There was nevertheless an absorption and an excitement about this new strange business that did not for a moment allow her to be dull. She might feel ill, wretched, exhausted, but she was always interested. A tremendous event was ahead of her, and all her days were working up to it. She lived in preparation. Each one of her sensations was a preparation, an advance. There was a necessity for it; something was being made, was growing, had to be completed; life was full of meaning, and of plain meaning; she understood and saw reasons everywhere for what happened to her. Things had to be so if one wanted the supreme crown, and her part of the work was really very easy, it was just to be patient. She was often depressed, but only because the month seemed so endless and she was so tired of her discomfort—never because she was afraid. She had no fears, for she had no experience. 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. Besides, she had been trained in a healthy self-effacement.

She only cried once, but then it was February and enough to make anybody cry, with the sleet stinging the windows and the wind howling round the dark little house. She put it down to February, a month she had never thought anything of, and hid from herself as she hurriedly wiped away her tears—where did they all come from?—that she was disgracefully crying because she had been alone so long, and Ilse had gone out somewhere without asking, and Robert hadn't spoken to her for days, and there was nobody to bring in the lamp if she didn't fetch it herself, and she couldn't fetch it because she felt so funny and might drop it, and what she wanted most in the world was a mother. Not a mother somewhere else, away in Redchester, but a real soft warm mother sitting beside her in that room, with her (the mother's) arm under her (Ingeborg's) head, and her (Ingeborg's) face against her (the mother's) bosom. A mother with feathers all over her like a kind hen would be very ideal, but short of that there was a soft black dress she remembered her mother used to wear with amiable old lace on it that wouldn't scratch, and the comfort it would be, the comfort, if for half an hour she might put her cheek against this and keep it there and say nothing.

And she cried more and more, and told herself more and more eagerly, with a kind of rage, that February was no sort of month at all.

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 did not cry again.

The spring had dried up the roads, but she did not for all that take walks that obliged her to pass through the village; instead, she spent hours in the budding garden up and down on one of the two available paths, the one at the end on the edge of the rye-fields which were now the vividest green, or the one on the east side of the house beneath Robert's laboratory windows where the lilacs grew.

His table was at right angles to the end window, and she often stood on the path watching him, his head bent over his work in an absorption that went on hour after hour. He kept the windows shut because the spring disturbed him. It had a way of coming in irrepressibly and wantoning among his papers, or throwing a handful of lilac blossoms into his rye samples, or sending an officious bee to lumber round him.

Ingeborg walked up and down, up and down on this path every day, taking the exercise Baroness Glambeck had recommended, and for three weeks just this path was the most beautiful thing in the world, for it was planted on either side with ancient lilac bushes and they were a revelation to her when they came out after the spare and frugal lilacs in the gardens at home. Above their swaying scented loveliness of light and colour and shape she could see Robert's low-coloured head inside the window bending over his table every time she came to the end of her tramp and turned round again. It was the best part of the whole nine months, these three weeks of lilacs and fine weather on that scented path, with Robert busy and content where she could see him. She loved being able to see him; it was a companionable thing.

By June everything was ready. The nursery was furnished, the cradle trimmed, a pale blue perambulator blocked the passage, neat stacks of little clothes filled the cupboards, and Frau Dosch, a hoary person of unseemly conversation, interviewed and told to be on the alert. The idea of arranging for a doctor to be on the alert too would not of itself have entered Ingeborg's head, and nobody put it there. Such a being was indeed mentioned once by Baroness Glambeck, whose interest, increasing with the months, brought her over several times, but only vaguely as some one who had to be sent for when the midwife judged the patient to have reached the stage. Then, apparently, the law obliged the midwife to send for a doctor.

"There is much difference, however," said the Baroness, "between thinking one is in extremity and really being in it," and the patient was apt to be biassed on these occasions, she explained, and inclined rashly to jump to conclusions. Therefore wisdom dictated the leaving of such a decision to the midwife.

"Yes," said Ingeborg placidly.

"Of course," said the Baroness, "all this is different from other illnesses, because it is not one."

"Yes," said Ingeborg, placidly.

"And when I speak of the patient I do not mean the patient, because without an illness there cannot be a patient."

"No," said Ingeborg, placidly.

"Nor without a patient can there be an illness."

"No," said Ingeborg, placidly.

