Herr Dremmel

“ 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. ”

“ When Herr Dremmel came out of his laboratory to ask why his lamp had not been brought, and found no light anywhere and no Ilse when he shouted, he was vexed; but when he had fetched a lamp himself and put it on the table where it shone on to Ingeborg's swollen and blinking eyes, he was still more vexed.
"This is foolish," he said, staring down at her a moment. "You will only harm my child." ”

“ She contemplated the final part of the adventure, the part Ilse alluded to cheerfully as her Difficult Hour, with the perfect tranquillity of ignorance. On the whole she was very free from the moods Herr Dremmel had braced himself to bear, and continued right through not to be exacting. She had no examples of more fussed over and tended women before her eyes to upset her contentment, and saw for herself how the village women in like condition worked on at their wash-tubs and in the fields up to the end. ”

“ Neither Herr Dremmel nor Ingeborg had ever been quite so happy. He loved her as warmly as before their marriage. He found himself noticing things like the fine texture of her skin, and observing how pretty the back of her neck was and the way her hair behaved just at that point. She was the brightest adornment and finish to a man's house, he said to himself, independently busy with her baby and her housekeeping, not worrying him, not having to be thought about in his laboratory when he wished to work, absorbed in womanly interests, cheerful, affectionate, careful of her child. ”

“ Again Frau Dremmel, as she had done that day at Meuk, turned her eyes slowly all over her while she was receiving her son's abstracted kiss; but she said nothing except, to her son, Guten Tag, and passively submitted to Ingeborg's shaking both her hands, which were clothed in the black cotton of decent widowhood.
"Do say something, Robert," murmured Ingeborg. "Say how glad I am. Say all the things I'd say if I could say things."
Herr Dremmel gazed at his wife a moment collecting his thoughts.
"Why should one say anything?" he said. "She is a simple woman. No longer young. ”

“ The pig standing solitary in the mud was the wettest pig. The puddles were all over little buttons made of raindrops. Invariably after a thunderstorm the weather broke up for days, sometimes for weeks. What would she and Ingram do now? she thought; what in the world would they do now? Shut up in the dark little parlour, he unable to work, and no walks, and no punting—why, he'd go, of course, and the wonder-time was at an end.
"A week of this," said Herr Dremmel, coming out of his laboratory to stand on the doorstep and rub his hands in satisfaction, "a week of this will save the situation." ”

“ The harder he worked, the more hotly he pursued knowledge, the more urgent was a man's need for intervals of tepidity. One sought out one's little wife and rested one's brain; one took one's son on one's knee; one pulled, perhaps, the plait of one's daughter.
Life for Herr Dremmel was both great and simple. During the seven years of his marriage it had become continually more so. ”

“ Being a wise man, Herr Dremmel lost no time in fidgeting or lamenting over the inevitable, but having heard the doctor's summing up, which was expressed in the one firm word repeated over and over again like a series of blows, ausgeschlossen, he ruled Ingeborg out of his thoughts as a wife and proceeded to train himself to contemplate her as a sister. ”

“ 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.
It was useless to depend on others; it was useless to depend, as she had done in her ridiculous vanity, on others depending on her. ”

“ 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 space 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. ”

“ Herr Dremmel said so it was. And so was family life. He would not, he informed her, quibble over terms. What he wished to make clear was that there could not be family life without a family to have it in.
"And don't you call you and me and Robertlet a family?" she asked.
"One child?" said Herr Dremmel. "You would limit the family to one child? That is a highly unchristian line of conduct."
"But the Christian lines of conduct seem to hurt so," murmured Ingeborg. ”

“ 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." ”

“ From Allenstein they went on by a light railway with toy carriages and a tiny engine through an infinity of rye-fields and seemingly uninhabited country to the nearest station to Kökensee, a place called Meuk, of some pretension to being a little town, with an enormous church rising out of its middle and containing, among other objects of interest, explained Herr Dremmel, his mother.
"Oh?" said Ingeborg, surprised. "Have you got one?" For he somehow produced a completely motherless impression.
"Invariably, my treasure," said Herr Dremmel with patience, "do people have mothers." ”

“ How to get the Duchess away; how to get Herr Dremmel turned, noiselessly, out of the house; how to prevent Ingeborg's coming at any moment along the path behind them with Lady Pamela....
"We have every reason, sir," said Herr Dremmel, holding the Bishop's hand in a firm pressure, "to congratulate each other, I you, on the possession of such a daughter, you me—"
"Isn't she a lovely girl," said the Duchess, for whom only Judith existed in that family. "Would rape cake and the other thing help my flowers at all, or is it only for the mangels?"
"Mangels!" thought the Bishop, "Rape cake!" ”

