been expecting them for years, brought out of her dreams--good dreams--by the noise of the door.

"Yes," said Robertlet, also roused from dreams that did him credit.

"We must now get under the clothes," said Ditti, who had settled long ago what would be the right thing to do.

"Yes," said Robertlet.

"You needn't," said Ingeborg out of the darkness--they both started, they had forgotten she was there--"it was only Papa."

Put the thought of Papa coming up to their room and banging the door in the middle of the night filled them in its strangeness with an even greater uneasiness; they would have preferred thieves; and after some preliminary lying quiet and being good they one after the other withdrew as silently as possible beneath the comfort of the clothes, where they waited in neat patience for the next thing Papa might do until, stifled but uncomplaining, they once more fell asleep.

There followed some days of strain in the Kokensee parsonage.

Herr Dremmel retired into an extremity of silence, made no allusion to these regrettable incidents, became at meals a mere figure behind a newspaper, and at other times was not there at all.

He had decided that he would not waste his energies in anger. At the earliest opportunity he would drive in to Meuk, call on the doctor, and after explaining the effect of Zoppot, a place which was to have cured her, on his wife, request him now to prescribe a cure for the cure. It was Ingeborg's business to come to her husband and ask for forgiveness, and he would give her these few days in which to do it. If she did not he would know, after consultation with the doctor, what course to take--whether of severity, or whether, setting aside his manhood, it was not rather an occasion on which one ought to coax. He was, after all, too humane to resort without medical sanction to scenes. Perhaps what she needed was only a corrective to Zoppot. There was such a thing as excess of salubriousness.

Having made up his mind, he found himself calmer, able to work again in the knowledge that in a few days he would be clear, with the aid of the doctor, as to what should be done; and Ingeborg had nothing to complain of except that he would not speak. Several times she tried to reopen the so hastily closed subject, but got no further in the face of his monumental silence than "But, Robert--"

She took the children for outings in the forest, and while they did not chatter merrily together and did not play at games she thought over all the ways that were really tactful of luring him to reasonable discussion. She knew she had made a lamentable first appearance in the _role_ of a retiring mother, but how difficult it was when you felt overwhelmingly to talk objectively. And then there were tears. A woman cried, and what a handicap that was. Before the first semicolon in any vital discourse with one's husband was reached one was dissolved in tears, thought Ingeborg, ashamed and resentful; and Robert grew so calm and patient, so disconcertingly calm and patient when faced by crying; he sat there like some large G.o.d, untouched by human distress, waiting for the return of reason. It is true he cried, too, sometimes, but only about odd things like Christmas Eves and sons if they were sufficiently new born--things that came under the category surely of cheerful, at most of cheerfully touching; but he never cried about these great important issues, these questions on which all one's happiness hung.

Life would run more easily, she thought, if husbands and wives had the same taste in tears.

Four days after her return home she asked him to forgive her.

It was at the end of supper, and he had just removed his book from the supporting loaf and was getting up to go when she ran across to him with the quickness of despair and laid hold of him by both his sleeves and said, "Forgive me."

He looked down at her with a gleam in his eye; he would not have to go to Meuk after all.

"Do," she begged. "Robert! Do! You know I love you. I'm so miserable to have hurt you. Do let's be friends. Won't we?"

"Friends?" echoed Herr Dremmel, drawing back. "Is that all you have to say to me?"

"Oh, do be friends! I can't bear this."

"Ingeborg," he said with the severity of disappointment, pulling his sleeves out of her hands and going to the door, "have you then not yet discovered that a true husband and wife can never be friends?"

"Oh, but how dreadful!" said Ingeborg, dropping her hands by her side and staring after him as he went out.

Toward the end of the week, when her una.s.sisted meditations continued to produce no suggestions of any use for removing the stain that undoubtedly rested on her, she thought she would go in to Meuk and seek the counsel of the doctor. He had always been good to her, kind and understanding. She would go to him more in the spirit of one who goes to a priest than to a doctor, and inquire of him earnestly what she should do to be saved.

She found the position at home unendurable. If the doctor told her that it was her duty to go on having children, and that it was mere chance the two last had been born dead, she would resume her career. It was a miserable career--a terrible, maimed thing--but less miserable than doubt as to whether one were not being wicked and Robert was being utterly right. Not for nothing was she the daughter of a bishop, and had enjoyed for twenty-two years the privileges of a Christian home. Also she well knew that the public opinion of Kokensee and Glambeck would be against her in this matter of rebellion, and she felt too weak to stand up alone against these big things. She had never been able to hold out long against prolonged disapproval; nor had she ever been able to endure that people round her should not be happy. By the end of the week she was so wretched and so full of doubts that she decided to put her trust in Meuk and abide by the decision of its doctor; and so it happened that she set out on the five-mile walk to it on the same day on which Herr Dremmel drove there.

