It was very unfortunate, but they could not be got, for instance, to like the heavenly bodies. Useless for their mother to press them upon their notice on clear evenings when all the sky was a-blink. From first to last they saw nothing in the sunsets that lit the white winter world into a vast cave of colour except a sign that it must be tea-time. Not once could they be induced to shudder at the thought, on great starry nights, of infinite s.p.a.ce. They were unmoved by the information that they were being hurled at an incredible speed through it; and they didn't mind the moon being all those miles away. In the dancing cla.s.s it was Ingeborg who danced. In the gymnastic cla.s.s it was she who grew lissom. The _English and German Chatting_, owing to an absence in Robertlet and Ditti of any of the ingredients of chat, was a monologue; and for the course on _Introductions to Insects Collected in the House_ it was Ingeborg who caught the flies.

They were, however, very good. Nothing to which they were subjected altered that. When their mother in spite of discouragements went on bravely, so did they. When out of doors she s...o...b..lled them they stood patiently till she had done. She showed them how to make a snow man, and they did not complain. She gave them little sledges at Christmas, and explained the emotions to be extracted from these objects by sliding on them swiftly down slopes, and they bore her no ill-will when, having slid, they fell off, but quietly preferred the level garden paths and drew each other in turn on one sledge up and down them, while their mother on the other sledge did the sorts of things they had come to expect from mothers, and kept on disappearing over the brink of the slope to the frozen lake head first and face downward.

"It's very _difficult_," thought Ingeborg sometimes, as the winter dragged on.

There she was, heavy with facts about flies and stars and distances extracted in the evenings during her preparation hours from the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" which had been procured from London for the purpose--the parsonage groaned beneath it--and longing to unload them, and she was not able to because the two vessels which ought to have received them were fitted so impenetrably with lids.

They seemed to grow, if anything, more lidded. Quieter and quieter. The hour at the end of the day, marked on the plan Lap, an hour she had thought might easily become beautiful, something her children would remember years hence, which was to have been all white intimacy, with kisses and talks about angels and the best and quickest ways of getting to heaven while Robertlet sat in the lap on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Ditti sat in it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sat.u.r.days (there being scarcity in laps), was from the beginning an hour of semi-somnolence for the children, of staring sleepily into the glow of the stove, resting while they waited for what their mother would do or say next.

Ingeborg was inclined to be disheartened at this hour. It was the last one of the children's day, and the day had been long. There was the firelight, the mother's lap and knee, the mother herself ready to kiss and be confided in and more than ready to confide in her turn those discoveries she had made in the regions of science, and nothing happened. Robertlet and Ditti either stared fixedly at the glow from the open stove door or at Ingeborg herself; but whichever they stared at they did it in silence.

"What are you thinking of?" she would ask them sometimes, disturbing their dreamless dream, their happy freedom from thought. And then together they would answer, "Nothing."

"No, but tell me really--you can't _really_ think of nothing. It's impossible. Nothing is"--she floundered--"is always _something_--."

But the next time she asked the same question they answered with one voice just as before, "Nothing."

Then it occurred to her that perhaps they were having too much mother.

This also happened in the hour called Lap.

"A mother," she reflected, both her arms round her children according to plan, "must often be rather a nuisance."

She looked down with a new sympathy at Ditti's head reposing, also according to plan, on her shoulder.

"Especially if she's a devoted mother."

She laid her cheek on the black smooth hair, parted and pigtailed and as unlike Robert's fair furry stuff or her own as it was like the elder Frau Dremmel's.

"A devoted mother," continued Ingeborg to herself, her eyes on the glowing heart of the stove and her cheek on Ditti's head, "is one who gives up all her time to trying to make her children different."

"_I'm_ a devoted mother," she added, after a pause in which she had faced her conscience.

"How dreadful!" she thought.

She began to kiss Ditti's head very softly.

"How, too, dreadful to be in the power of somebody different; of somebody quick if you're not quick, or dull if you're not dull, and anyhow so old, so very old compared to you, and have to be made like her! How would I like being in my mother-in-law's power, with years and years for her to work at forcing me to be what she'd think I ought to be? And what she'd think I ought to be would be herself, what she tries to be. Of course. You can't think outside yourself."

She drew the children tighter. "You _poor_ little things!" she exclaimed aloud, suddenly overcome by the vision of what it must be like to have to put up with a person so fundamentally alien through a whole winter; and she kissed them one after the other, holding their faces close to hers with her hands against their cheeks in a pa.s.sion of apology.

