The Pastor's Wife
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He hurried past her almost at a run.
She got into her room somehow, feeling Heaven had forsaken her.
After a minute or two she heard him coming along again. He stopped at her door and called to her softly:
"It's all right. It was still there. Wasn't it lucky?"
"Very," said Ingeborg; but so faintly that he did not hear.
"Good night, my Little One," she heard him say. "Now I'm going out to get that supper."
"Good night," said Ingeborg, again so faintly that he heard nothing; and after a pause of listening he went away.
She tumbled down on to the bed. She felt sick. It was a quarter past ten. She had three hours to wait. She knew what she was going to do, try to do. At one o'clock she would take off her shoes and go down the passage and see if his door were locked. He would be asleep. He must, oh, he must be asleep—she twisted about in the terror that smote her at the thought that he might perhaps not be asleep....
"God does love me," she said to herself, "I am His child. Haven't I sinned and repented? Haven't I done all the things? He's bound to help me, to save me. It is the wicked He saves—I am wicked-"
Her heart stood still at the fearful thought that perhaps she had not yet been after all wicked enough, not wicked enough to be saved.
People belonging to the other rooms began to come back to bed. Somebody in the next room sang while he was undressing, a gay Italian song, and presently he smoked, and the smoke came in under the door between her room and his.
She lay in the dark, or rather in the lights and shadows of the uncurtained room, and every two or three minutes a tramcar passed and shut out other sounds. Ingram must have come in long ago. When it was midnight she got up and arranged her shoes and hat just inside the door so that she could seize them as she came back, supposing she had been successful, and rush on straight downstairs and out and to the station. All other thoughts were now lost in the intentness with which she was concentrated on what she had to do exactly next. She would not let herself look aside at the abyss yawning if she were not successful. She gripped hold of the thing she had to do, the getting of the money, and fixed her whole self on that alone.
She lay down on the bed again, her hands clenched as though in them she held her determination. Once her thoughts did slip off to Robert, to the extreme desolation of what was waiting for her there, and tears came through her tightly shut eyelids.
"It's what you've deserved," she whispered, struggling to stop them. "Yes, but he hasn't deserved it. Robert hasn't deserved it—you've ruined him—" she was forced to go on.
She shook off the unnerving thoughts. By her watch it was a quarter to one.
She stood up and began to listen.
The tramcars passed now only every ten minutes. In between their passing the hôtel was quiet. She would wait for the approach of the next one—in the stillness she could hear it coming a long way off—then she would run down the passage in her stockinged feet to Ingram's door and open it just as the noise was loudest.
An icy hand seemed holding her heart, so icy that it burned. She had not known she had so many pulses in her body. They shook her and shook her; great, heavy, hammering things. She crept to her door and opened it a chink. There was a dim light in the passage. She heard the distant rumbling of a tramcar. Now—she must run.
But she could not. She stood and shook. There it was, coming nearer, and not another for ten minutes. She began to sob and say prayers. The tramcar struck its bell sharply, it had reached the corner of the piazza, it would be passing in another minute. She wrenched the door open and ran like a flying shadow down the passage, and just as the car was at its loudest turned the handle of Ingram's door.
It was not locked. She stood inside. The tramcar rumbled away into the distance. Ingram—she nearly wept for relief—was breathing deeply, was asleep.
"But how funny," she thought, after one terrified glance at him as he lay in the bar of light the street lamp cast on the bed, thinking with a top layer of attention while underneath she was entirely concentrated on the pocket-book, "how funny to go to bed in one's beard!…"
She stole over to the table and peered about frantically among the things scattered on it, saw nothing, began with breathless care to try to open its drawer noiselessly, listening all the while for the least pause in the breathing on the bed, and all the while with the foolish detached layer of thoughts running in her head like some senseless tune—
"Funny to go to bed in a beard—funny to sleep in a thing like that—funny not to take it off at night and hang it up outside the door with one's clothes and have it properly brushed—"
The drawer creaked as it opened. The regular breathing paused. She stood motionless, hit rigid with terror. Then the breathing began again; and, after all, there was nothing in the drawer.