She was leaning back in a low chair watching the sun shining on the tops of the lime-trees over her head, for it was the end of June and they were in the garden. It all seemed very satisfactory. Nobody was ill, nobody was going to be ill. There would be rather a troublesome moment that would be met and got over with patience and Frau Dosch, but no illness, just nature having its way, and then—it really seemed altogether too wonderful that then, quite soon now, perhaps in a week or two, any day really, there would be a baby. And she was going to love it with this passion of love that only mothers know, and it was going to fill her life most beautifully to the brim, and it would make her so happy that she would never want anything but just it.

That is what they had told her. On her own account she had added to this that the baby would be every bit as clever as Robert but with more leisure; that it would have his brains but not his laboratory; that it wouldn't be able, it wouldn't want, to get out of its perambulator and go and lock itself up away from her and weigh rye grains; and that it wouldn't mind, in fact it would prefer, being fetched out of its thoughts to come and be kissed.

For ages, for years, it was going to be her dear and close companion, her fellow-paddler in the lake, her fellow-wanderer in God's woods. Her eyes were soft with joy at the thought of how soon now she was going to be able to tuck this precious being under her arm and take it with her lightly and easily into the garden, restored to her own slim nimbleness again, and point out the exceeding beauty of the world to its new, astonished eyes. She would show it the rye-fields, and the great heaped-up sky. She would make it acquainted with the frogs, and introduce it to the bittern. She would draw its attention to the delight of lying face downwards on hot grass where tufts of thyme grew and watching the busy life among the blades and roots. She would insist on its observing the storks standing in their nest on the stable roof and how the light lay along their white wings, and how the red of their legs was like the red of the pollard willows in March. And at night, if it were so ill-advised as not to sleep, she would pick it up and take it to the window and impress its soft mind all over with shining little stars. Wonderful to think that before the orange-coloured lupins, those August glories, had done flowering, she would be out among them again, only with her son this time, her flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, her Robertlet.

Baroness Glambeck watched her face curiously as she lay looking up at the sunny tree-tops with the amused smile of these thoughts on it. It was clear the Frau Pastor had forgotten her presence; and even her being so near her Difficult Hour did not explain or excuse a social lapse. Indeed, the Frau Pastor received her visits with an absence of excitement and of realisation of the honour being done her that was almost beyond the limits of the forgivable. Always she behaved as though she were an equal, and a particularly equal equal. Much, however, could be excused in a person who was not only English—a nation the Baroness had heard described as rude—but so near her first confinement. When this was over there would be a severe readjustment of relationships, but meanwhile one could not really be angry with her; just her amazing and terrible ignorance of the simplest facts connected with child-bearing made it impossible to be angry with her. She reminded the Baroness of a sheep going tranquilly to the slaughter, quite pleased with the promenade, quite without a thought of what lay at the end of it. Did English mothers then all keep their daughters in such darkness on the one great subject for a woman?

For some subtle reason the expression of extreme placidness on Ingeborg's face as she lay silently watching the tree-tops and planning what she would do with her baby annoyed the Baroness.

"It will hurt, you know," she said.

Ingeborg brought her gaze slowly down to earth again, and looked at her a moment.

"What?" she said.

"It will hurt," repeated the Baroness.

"Oh, yes," said Ingeborg. "I know. But it's all natural."

"Certainly it is natural. Nevertheless—"

The Baroness stopped grimly, screwed up her mouth, and shook her head three times with an awful suggestiveness.

Ingeborg looked at her, and then suddenly some words out of her cathedral-going days at Redchester flashed into her mind. She had totally forgotten them, and now her memory began jerking them together. They came, she knew, in the Prayer-book somewhere; was it in the Litany? No; but anyhow they were in that truthful book, the Book of Common Prayer, and they were—yes, that was it: The great danger of child-birth. Yes; and again: The great pain and peril of child-birth.

A quick flush came into her face, and for the first time a look of fear into her eyes. She sat up, leaning on both her hands, and stared at the Baroness.

"Is it so very dreadful?" she asked.

The Baroness merely shook her head.

"It can't be very" said Ingeborg, watching the Baroness's expression in search of agreement, "or there wouldn't be any mothers left."

The Baroness went on screwing up her mouth and shaking her head.

"It must be bearable," said Ingeborg again, anxiously.

The Baroness would not commit herself.

"They'd die, you see, if it wasn't—the mothers all would. But there seem"—her voice trembled a little in her desire for the Baroness's agreement—"there seem to be lots of mothers still about."

She paused, but the Baroness continued not to commit herself.

"I can bear anything," said Ingeborg, with a great show of pride and a voice that trembled, "if it's—if it's reasonable."