He had driven off in the middle of the morning with sandwiches for himself and the coachman in the direction of the experiment ground, telling her he would not be in till the evening, so she seized the favourable opportunity and, also armed with sandwiches, started soon after twelve o'clock for Meuk. The doctor's consulting hour was, she knew, from two to three, and if she were there punctually at two she could talk to him, have her fate decided, and be home again by four.

She walked along the edge of the harvested rye-fields eating her sandwiches as she went, and refusing to think for this brief hour and a half of the difficulties of life. Her mind was weary of them. She would put them away from her for this one walk. It was the brightest of August middays. The world seemed filled with every element of happiness. Some people, probably friends of the Glambecks, were shooting partridges over the stubble. The lupin fields were in their full glory, and their peculiar orange scent met her all along the way. There was a mile of sandy track to be waded through, and then came four good miles of hard white highroad between reddening mountain ashes to Meuk. Walking in that clear fresh warmth, so bright with colour, so sweet with scents, she could not but begin gradually to glow, and by the time she arrived at the doctor's house, however wan her spirits might be, the rest of her was so rosy that the servant who opened the door tried to head her off from the waiting-room to the other end of the pa.s.sage, persuaded that what she had come for could not be the doctor, but an animated call on the doctor's wife. She entered the waiting-room, a dingy place, with much the effect of a shaft of light piercing through a fog; and there, sitting at the table, turning over the fingered and aged piles of ill.u.s.trated weeklies, she found Herr Dremmel. For a moment they stared at each other.

There was no one else there. Through folding-doors could be heard the murmur of a patient consulting in the next room. Meuk was not usually a sick place, and nine times out of ten the doctor read his newspaper undisturbed from two to three; this was the tenth time, and though it had only just struck two a patient was with him already.

Herr Dremmel and Ingeborg stared at each other for a moment without speaking. Then he said, suddenly angered by the realisation that she had come in to Meuk without asking him if she might, "You did not tell me you were coming here."

"No," said Ingeborg.

"Why have you come?"

She sat down as inconspicuously as she could on the edge of a chair in a corner and clung to her umbrella. It was the awkwardest thing meeting Robert there.

"I--I just thought I would," she murmured.

"You do not look ill. You were not ill this morning."

"It's--psychological," murmured Ingeborg unnerved, and laying hold of the first word that darted into her undisciplined brain.

"Psycho--?"

"Are _you_ ill, Robert?" she asked, suddenly anxious. "Why have _you_ come?"

"My dear wife, that is my affair," said Herr Dremmel, who was particularly annoyed and puzzled by her presence.

"Oh," murmured Ingeborg. She had never yet heard herself called his dear wife, and felt the immensity of her relegation to her proper place.

He fluttered the pages of the _Fliegende Blatter_; she held on tighter to what seemed to be her only friend, her umbrella.

"Did you walk?" he asked presently, letting off the question at her like a gun.

"Yes--oh, yes," said Ingeborg, with hasty meekness.

What had she come for? thought Herr Dremmel, fluttering the pages faster. Ridiculous to pretend she needed a doctor. She looked, sitting there with her unusual pink cheeks, like a flourishing sixteen--at most eighteen.

What had he come for? thought Ingeborg, wishing life would not deal so upsettingly in coincidences, and keeping her eyes carefully on the carpet. Then a swift fear jumped at her heart--suppose he were ill?

Suppose he had begun to have one of those large, determined, obscure diseases that seem to mow down men and make the world so much a place of widows? She had observed that for one widower in Kokensee and the surrounding district there were ten widows. The women appeared to ail through life, constantly being smitten down by one thing after the other, but at least they stayed alive; while the men, who went year by year out robustly to work, died after a single smiting. "Perhaps it's want of practice in being smitten," she thought; and looked anxiously under her eyelashes at Robert, struggling with a desire to go over and implore him to tell her what was the matter. In another moment she would have gone, driven across by her impulses, if the folding-doors had not been thrown open and the doctor appeared bowing.

"_Darf ich bitten_?" said the doctor to Herr Dremmel, not perceiving Ingeborg, who was shuttered out of sight by the one half of the door he had opened. "Ah--it is the Herr Pastor," he added less officially on recognising him, and advanced holding out his hand. "I hope, my friend, there is nothing wrong with you?"

Herr Dremmel did not answer, but seizing his hat made a movement of a forestalling character towards the consulting room; and the doctor turning to follow him beheld Ingeborg in her corner behind the door.

"Ah--the Frau Pastor," he said, bowing again and again advancing with an extended hand. "Which," he added, looking from one to the other, "is the patient?"

But Herr Dremmel's back, disappearing with determination into the next room, suggested an acute need of a.s.sistance not visible in his wife's retiring att.i.tude.