LITMIR.BIZ

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made me recollect with pleasure that I was soon going home. In East Prussia there are, on the one hand, drawbacks; but, on the other, are double windows, stoves, and a just proportion of feathers for each man's bed. Till the draughts and blankets of the boarding-house braced me to enduring instead of enjoying I had thought my holiday too short, and when I remembered my life and work at home—my official life and work—it had been appearing to me puny."

      "Puny?" said Ingeborg, her eyes on his white tie.

      "Puny. The draughts and blankets of the boarding-house cured me. I am returning gladly. My life there, I say to myself, may be puny but it is warm. So," he added, smiling, "a man learns content."

      "Taught by draughts and blankets?"

      "Taught by going away."

      "Oh?" said Ingeborg. Had Providence then only led her to that poster in order that she should learn content? Were Dent's Tours really run, educationally, by Providence?

      "But—" she began, and then slopped.

      "It is necessary to go away in order to come back," said the German gentleman, again with patience.

      "Yes. Of course. But—"

      "The chief use of a holiday is to make one hungry to have finished with it."

      "Oh no," she protested, the joy of holiday in her voice.

      "Ah. You are at the beginning."

      "The very beginning."

      "Yet at the end you, too, will return home reconciled."

      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 passing, "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."

      For the third time the ladies leapt, and the one next to her drew away her dress.

      He showed his appreciation of her intelligence by nodding slowly.

      "A nation must be fed," he said, "and empty fields will feed no one."

      "Of course not," said Ingeborg.

      "So that it is the chief element in all progress; for the root of progress flourishes only in a filled stomach."

      The ladies began to fan themselves violently, nervously, one with The Daily Mirror the other with Answers.

      "Of course," said Ingeborg.

      "First," said the German gentleman, "you fill your stomach—"

      The lady next to Ingeborg made a sudden lunge across her at the strap.

      "Excuse me, but do you mind putting that window down?" she said in a sort of burst.

      The German gentleman, stemmed in his speech, used the interval while Ingeborg opened the window in buttoning up his overcoat again with care and patience and readjusting his muffler.

      When

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