“ Herr Dremmel could not see what had happened, custom concealing him during the singing in a wooden box at the foot of the pulpit where he was busy imagining agricultural experiments. Till he came out the singing went on; and suppose, thought the Baroness, he were to forget to come out? Once he had forgotten, she had heard, and had stayed in his box, having very unfortunately been visited there by a revelation concerning potash that caught him up into oblivion for the best part of an hour, during which the chorale was gone through with an increasing faintness fifteen times. ”

“ He was becoming almost eager.
"But," asked Ingeborg, exploring this new interesting situation, "why do you want to?"
"Want to marry you?"
"Yes."
"Because," said Herr Dremmel, immensely prompt, "I have had the extreme good fortune to fall in love with you."
Again she looked pleased.
"And I do not ask you," he went on, "to love me, or whether you do love me. It would be presumption on my part, and not, if you did, very modest on yours. That is the difference between a man and a woman. ”

“ What Herr Dremmel had done, being ignorant which was Ingeborg's room and after laborious thought deciding that to demand her number of the hall-porter later than dusk might very conceivably cast a slur on her reputation, young ladies being, as he well knew, of all living creatures the most easily slurred, was to write as many copies of the letter as there were doors on her landing and thrust them industriously one by one beneath each door, strong in the knowledge that she would in this manner inevitably get one of them. ”

“ So must one feel who is born again, all new, all clean from old mistakes and fears. She felt lifted up, extraordinarily happy, extraordinarily good, more in harmony with Providence and the Bible than she had been since childhood. She would have been willing, and indeed found it perfectly natural, to kneel down with her mother and Judith then and there and say prayers together out loud. She would have been willing on the crest of her wave of gratefulness quite readily to give up Herr Dremmel in return for the family's immense kindness in not asking her to give him up. ”

“ Ingeborg sat throwing crumbs to the birds and watching the sky at the edge of the world grow first a mighty red, then fade, then light up into clear green; and long after the shadows beneath the lime-trees were black and the stars and the bats were out and the frogs down in the reeds of the lake and the occasional creaking of the village pump were all that one could hear outside the immense stillness, they would go on sitting there, Herr Dremmel silently smoking, Ingeborg silently making plans. ”

“ I am not myself in a clean shirt for at least the first two hours."
"Don't let's call," said Ingeborg. "We're so happy as we are."
"Nay," said Herr Dremmel, immediately brought to reason by his wife's support of his unreason, "but we must call. There are duties no decent man neglects. And I am a decent man. ”

“ She had been persuading herself that her little holiday was harmless and natural; and now this business with Herr Dremmel would, she felt, do away with all that, and justify a wrath in her father that she might, else for her private solace and encouragement, have looked upon as unreasonable. It is a peculiarity of parents, reflected Ingeborg, that they are always being justified. However small and innocent what you are doing may be, if they disapprove something turns up to cause them to have been altogether right. ”

“ Then she would forget how sick she felt, and smile and be ashamed that she had minded anything. The highest good—what would not one practise in the way of being sick to attain the highest good?
"And he'll be full of brains like yours," she would say, pulling down his hand from her hair and kissing it and looking up at him smiling.
"And I shall have to double the size of my heart," Herr Dremmel would say, "to take in two loves."
Then Ingeborg would laugh for joy, and for quite a long while manage very nearly to glory in feeling sick. ”

“ As the years passed and successes followed upon his patience, his absorption and subjugation by his work became increasingly profound; for a man has but a handful of years, and cannot during that brief span live too inquisitively. Herr Dremmel was wringing more out of Nature, who only asks to be forced to tell, each year. ”

“ They seemed to flicker gently to and fro, little tongues of fire.
"Why," said Herr Dremmel, suddenly leaning forward and staring, "you are like a spirit."
This pleased her. For a moment her eyes danced.
"Like a spirit," he repeated. "And here am I talking heavily to you, as though you were an ordinary woman. Little One, how does one trap a spirit into marrying? Tell me. For very earnestly do I desire to be shown the way."
"One doesn't," said Ingeborg.
"Ah, do not be difficult. You have been so easy, of such a comfortable response in all things up to now."
"But this—" began Ingeborg. ”

“ Herr Dremmel sawed her hand up and down in his irritation.
"What is this irrelevant talk?" he said. "I offer you marriage, and you respond with information about cod liver oil. I do not believe the father obstacle. I do not recognize my honest little friend of these last days. It is waste of time, not being open. Would you, then, if it were not for your father, marry me?"
"But," Ingeborg flashed round at him, swept off her feet as she so often was by an impulse of utter truth, "it's because of him that I would."
And the instant she had said it she was shocked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And as no cook was to be found locally, every wife and mother except ladies like Baroness Glambeck carrying out these higher domestic rites herself, she did nothing. She resigned herself to a fate that was, after all, everybody else's in Kökensee. It was easier to be resigned than to be energetic. Her will grew very flabby. Once she said prayers about cooking, and asked that she might never see or smell it again; but she broke off on realising suddenly and chillily that only death could get her out of the kitchen.
Herr Dremmel was, as he had always been, good and kind to her. ”