She looked round the room in despair. On the little table by his pillow lay his watch and handkerchief. Nothing else. But in the table was a small drawer. She must look in that, too; she must go over and look in that; but how to open it so close to his head without walking him? She crept across to it, stopping at each step. Holding her breath she waited and listened before daring to take another. The drawer was not quite shut, and the slight noise of pulling its chink a little wider did not interrupt Ingrain's breathing. She put in her hand and drew out the pocket-book, drew out some notes—Italian notes, the first she found, a handful of them—pushed the pocket-book into the drawer again, and was in the act of turning to run when she was rooted to the floor.
Ingram was looking at her.
His eyes were open, and he was looking at her. Sleepily, hardly awake, like one trying to focus a thought. She stood fascinated with horror, staring at him, not able to move, her hand behind her back clutching the money. Then he put out his arm and caught her dress.
"Ingeborg?" he said in a sleepy wonder, still half in the deep dreams he had come up out of, "You? My little angel love—you? You've come?"
"Yes—yes," she stammered, trying to pull her dress away, wild with fear, flinging herself as usual in extremity on to the first words that came into her head—"Yes, yes, but I must go back to my room a minute—just one minute—please let me go—just one minute—I—I've forgotten my toothbrush—"
And Ingram, steeped in the heaviness of the first real sleep he had had for nights and only half awake, murmured, with the happy, foolish reasonableness of that condition—
"Don't be long, then, sweetest little mate," and let her go.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Two days later the porter at the Meuk station beheld Frau Pastor Dremmel trying to open the door of a third-class compartment in the early afternoon train from Allenstein, and going to her assistance, there being no other passenger to distract him, was surprised to find she had no luggage. Yet only the week before with his own hands he had put in a trunk for her and labelled it Berlin. With the interest of a lonely man whose time is his own, he inquired whether she had lost it and was surprised to find she did not answer. He then told her, or rather called after her, for she was moving away, that the pastoral carriage had not yet come for her, and was surprised again, for again she did not answer. He stood watching her, wondering what was wrong. He was too much accustomed to dilapidations and dirt in himself to see them in others, so that these outer signs of exhaustion and prolonged travelling escaped him. Puzzled, he shook his head as she disappeared through the station door; then he remembered that the poor lady was an Engländerin, and was able to turn away calmed, with the satisfaction of him who has found the right label and stuck it on.
Meuk, as she passed through it, shook its head over her, too, consoling itself when she returned no greetings, did not even seem to see greetings, with the same explanation and shrug—Engländerin. Robertlet and Ditti, walking along neatly to afternoon school, and suddenly aware of the approach down the street towards them of a disordered parent who not only did not stop but apparently did not see them, murmured to each other, being by now well instructed by their grandmother, the same explanation—Engländerin. Frau Dremmel, leaning on her window-sill to watch her charges safely round the corner, and lingering a moment in the mellow summer air, explained her daughter-in-law, who went by without a glance, walking conspicuously in the middle of the road, with no parcel in her hand to legitimise her being out and not so much as an umbrella to give her a countenance, just with empty ungloved hands hanging down, and a scandalous scarcity of hairpins, and her clothes all twisted, in the same brief manner, Engländerin. Baroness Glambeck, driving towards the town along the shade-flecked highroad, bent on one of those errands of mercy that are forced at intervals upon the great, with a basket of the properties, principally home-made jam and mittens, at her feet, endeavoured though vainly to mitigate the shock she received on being cut by her own pastor's wife, and a pastor's wife producing curiously the effect of somehow being in tatters, by using the same word to the female dependent who accompanied her on these occasions because somebody had to carry the jam—Engländerin. The very birds in the branches, being German birds, were no doubt singing it; the dogs, as they met her, scented misfortune and barked furiously, instantly detecting the alien, angered by her batteredness, discovering nothing in her clothes however diligently they sniffed that an honest German dog could care about; and when on a lonely stretch of the road she came to a tramp, instead of begging he offered her a drink.