Even to that exclamation, a quite new one in a quite new voice, they said nothing, but waited patiently for what would no doubt happen next.

CHAPTER XXVI

What happened next was that they went to school.

Just as Ingeborg was beginning to ask herself rather shy questions--for she was very full of respects--about the value of education and the claims of free development, the State stepped in and swept Robertlet and Ditti away from her into its competent keeping. In an instant, so it seemed to her afterward when in the empty house she had nothing to do but put away their traces, she was bereft.

"You never told me _this_ is what happens to mothers," she said to Herr Dremmel the day the brief order from the Chief Inspector of Schools arrived.

Herr Dremmel, who was annoyed that he should have forgotten his parental and civic duties, and still more annoyed, it being April and his fields needing much attention as a new-born infant, or a young woman one wishes, impelled by amorous motives, to marry, that there should be parental and civic duties to forget, was short with her.

"Every German of six has to be educated," he said.

"But they _are_ being educated," said Ingeborg, her mind weighted with all she herself had learned.

He waved her aside.

"But, Robert--my children--surely there's some way of educating them besides sending them away from me?"

He continued to wave her aside.

There was no doubt about it: the children had to go, and they went.

Of the alternatives, their being taught at home by a person with Government certificates, or attending the village school, Herr Dremmel would not hear. He was having differences of a personal nature with the village schoolmaster, who refused with a steadiness that annoyed Herr Dremmel to recognise that he was a _Schafskopf_, while Herr Dremmel held, and patiently explained, that a person who is born a _Schafskopf_ should be simple and frank about it, and not persist in behaving as if he were not one; and as for a teacher in the house, that was altogether impossible, because there was no room.

"There's the laboratory," said Ingeborg recklessly, to whom anything seemed better than letting her children go.

"The lab--?"

"Only to sleep in," she eagerly explained, "just sleep in, you know. The teacher needn't be there at all in the daytime, for instance."

"Ingeborg--" began Herr Dremmel; then he thought better of it, and merely held out his cup for more tea. Women were really much to be pitied. Their entire inability to reach even an elementary conception of values...

The children went to school in Meuk. They lodged with their grandmother, and were to come home on those vague Sundays when the weather was good and Herr Dremmel did not require the horses. Ingeborg could not believe in such a complete sweep out of her life. She loved Robertlet and Ditti with an extreme and odd tenderness. There was self-reproach in it, a pa.s.sionate desire to protect. It was the love sometimes found in those who have to do all the loving by themselves. It was an acute and quivering thing. After her experiences in the winter she had doubts whether education at present was what they wanted. It was not school they wanted, she thought, but to run wild. She knew it would have been perhaps difficult to get them to run in this manner, but thought if she had had them a little longer and had thoroughly revised her plan, purging it of science and filling them up instead with different forms of wildness, she might eventually have induced them to. There could have been a carefully graduated course in wildness, she thought, beginning quietly with weeding paths, and going on by steps of ever-increasing abandonment to tree-climbing, bird-nesting, and midnight raids on apples.

And while she wandered about the deserted garden and was desolate, Robertlet and Ditti, safe in their grandmother's house, were having the most beautiful dumplings every day for dinner that seemed to fit into each part of them as warmly and neatly as though they were bits of their own bodies come back, after having been artificially separated, to fill them with a delicious hot contentment, and their grandmother was saying to them at regular intervals with a raised forefinger: "My children, never forget that you are Germans."

There was now nothing left for Ingeborg but, as she told Herr Dremmel the first Sunday Robertlet and Ditti had been coming home and then for some obscure reason did not come, thrusting the information tactlessly at tea-time between his attention and his book, her own inside.

"After all," she said, as usual quite suddenly, breaking a valuable silence, "there's still me."

Herr Dremmel said nothing, for it was one of those statements of fact that luckily do not require an answer.

"n.o.body," said Ingeborg, throwing her head back a little, "can take that away."

Herr Dremmel said nothing to that either, chiefly because he did not want to. He had no time nor desire to guess at meanings which were, no doubt, after all not there.

"Whatever happens," she said, "I've still got my own inside."

"Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "I will not ask you what you mean in case you should tell me."

There was a drought going on, and Herr Dremmel, who justly prided himself on his sweetness of temper, was not as patient as usual; so Ingeborg, silenced, went into the garden where the drought was making the world glow and shimmer, and reflected that on the object she called her inside alone now depended her happiness.