Both husband and wife were torturing themselves, for the woman's thoughts especially always ended at that one point. Now that she had been separated from those dear children, from the, alas, much too short happiness she had experienced that summer, it seemed to have become quite clear to her what she missed--for had it not only weighed on her like a painful suspicion before? But now, now the terrible unvarnished truth was there: everything people otherwise call "happiness" in this world is nothing compared to a child's kiss, to its smile, to its nestling in its mother's lap.
She had always given the children in the meadow a tender kiss when they came and went, now she longed for those kisses. Her husband's kiss did not replace them; she would soon have been married fifteen years, his kiss was no longer a sensation, it had become a habit. But a kiss from a child's lips, that are so fresh, so untouched, so timid and yet so confiding, was something quite new to her, something, exceedingly sweet. A feeling of happiness had flowed through her soul on those occasions as well as the quite physical pleasure of being able to bury her mouth in those delicately soft and yet so firm cheeks, which health and youth had covered with a soft down like that on the cheeks of a peach. Her thoughts always wandered back to that meadow in the Alps, full of longing. And this longing of hers that was never stilled magnified what had happened, and surrounded the figures that had appeared in her life for so short a time with the whole halo of tender memories. Her idle thoughts spun long threads. As she longed for those little ones so they would also be longing for her, they would wander across the meadow weeping, and the large present of money she had left behind for each of them with the proprietor of the hotel--she had been obliged to leave without saying good-bye to them--would not console them; they would stand outside the door and cast their eyes up to the windows from which their friend so often had waved to them. No, she could not forgive Paul for showing so little comprehension of her feelings.
The stay in the Black Forest, whose velvety slopes reminded them too much of the Swiss meadows and from whose points of view you could look over to the Alps on a clear day, became a torture to both the man and woman. They felt they must get away; the dark firs, the immense green forest became too monotonous for them. Should they not try some seaside resort for once? The sea is ever new. And it was also just the season for the seaside. The wind blew already over the stubble in the fields, as they drove down to the plain.
They chose a Belgian watering-place, one in which the visitors dress a great deal, and in which quite a cosmopolitan set of people offer something new to the eye every day. They both felt it, they had remained much too long in mountain solitudes.
During the first days the gay doings amused them, but then Paul and his wife, between whom something like a barrier had tried to push itself lately, both agreed all at once: this sauntering up and down of men who looked like fools, of women who if they did not belong to the demi-monde successfully imitated it, was not for them. Let them only get away.
The man proposed they should give up travelling entirely and return to Berlin a little earlier, but Käte would not listen to it. She had a secret dread of Berlin--oh, would she have to go back to her old life again? So far she had never asked herself what she had really expected from these long months of travel; but she had hoped for something--certainly. What?
Oh dear, now she would be so much alone again, and there was nothing, nothing that really filled her life entirely.
No, she was not able to return to Berlin yet. She told her husband that she felt she had not quite recovered yet--she was certainly anæmic, she was suffering from poorness of blood. She ought to have gone to Schwalbach, Franzensbad or some other iron springs long ago--who knows, perhaps many things would be different then.
He was not impatient--at least he did not show it--for he was moved with a deep compassion for her. Of course she should go to some iron springs; they ought to have tried them long ago, have made a point of it.
The Belgian doctor sent them to the well-known baths at Spa.