The lane turning off to Kökensee was so lovely that afternoon in the bright bravery of early summer, and so glanced and shone and darted with busy birds and insects and the glory of young leaves in the sun, that the dingy human figure faltering along it seemed an indecency. In that vigorous world what place was there for blind fatigue? In that world of triumph what place for a failure? It was the sort of day that used to make Ingeborg's heart lift up; now she saw nothing, felt nothing, except that the sand was deep.
She began to cry presently because the sand was deep. It seemed to give way on purpose beneath her feet, try on purpose to make her stumble and not get home. The line of roofs up against the afternoon sky did not appear to come any nearer, and yet she kept on trying to get home. The tears fell down her face as she laboured along. She was afraid she wouldn't get home in time before she had to leave off walking because she couldn't walk any farther. It seemed to her a dreadful thing that she who could walk so well should not be able to walk now and get home. And this white sand—how fine it was, how it slid away on each side of one's feet wherever one put them! And it got into one's shoes, and one couldn't stop and empty them for fear if one sat down one wouldn't be able to get up again, and then one wouldn't get home. Slower and more slowly she laboured along. By the time she reached the steep part just before the village she was crawling like a hurt insect. She had forgotten to eat on the journey, and in Milan there had only been the rusks.
The street was asleep, empty that fine afternoon, the inhabitants away at work in the fields, and only the pig and the geese were visible in the parsonage yard. Luckily the gate in the wire-netting fence that shut off the house and garden was not latched, for she could not have opened it, but would have stood there holding on to it and foolishly sobbing till some one came and helped. The least obstacle now would be a thing that in no way could be got over. The front door was shut, and sooner than go up the steps and try to get it open, she went round the path to the side of the house where the lilacs grew and Robert's window was. That way she could reach the kitchen, whose door stood always open and was level with the garden. Robert would be out in his fields. She would go into his laboratory and wait for him. Nobody but Robert knew yet. She had come back before the end of her leave. His shame was not yet public property. If he just beat her, she thought, in a disinterested weak way, and there was an end of it, wouldn't that do? Then no one need ever know, and he could stay on in Kökensee and go on with his work, and she wouldn't have ruined him. It was the thought of having ruined Robert that clove her heart in two. To have ruined him, when all her ambition and all her hope had been to make him so happy....
Well did she know that a pastor whose wife had broken the seventh commandment would be driven out, would be impossibly scandalous in any parish. And her not having broken it was quite beside the point; it didn't matter what you didn't do so long as you looked as though you had done it. And if Robert killed her it wouldn't help him, either; he would have done the only decent thing, as the Baroness and her son Hildebrand had said that time long ago, and avenged his honour in the proper German way, but there were drawbacks to avenging one's honour—one was, illogically, punished for doing it, and even though it were mild punishment, any punishment ended a pastor's career.
She crept round the corner of the house. She was so tired that if she had to wait for him long in his laboratory she felt sure she wouldn't be able to keep awake. Well, if he came in and killed her while she was asleep it would be for her the pleasantest thing; she was so very tired that it would be nice, she thought vaguely, to wake up afterwards, and find oneself comfortably dead. But Robert was not in his fields. From the path beneath his window she could see his head, as she had seen it hundreds of times, bending over his desk.
At the sight she stopped, and her heart seemed to shrink into quite a little, scarcely beating thing. There he was, her dishonoured husband, the being who in her life had been kindest to her, had loved her most, still working, still going on doggedly among the ruins she had created, up to the last moment when public opinion, brutal and stupid, making her the chief thing when she so utterly was not, while it thrust her and her wishes and intimate knowledge aside as not mattering when, as in the question of more children, or no more children, they so utterly did, would on her sole account, on the sole account of what seemed to her at that moment the most profoundly naturally unimportant thing in life, a woman who had been silly, put a stop to his fine work and refuse to give the world a chance to profit by his brains.
