"But he does _love_ me," she still said to herself.

Puzzled, she racked her brain to think of ways to please him, and tried to make his house as comfortably perfect for him as possible, performing every duty she could find or invent with a thoroughness that by eleven o'clock in the morning had exhausted the supply. Herr Dremmel, however, was not accessible by ways of order and good food; he had never noticed their absence, and he did not now notice their presence. She saw after a while herself that his sum of happiness was not in the least increased by them. How could she make him happy, then? What could she do to make his life the brightest serene thing?

It was a shock to her, an immense and shattering surprise, the day she realised that all this time he was, in fact, being happy. She walked in the garden long that day, staring hard at this new perception, pondering, astonished.

"But he does _l_--" she began; and stopped.

Did he? What was the good of saying he did if he didn't? Was everything with him, and perhaps with other husbands--she knew so little about husbands--bound up with parenthood? Was it true, what he said to her the day she begged him to be friends, that a husband and wife could never be friends? She felt so entirely able to love Robert, to love him tenderly and deeply, without perpetually being somebody's mother. Perhaps wives could be friends and husbands couldn't. She wished she knew more about these things. She felt she did not rightly understand; and suspected, walking up and down the damp October garden, that being a bishop's daughter was an inefficient preparation for being anybody's wife. It kept one's mind m.u.f.fled. You were brought up not to look. If you wanted to see you had to be furtive and peep at life over the edge, as it were, of your Prayer-book, which made you feel wicked and didn't give you any sort of a view. All bishops' daughters, she said to herself walking fast, for her thoughts became tumultuous on this subject, ought to be maiden ladies; or, if they couldn't manage that as St. Paul would say, they should at least only marry more bishops. Not curates, not vicars, not mysterious elusivenesses like German pastors, but bishops. People they were used to. People they understood. Continuations. Second volumes. Sequels. Ap.r.o.ns. Curates might have convulsive moments that would worry souls blanched white by the keeping out of the light, souls like celery, no whiter than anybody else's if left properly to themselves, but blanched by a continual banking up round them of episcopal mould; and even a vicar might conceivably sometimes be headlong; while as for a German pastor.... She flung out her hands.

Well, Robert was not headlong. No one could accuse him of anything but the most steady sequence in his steps. But he was, she thought, not having the clue to Herr Dremmel's conduct, incomprehensible. With the simple faith of women, that faith that holds out against so many enlightenments and whose artless mainspring is vanity, she had believed quite firmly that every sweet and admiring a.s.surance he had ever given her would go on changelessly and indefinitely holding good, she had believed she knew and understood him better than he did himself, and that at any time she wanted to she had only to reach out her hand to be able to help herself to more of his love. This faith in herself and in her power, if she really wished, to charm him, she called having faith in him. It took six weeks of steadily continued mild indifference on Herr Dremmel's part, of placid imperviousness to all approaches of an affectionate nature, of the most obvious keen relish in his work, keener than he had yet shown, to reveal the truth at last to her; and greatly was she astonished. He was happy, and he was happy without her! "And that," said Ingeborg, unable to resist the conclusion pressed upon her, "isn't love."

She stopped a moment beneath the gently dripping trees and took off her knitted cap and shook it dry, for she had inadvertently brushed against an overhanging branch on which last summer's leaves still wetly clung.

She pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed her cap thoughtfully. It had been raining all the morning, and now late in the afternoon the garden was a quiet grey place of fallen leaves and gathering dusk and occasional small shakings of wet off the trees when a silent bird perched on the sodden branches. Some drops fell on her bare head while she was drying her cap. She put up her hand mechanically and rubbed them off. She stood wiping her cap long after it was dry, absorbed in thought.

"I don't know what it is," she said presently, half aloud, "but I do know what it isn't."

She put on her cap again, pulling it over her ears with both hands and much care, and staring while she did it at a slug in the path in front of her.

"And what it isn't," she said after another interval, shaking her head and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face into an expression of profoundest negation, "is love."

"_Well_," she added, deeply astonished.

Then, with a flash of insight, "It's because he works."

