Chapter 18

But these high moments of swimming in warm emotion do not last, she found; they are not final, they are not, as she had fondly believed, a state of understanding and cloudless love at last attained to and rested in radiantly. She discovered that the littlest thing puts an end to them, just such a little thing as its being bedtime, for instance, is enough, and the mood does not return, and not only does it not return but it seems forgotten.

She became aware of this next morning at breakfast, and it caused at first an immense surprise. She had got the coffee ready with the glow of the evening before still warming her rosily, she was still altogether thinking dear Robert, and wondering, her head on one side as she cut the bread—Ilse was a little cross after the marzipan—and a smile on her lips, at the happiness the world contains; and when he came in she ran to him, shiningly ready to take up the mood at the exact point where bedtime had broken it off the night before.

But Herr Dremmel had travelled a thousand miles in thought since then. He hardly saw her. He kissed her mechanically and sat down to eat. To him she was as everyday and usual again as the bread and coffee of his breakfast. She was his wife who was going presently to be a mother. It was normal, ordinary, and satisfactory; and the matter being settled and the proper first joy and sentiment felt, he could go on with more concentration than ever with his work, for there would not now be the perturbing moments so frequent in the last six months when his wife’s condition, or rather negation of condition, had thrust itself with the annoyance of an irrepressible weed up among his thinking. The matter was settled; and he put it aside as every worker must put the extraneous aside. Just on this morning he was profoundly concerned with the function of potash in the formation of carbohydrates. He had sat up late—long after Ingeborg, feeling as if she were dissolved in stars and happily certain that Robert felt just as liquidly starry, had gone to bed—considering potash. He wanted more starch in his grain, more woody-fibre in his straw. She was not across the passage into their bedroom before his mind had sprung back to potash. More starch in his grain, more woody-fibre in his straw, less fungoid disease on his mangels...

At breakfast his thoughts were so sticky with the glucose and cane sugar of digestible carbohydrates that he could not even get them free for his newspaper, but sat quite silently munching bread and butter, his eyes on his plate.

“Well, Robert?” said Ingeborg, smiling at him round the coffee pot, a smile in which lurked the joyful importance of the evening before.

“Well, Little One?” he said absently, not looking at her.

“Well, Robert?” she said again, challengingly.

“What is it, Little One?” he asked, looking up with the slight irritation of the interrupted.

“What? You’re not pleased any more?” she asked, pretending indignation.

“Pleased about what?”

She stared at him at this without pretending anything.

“About what?” she repeated, her lips dropping apart.

He had forgotten.

She thought this really very extraordinary. She poured herself out a cup of coffee slowly, thinking. He had forgotten. The thing he had said so often that he wanted most was a thing he could forget, once he had the certain promise of it, in a night. The candles on the Christmas tree in the corner were not more burned out and finished than his tender intensity of feeling of the evening before.

Well, that was Robert. That was the way, of course, of clever men. But—the tears? He had felt enough for tears. It was without a doubt that he had felt tremendously. How wonderful then, she thought, slowly dropping sugar into her cup, for even the memory of it to be wiped out!

Well, that, too, was Robert. He did not cling as she did to moments, but passed on intelligently; and she was merely stupid to suppose any one with his brains would linger, would loiter about with her indefinitely, gloating over their happiness.

She left her coffee and got up and went over to him and kissed him. “Dear Robert,” she murmured, accommodating herself to him, proud even, now, that he could be so deeply preoccupied with profound thoughts as to forget an event so really great: for after all, a child to be born, a new life to be launched, was not that something really great? Yet his thoughts, her husband’s thoughts, were greater.

“Dear Robert,” she murmured; and kissed him proudly.

But the winter, in spite of these convictions of happiness and of having every reason for pride, was a time that she dragged through with difficulty. She who had never thought of her body, who had found in it the perfect instrument for carrying out her will, was forced to think of it almost continuously. It mastered her. She had endlessly to humour it before she could use it even a little. She seemed for ever to be having to take it to a sofa and lay it down flat and not make it do anything. She seemed for ever to be trying to persuade it that it did not mind the smell of the pig, or the smell that came across from Glambeck when the wind was that way of potato spirits being made in the distillery there. When these smells got through the window chinks she would shut her eyes and think hard of the scent of roses and pinks, and of that lovely orange scent of the orange-coloured lupin she had seen grown everywhere in the summer; but sooner or later her efforts, however valiant, ended in the creeping coldness, the icy perspiration, of sick faintness.

As the months went on her body became fastidious even about daily inevitable smells such as the roasting of coffee and the frying of potatoes, which was extremely awkward when one had to see to these things oneself; and it often happened that Ilse, coming out of the scullery or in from the yard fresh and energetic with health, would find her mistress dropped on a chair with her head on the kitchen table in quite an absurd condition considering that everybody assured her it was not an illness at all of feeling as though it were one.