She looked at him and shook her head.
"I don"t think reconciled is quite the--" She paused, thinking. "To what?" she went on. "To puniness, too?"
The two ladies faltered in their conversation, and glanced at Ingeborg, and then at each other.
"Perhaps not to puniness. You are not a pastor."
There was a distinct holding of the breath of the two ladies. The German gentleman"s slow speech fell very clearly on their sudden silence.
"No," said Ingeborg. "But what has that--"
"I am. And it is a puny life."
Ingeborg felt a slight curdling. She thought of her father--also, if you come to that, a pastor. She was sure there was nothing in anything he ever did that would strike him as puny. His life was magnificent and important, filled to bursting point with a splendid usefulness and with a tendency to fill the lives of every one who came within his reach to their several bursting points, too. But he, of course, was a prince of the Church. Still, he had gone through the Church"s stages, beginning humbly; yet she doubted whether at any moment of his career he had looked at it and thought it puny. And was it not indeed the highest career of all? However breathless and hurried it made one"s female relations in its upper reaches, and drudging in its lower, the very highest?
But though she was curdled she was interested.
"It might not be amiss," continued the pastor, looking out of the window at some well-farmed land they were pa.s.sing, "if it were not for the Sundays."
Again she was curdled.
"But--"
"They spoil it."
She was silent; and the silence of the two ladies appeared to acquire a frost.
"It is the fatal habit of Sundays," he went on, following the disappearing land with his eyes, "to recur."
He paused, as if waiting for her to agree.
She had to, because it was a truth one could not get away from. "Yes,"
she said, reluctantly. "Of course. It"s their nature." Then a wave of memories suddenly broke over her, and she added warmly "Oh _don"t_ they!"
The frost of the ladies seemed to settle down. It grew heavy.
"They interrupt one"s work," he said.
"But they _are_ your work," she said, puzzled.
"No."
She stared. "But," she began, "a pastor--"
"A pastor is also a man."
"Yes," said Ingeborg, "but--"
"You have no doubt observed that he is, invariably, also a man."
"Yes," said Ingeborg, "but--"
"And a man of intelligence--I am a man of intelligence--cannot fill up his life with the meagre materials offered by the practice of the tenets of the Lutheran Church."
"Oh--the _Lutheran_ Church," said Ingeborg, catching at a straw.
"Any church."
She was silent. She felt how immensely her father would not have liked it. She felt it was wicked to sit there and listen. She also felt, strange and dreadful to observe, refreshed.
"Then," she began, knitting her brows, for really this at its best was bad taste, and bad taste, she had always been taught, was the very worst--oh, but how nice it was, a little bit of it, after the swamps of good taste one waded about in in cathedral cities! She knitted her brows, aghast at her thoughts. "Then what," she asked, "_do_ you fill your life up with?"
"Manure," said the German gentleman.
The ladies leapt in their places.
"Ma--" began Ingeborg; then stopped.
"I am engaged in endeavouring to teach the peasants of my parish how best to farm their poor pieces of land."
"Oh, really," said Ingeborg, politely.
"I do it by example. They do not attend to words. I have bought a few acres and experiment before their eyes. Our soil is the worst in Germany. It is inconceivably thankless. And the peasants resemble it."
"Oh, really," said Ingeborg.
"The result of the combination is poverty."
"So then, I suppose," said Ingeborg, with memories of the Bishop"s methods, "you preach patience."
"Patience! I preach manure."
Again at the dreadful word the ladies leapt.
"It is," he said solemnly, his eyes glistening with enthusiasm, "the foundation of a nation"s greatness."
"I hadn"t thought of it like that," said Ingeborg, seeing that he waited.
"But on what then does a State depend in the last resort?"
She was afraid to say, for there seemed to be so many possible answers.
"Naturally on its agriculture," said the pastor, with the slight irritation of one obliged to linger over the obvious.
"Of course," said the pliable Ingeborg, trained in acquiescence.
"And on what does agriculture depend in the last resort?"
Brilliantly she hazarded "Manure."