Then, with a quick desire to cover up the wound to her vanity, "If he didn't get lost in his work he'd _remember_ he loves me--it's only that he _forgets_."

Then, with a white flare of candour, "He's a bigger thing than I am."

Then, with the old eagerness to help, "So it's my business to see that he can be big in happy peace."

Then, remembrance smiting her with its flat, cold hand, "But he _is_ happy."

Then, "So where do I come in?"

Then, with a great, frank acceptance of the truth, "I don't come in."

Then, swept by swift, indignant honesty, "Why should I _want_ to come in? What is all this coming in? Oh"--she stamped her foot--"the simple fact, the naked fact when I've pulled all the silly clothes off, is that I only want him to be happy if it's I who make him happy, and I'm nothing but a--I'm just a--" She twisted round on her heels, her arms flung out, in search of the exact raw word--"I'm nothing but just a common tyrant."

At tea-time her condition can best, though yet imperfectly, be described as chastened.

CHAPTER XXV

Nevertheless, though she tried to face it squarely and help herself by indignation at her own selfish vanity, she felt a great emptiness round her, a great chill.

It was impossible to get used all at once to this new knowledge, so astonishing after seven years of conviction that one was loved, and so astonishing when one remembered that as recently as August--one could positively count the days--just coming home again after an absence had drawn forth from Robert any number of manifestations of it. It had the suddenness and completeness of the switching off of light. A second before, one was illuminated; another second, and one was groping in the dark. For she did grope. She was groping for reasons. It seemed for a long time so incredible that her entire importance and interest as a human being should depend on whether she was or was not what he called a true wife that she preferred to go on groping rather than take hold of this as an explanation.

She had been so sure of Robert. She had been so familiar with him and unafraid. When she thought of her days at home, of her abject fear of her father, of her insignificance, she felt that Robert's love and admiration had lifted her up from being a creeping thing to being a creature with quite bright brave wings. He had come suddenly into her life and told her she was a _susses Kleines_: and behold she became a _susses Kleines_. And now he didn't think her even that any more; he had dropped her again, and she was already falling back into the old state of timidity towards the man in the house.

She turned to the children and the housekeeping and to a search for something she could do in the parish, so that at least while she was making efforts to clear her confusion about Robert she might not be wasting time. If she was no use to him she might be of use to the less independent. She was entirely humble at this moment, and would have thanked a dog if it had been so kind as to allow her to persuade it to wag its tail. It had always been her hope throughout each of her illnesses that presently when that one was over she would get up and begin to do good, and now here she was, finally up, with two children who had not yet had much mother, two servants whose lives might perhaps be made more interesting, a whole field outside her gates for practise in deeds of mercy, and enormous tracts of time on her hands. All she had to do was to begin.

But it was rather like an over-delayed resurrection. Things had filled up. Everybody seemed used to being left alone, and such a thing as district-visiting, so familiar to a person bred in Redchester, was unknown in East Prussia. The wife of a country pastor had as many duties in her own house as one woman could perform in a day, and n.o.body expected to see her going about into other houses consoling and alleviating. Also, the peasants thought, why should one be consoled and alleviated? The social difference between the peasant and the pastor was so small and rested so often only on education that it would have appeared equally natural, if the thing could from any point of view have been made natural, for the wife of the peasant to go and console and alleviate the parsonage. Who wanted sympathy in Kokensee? Certainly not the men, and the women were too busy with family cares, those many crushing cares that yet kept them interested and alive, to have time for consolations. And those with most cares, most children who died, most internal complaints, most gloom and weariness, achieved just because of these things almost as much distinction and popularity in the village as those with most money. Ingeborg herself was popular so long as her children were drowned out of punts, or died of mumps, or were stillborn; but now that nothing happened to her and she went about, after having had six of them, still straight and slender, Kokensee regarded her coldly and with distrust. Doing nothing for anybody on a sofa in an untidy black tea-gown she had been respected. Trim and anxious to be of use she was disapproved of.