Well, she couldn't think about that now. She couldn't hold on to any of her thoughts for more than an instant. She only knew that the moment had come for facing him, and that she was very tired. She really was extraordinarily tired. Her mind was just as dim and reluctant to move as her body. Whatever Robert was going to do to her she would cling to him with her arms round his neck while he did it. She was so tired that she thought if he didn't mind her just putting her arms round his neck she would very likely go to sleep while he beat her. But poor Robert, she thought—how hot it was going to make him to have to be violent, to have to beat! It was not at all good beating weather.... And it was almost a pity to waste punishment on somebody too tired to be able properly to appreciate it, to take it, as it were, properly in.
She moved along down the path towards the back door. When one came to think of it it was a strange thing to be going in to Robert to be hurt. Well, but she had deserved it; she perfectly understood about his honour and its needs. Oh, yes, she perfectly understood that. A man has to—what had she just been going to think? What does a man have to? Oh, well. If only what he did to her could blot out every consequence of what she had done to him, be a full, perfect, and sufficient—no, that was profane; tiresome how one thought in the phrases of the Prayer-book and how difficult it was if one had had much to do with prayer-books not to be profane. As it was, her punishment wouldn't do anybody any good that she could see. Funny, the punishment idea. Of what use was it really? The consequences of the things one did were surely enough in their devastating effect; why increase devastation? And forgiveness didn't seem to be of much use, either. It blotted out the past, she had heard people in pulpits say, but it didn't blot out the future, that daily living among consequences which she perceived was going to be so dreadful.
Well, she couldn't think now. And here was the kitchen door; and here—yes, wasn't that Klara, staring at her open-mouthed, arrested in the middle of emptying a bucket? Why did she stare at her? Did she then know?
"Allmächtiger Gott" exclaimed Klara, dropping the bucket.
Yes, evidently Klara knew, she thought, dragging her dusty feet across the kitchen into the passage, and allmächtiger Gott was what one said in Germany when one's disgraced mistress came back, instead of guten Tag. Well, it didn't matter. The dark little passage; one almost had to grope one's way along it when the front door was shut. And it had not been aired apparently since she went away, and it was heavy and choked with kitchen smell. She supposed it must be this thickness of atmosphere that made her, on Robert's doormat with her hand on the latch, feel suddenly so very like fainting. And it really was dark; surely it didn't only seem dark because she suddenly couldn't see? Alarmed, she remembered how she had fainted after her conscience-stricken journey back from Lucerne. Was she then to go through life making at intervals conscience-stricken journeys back, and fainting at the critical moment at their end?
In terror lest she should do it now if she waited a moment longer, and so twist things round in that dishonourable womanly way which commits the wrong and then bringing in the appeal of bodily weakness secures the comforting, secures, almost, the apology, she seized all her courage, swept its fragments together into a firm clutching, and opened the door.
Herr Dremmel was at his table, writing. He did not look up.
"Robert," she said faintly, her back against the door, her hands behind her spread out and clinging to it, here I am.
Herr Dremmel continued writing. He was, to all appearances, absorbed; and his forehead, that hot afternoon, was covered with the drops of concentration.
"Robert," she said at last again, in a voice that shook however hard she tried to keep it steady, "here I am."
Herr Dremmel finished his sentence. Then he raised his head and looked at her.
Staring back at him in misery and fear, and yet beside the fear with a dreadful courage, she recognised the look. It was the look he had when he was collecting his attention, bringing it up from distant deep places to the surface, to herself. How strange that he should at this moment have to collect it, that it did not instantly spring at her, that she and the havoc she had brought into his life should not be soaked into every part of his consciousness!
"What did you say, Ingeborg?" he said, looking at her with that so recognisable look.
For all her study of him she felt she did not yet know Robert.
"I only said," she stammered, "that I—that here—that here I was."
He looked at her for a further space of silence. Then it flashed upon her that he was, dreadfully, pretending. He was acting. He was going to torment her before punishing her. He was going to be slowly cruel.
