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 passionate 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.
"nobody," 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.
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. after all, each year had a may in it and the birds sang. she would send away the extra servant and do the work herself, as she used to at first. she would begin again to develop her intelligence, and write that evening to london for the spectator. something, she remembered, had warmed and quickened her all those years ago after her meeting with ingram—was it the spectator? she would make plans. she would draw up plans in red ink. there were a thousand things she might study. there were languages.
she walked up and down the garden. if she let herself be beaten back this time into neglect of herself and indifference she would be done for. there was no one to save her. she would lapse and lapse; and not into fatnesses and peace like other women in germany lopped of their children, and of a class above the class that stood at that instrument of salvation, its own washtub, not into afternoon slumbers and benevolences of a woolly nature that kept one's hand knitting while one's brains went to sleep till presently one was dead, but into something fretful and nipped, with a little shrivelled, skinny, steadily dwindling mind.
her eyes grew very wide at this dreadful picture. now was the moment, she thought, turning away from it quickly, now that there had come this pause in her life, to go over to england for a visit and see her relations and talk and come back refreshed to a new chapter of existence in kökensee. she had not been out of kökensee, except to zoppot, since her marriage, and her throat tightened at the thought of england. but the bishop had never forgiven her marriage; and her having had six children had also, it seemed from her mother's letters when there used to be letters, made an unfavourable impression on him. it had, in fact, upset him. he had considered such conduct too distinctively german to be passed over; and when she added to the error in taste of having had them the further error or rather negligence—it must have been criminal, thought the bishop—of not being able to keep them alive, the palace, after having four times with an increasing severity condoled, withdrew into a disapproval so profound that it could only express itself adequately by silence.
and a stay with judith was out of the question. one had for a stay with judith to have clothes, and she had no clothes; at least, none newer than eight years old—her immense unworn trousseau dogged her through the years—for judith gave many parties at the master's lodge, brilliant gatherings, her mother called them in her rare letters, where london, come down on purpose and expressed in prime and other ministers as well as in the fine flower of the aristocracy and a few selected fragrances from the world of literature and art—once her mother wrote that ingram, the great painter, had been at the last party, and was so much enslaved by judith's loveliness that he had asked as a favour to be allowed to paint her—sat at judith's feet.
no; england was not for her. her place was in kökensee, and her business now was to do what her governesses used to call improve her mind. perhaps if she improved it enough robert would talk to her again sometimes, and this time not on the little treasure basis but on the solid one of intellectual companionship. might she not end by being a real helpmeet to him? somebody who would gradually learn to be quiet and analytical and artful with grains?
she went indoors and wrote then and there to london, renewing the long-ended subscriptions to the times, spectator, clarion, hibbert's journal, and the rest. she asked for a catalogue of the newest publications that were not novels—her determination was too serious just then for novels—ordered herbert spencer's "first principles," for she felt she would like to have some principles, especially first ones, and said she would be glad of any little hint the news-agent could give her as to what he thought a married lady ought to know; and she spent the rest of the evening and the two following days laying the foundations of intellectual companionship by looking up the article manure in the "encyclopædia britannica" and paraphrasing it into conversational observations that sounded to her so clever when she tried them on herr dremmel three days later at tea-time that she was astonished herself.
she was still more astonished when herr dremmel, having listened, remarked that her facts were wrong.
"but they can't possibly—" she began; then broke off, feeling the awkwardness of a position in which one was unable to argue without at once revealing the "encyclopædia."