When she went round to try to interest the women in the getting up of little gatherings that were to brighten the parish once a fortnight during the winter months, they shook their heads over their washtubs and told each other after she had gone that it was because she kept two servants. _Hausfraus_ who did not do their own work, they said, shaking their heads with many _ja, ja's_, were sure to get into mischief. All they asked of the pastor's wife was that she should attend to her own business and let them attend to theirs. They did not walk into her living-room; why should she walk into theirs? They did not want to brighten her winter; why should she want to brighten theirs? She should take example from her husband, they said, who never visited anybody. But a Frau who kept two servants and who after six children still wore skirts shorter than a Confirmation candidate's--_ja, ja, das kommt davon_.

And things had filled up at home. Rosa and the cook had been used so long to managing alone, and were so completely obsessed by the idea that the Frau Pastor was half dead and that her one real function was to lie down, that they regarded her suddenly frequent appearances in the kitchen with the uneasiness and discomfort with which they would have regarded the appearances of a ghost. No more than if she had been a ghost did they know what to do with her. She did not seem real, separated from her bedroom and her beef-tea. They could not work with her. She would make them jump when, on looking up, they saw her in their midst, having come in unheard with her strange lightness of movement.

Their nerves were shaken when they discovered her on her knees in odd corners of the house doing things with dusters. To see her prodding potatoes over the fire, and weighing meat, and approaching onions familiarly made them creep.

It was like some dreadful miracle.

It was like, said Rosa, whispering, being obliged to cook dinners and make beds with the help of--side by side with--

"With what then?" cried the cook, pretending courage but catching fear from Rosa's face.

"_Mit einem Lazarus_," whispered Rosa, behind her hand.

The cook shrieked.

They did not, however, give notice, being good girls and prepared to bear much, till they saw their names in red ink in one of the squares ruled on a sheet of paper the Frau Pastor pinned up on the sitting-room wall above her writing-table.

For a day or two they were filled with nameless horror because the ink was red. Then, when they discovered what the numbers against the square, 3--4, meant, the horror was swept away in indignation, for it was the hour in the afternoon in which they usually mended or knitted and gossiped together, and it appeared that the Frau Pastor intended to come and sit with them during this hour and read aloud.

"Nice books are so--so nice," said Ingeborg, explaining her idea. "Don't you think you'll like nice books?"

She faltered a little, because of the expression on their faces.

"There is the pig," said the cook desperately.

"The pig?"

"It has to be fed between three and four."

"Oh, but we're not going to mind things like _pigs_!" said Ingeborg with a slightly laboured brightness.

The next day they gave notice.

But the plan pinned up in the parlour had nothing, except during this one hour, to do with Rosa and the cook; it had been drawn up solely on behalf of Robertlet and Ditti.

Ingeborg had pored over it for days, making careful squares with a ruler and doing all the princ.i.p.al words in red ink, her hair touzled by the stresses of thinking out, and her cheeks flushed. The winter was upon them, and already rain and gales made being out of doors impossible except for one daily courageous trudge after dinner with the children in waterproofs and goloshes, and she thought that with a little arranging she might shorten and brighten the long months to the spring. The children were so pa.s.sive. They seemed hardly conscious, she thought, of the world round them. Wouldn't they enjoy themselves more if they could be taught to look at things? Their resemblance to the elder Frau Dremmel was remarkable, it is true, but of course only superficial. Why they were apathetic was because they had had so little mother in their lives.

She had only been able to teach them their prayers and their grace, and beyond that had had to leave them to G.o.d. Now, however, she could take over her charge again, and teach them things that would make them lissom, quick, interested, and gay.

What would make Robertlet and Ditti lissom, quick, interested, and gay?

She pored profoundly over this question, and was steeped in red ink and with the end of her pen bitten off and the floor white with torn-up plans before she had answered it.

At the end of the winter she thought she could not have answered it right. There was something wrong with education. The children had been immensely patient. They had borne immensely with their mother. Yet by the end of a whole winter's application of the plan they knew only how cats and dogs were spelt, and the sole wonder that they felt after six months' parental effort to stir them to that important preliminary to knowledge was a dim surprise that such familiar beasts should need spelling.