"It is not reasonable," said the Baroness. "It is the Will of God."

"Oh, that's the same thing, the same thing," said Ingeborg, throwing herself back on her cushions and nervously pulling some white pinks she had been smelling to pieces.

She was ashamed of her terror. But all that evening she was restless and nervous, struggling with this new feeling of fear. She could not keep still, but walked about the sitting-room while Robert ate his supper at the table, pressing her cold hands together, trying to reason herself into tranquillity again.

She stood still a moment watching Robert's quiet black back as he bent over his supper. Then she went over to him impulsively and rubbed both her hands quickly through his hair, which had not been cut for some time, making it stand up on ends.

"There!" she said. "Now you look really sweet." And she bent and kissed him, lingeringly, on the back of his neck. He was near her, he was alive, she could hold on to him for a little before she went alone into whatever it was of icy and awful and unknown that waited for her.

"Good little wife," he said, still going on eating, but putting his left arm round her while his right continued to do what was necessary with the supper, and not looking up.

His affection at this time had watered down into a mild theory. She was not a wife to him, though he called her so; she was a werdende Mutter. This, Herr Dremmel told himself when he, too, felt bored by the length of the months, is a most honourable, creditable, and respectable condition; but no man can feel warm towards a condition. His little sheep had disappeared into the immensities of the werdende Mutter. He would be glad when she was restored to him.

The next day she got a letter from Mrs. Bullivant, dated from the Master's House, Ananias College, Oxford.

"It may interest you to hear," wrote Mrs. Bullivant, "that your sister has a little daughter. The child was born at daybreak this morning. I am worn out with watching. It is a very fine little girl, and both mother and child are doing well. I am not doing well at all. We had that excellent Dr. Williamson, I am thankful to say, or I don't know what would have happened. Of course our darling Judith was mercifully spared knowing anything about it, for she was kept well under chloroform, but I knew and I feet very upset. I only wish I, too, could have been chloroformed during those anxious hours. As it is I am suffering much from shock, and it will be a long while before I recover. Dr. Williamson says that on these occasions he always pities most the mothers of the mothers. Your father—"

But here Ingeborg let the letter drop to the floor and sat thinking.

When Robert came in to dinner late that day, hot and pleased from his fields which were doing particularly well after the warm rains of several admirably timed thunderstorms, she gave him his food and waited till he had eaten it and begun to smoke, and then asked him if she were going to have chloroform.

"Chloroform?" he repeated, gazing at her while he fetched back his thoughts from their pleasurable lingering among his fields. "What for?"

"So that I don't know about anything. Mother writes Judith had some. She's got a little girl."

Herr Dremmel took his cigar out of his mouth and stared at her. She was leaning both elbows on the table at her end and, with her chin on her hands, was looking at him with very bright eyes.

"But this is cowardice," he said.

"I'd like some chloroform," said Ingeborg.

"It is against nature," said Herr Dremmel.

"I'd like some chloroform," said Ingeborg.

"You have before you," said Herr Dremmel, endeavouring to be patient, "an entirely natural process, as natural as going to sleep at night and waking up next morning."

"It may be as natural," said Ingeborg, "but I don't believe it's as nice. I'd like some chloroform."

"What! Not nice? When it is going to introduce you to the supreme—"

"Y'es, I know. But I—I have a feeling it's going to introduce me rather roughly. I'd like some chloroform."

"God," said Herr Dremmel solemnly, "has arranged these introductions Himself, and it is not for us to criticise."

"That's the first time," said Ingeborg, "that you've talked like a bishop. You might be a bishop."

"When it comes to the highest things," said Herr Dremmel severely, "and this is the holiest, most exalted act a human being can perpetrate, all men are equally believers."

"I expect they are," said Ingeborg. "But the others—the ones who're not men—they'd like some chloroform."

"No healthy, normally built woman needs it," said Herr Dremmel, greatly irritated by this persistence. "No doctor would give it. Besides, there will not be a doctor, and the midwife may not administer it. Why, I do not recognise my little wife, my little intelligent wife who must know that nothing is being required of her but that which is done by other women every day."

"I don't see what being intelligent has to do with this," said Ingeborg, "and I'd like some chloroform."