Herr Dremmel, as though he were gathering himself together—gathering himself, she thought watching him and growing cold at his uncanniness, for a horrible spring—inquired of her if she had walked.
"Yes," said Ingeborg even more faintly, her eyes full of watchful fear.
He continued to look at her, but his hand while he did so felt about on the table for the pen he had laid down.
She recognized this look, too—amazing, horrible, how he could act—it was the one he had when, talking to somebody, a new illumination of the subject he was writing about came into his mind.
She felt sure now that the worst was going to happen to her; but first there was to be torture, a long playing about. These revealed depths of cunning cruelty in him, of talent for cleverest acting, froze her blood. Where was Robert, the man of large simplicities she believed she had known? It was a strange man, then, she had been living with? He had never, through all the years, been the one she thought she had married.
"Please-" she said, holding out both her hands, "Robert—don't. Won't you—won't you be natural?"
He still looked at her in silence. Then he said with a sudden air of remembering, "Did you get your boots, Ingeborg?"
This was dreadful. That he should even talk about the boots! Throw in her face that paltry preliminary lying.
"You know I didn't," she said, tears of shame for him that he could be so cruel coming into her eyes.
Again Herr Dremmel looked at her as though collecting, as though endeavouring to remember and to find.
"I know?" he repeated, after a pause of reflective gazing during which Ingeborg had flushed vividly and gone white again, so much shocked was she at the glimpse she was getting into inhumanity. It was devilish, she thought. But Robert devilish? Her universe seemed tumbling about her ears.
"I think," she said, lifting her head with the pride he ought to have felt and so evidently, so lamentably, didn't, "one should give one's punishment like a man."
There was another pause, during which Herr Dremmel, with his eyes on hers, appeared to ruminate.
Then he said, "Did you have a pleasant time?"
This was fiendish. Even when acting, thought Ingeborg, there were depths of baseness the decent refused to portray.
"I think," she said in a trembling voice, "if you wouldn't mind leaving off pretending—oh," she broke off, pressing her hands together, "what's the good, Robert? What's the good? Don't let us waste time. Don't make it worse, more hideous—you got my letter—you know all about it—"
"Your letter?" said Herr Dremmel.
She begged him, she entreated him to leave off pretending. "Don't, don't keep on like this," she besought—"it's such a dreadful way of doing it—it's so unworthy—"
"Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "will you not cultivate calm? You have journeyed and you have walked, but you have done neither sufficiently to justify intemperateness. Perhaps, if you must be intemperate, you will have the goodness to go and be so in your own room. Then we shall neither of us disturb the other."
"No," said Ingeborg, wringing her hands, "no. I won't go. I won't go into any other room till you've finished with me."
"But," said Herr Dremmel, "I have finished with you. And I wish," he added, pulling out his watch, "to have tea. I am driving to my fields at five o'clock."
"Oh, Robert," she begged, inexpressibly shocked, he meant to go on tormenting her then indefinitely? "please, please do whatever you're going to do to me and get it over. Here I am only waiting to be punished—"
"Punished?" repeated Herr Dremmel.
"Why," cried Ingeborg, her eyes bright with grief and shame for this steady persistence in baseness, "why, I don't think you're to punish me! You're not fit to punish a decent woman. You're contemptible!"
Herr Dremmel stared. "This," he then said, "is abuse. At least," he added, "it bears a close resemblance to that which in a reasonable human being would be abuse. However, Ingeborg, speech in you does not, as I have often observed, accurately represent meaning. I should rather say," he amended, "a meaning."
She moved across to the table to him, her eyes shining. He held his pen ready to go on writing so soon as she should be good enough to leave off interrupting.
"Robert," she said, leaning with both hands on the table, her voice shaking, "I—I never thought I'd have to be ashamed of you. I could bear anything but having to be ashamed of you—"
"Perhaps, then, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, "you will have the goodness to go and be ashamed of me in your own room. Then we shall neither of us disturb the other."