Chapter 26

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.