Herr Dremmel looked at her bright eyes and flushed cheeks in astonishment. Up to now she had rejoiced in her condition whenever he mentioned it, and indeed he could see no reason for any other attitude; she had apparently felt very little that was not pleasant during the whole time, known none of those distresses he had heard that women sometimes endure, been healthily free from complications. There had been moods, it is true, and he had occasionally found her lounging on sofas, but then women easily become lazy at these times. It had all been normal and would no doubt continue normal. What, then, was this shrinking at the eleventh hour, this inability to be as ordinarily courageous as every peasant woman in the place? It was a most unfortunate, unpleasant whim, the most unfortunate she could have had. He had been prepared for whims, but had always supposed they would be tinned pine apples. Of course he was not going to humour her. Too much was at stake. He had heard anæsthetics were harmful on these occasions, harmful and entirely unnecessary. The best thing by far for the child was the absence of everything except nature. Nature in this matter should be given a free hand. She was not always wise, he knew from his experience with his fields, but in this department he was informed she should be left completely to herself. If his wife was so soft as not to be able to bear a little pain what sort of sons was she likely to give him? A breed of shrinkers; a breed of white-skinned hiders. Why, he had not asked for gas even when he had three teeth out at one sitting two years before—it was the dentist who had insisted he should have it—and that was only teeth, objects of no value afterwards. But to have one's son handicapped at the very beginning because his mother was not unselfish enough to endure a little for his sake....

Ingeborg got up and came and put her arms round his neck and whispered. "I'm—frightened," she breathed. "Robert, I'm—frightened."

Then he took her to the sofa, and made her sit down beside him while he reasoned with her.

He reasoned for at least twenty minutes, taking great pains and being patient. He told her she was not really frightened, but that her physical condition caused her to fancy she thought she was.

Ingeborg was interested by this, and readily admitted that it was possible.

He told her about the simple courage of the other women in Kökensee, and Ingeborg agreed, for she had seen it herself.

He told her how God had arranged she should bring forth in sorrow, but she fidgeted and began again to talk of bishops.

He told her it would only be a few hours' suffering, perhaps less, and that in return there was a lifetime's joy for them in their child.

She listened attentively to this, was quite quiet for a few minutes, then slid her hand into his.

He told her she might, by letting herself go to fear, hurt her child, and would she not in that case find difficulty afterwards in forgiving herself?

This completed her cure. An enormous courage took the place of her misgivings. She rose up from the sofa so superfluously brave, so glowing with enterprise, that she wanted to begin at once that she might show how much she could cheerfully endure. "As though," she said, lifting her chin, "I couldn't stand what other women stand—as though I wouldn't stand anything sooner than hurt my baby!" And she flung back her head in the proudest defiance of whatever might be ahead of her.

Her baby, her husband, her happy home—to suffer for these would be beautiful if it were not such a little thing, almost too little to offer up at their dear altar. She would have been transfigured by her shining thoughts if any thing could have transfigured her, but no thoughts however bright could pierce through that sad body. Her outlines were not the outlines for heroic attitudes. She not only had a double chin, she seemed to be doubled all over. She looked the queerest figure, heavy, middle-aged, uncouth, ugly, standing there passionately expressing her readiness to begin; and Herr Dremmel unconsciously seeing this, and bored by having had to explain the obvious at such length and spend a valuable half hour bringing a woman to reason—why could they never go to it by themselves?—wasted no more words having got her there, but brushed a hasty kiss across her hair and went away looking at his watch.

And next day, just as she was putting the potatoes into that dinner-pot that so much simplified her cooking, she uttered a small exclamation and turned quickly to Ilse with a look of startled questioning.

"Geht's los?" asked Ilse, pausing in the wiping dry of a wooden ladle.

"I—don't know," said Ingeborg, gasping a little. "No," she added after a minute, during which they stood staring at each other, "it wasn't anything."

And she went on with the potatoes.

But when presently there was another little fluttering exclamation, Ilse, with great decision, laid down her gloomy drying-cloth and sought out Johann, Herr Dremmel not having come in, and bade him harness the horses and fetch Frau Dosch.

"The first thing," said Frau Dosch, arriving two hours later, surprisingly brisk and business-like considering her age and the heat, "the first thing is to plait your hair in two plaits."

And still later, when Ingeborg had left off pretending or trying to be anything at all, when courage and unselfishness and stoicism and a desire to please Robert—who was Robert?—were like toys for drawing-room games, shoved aside in these grips with death, Frau Dosch nodded her head philosophically while she ate and drank from the trays Ilse kept on bringing her, and said at regular intervals, "Ja, ja—was sein muss sein muss."

Such were the consolations of Frau Dosch.