He said the Master—so he always speaks of Kloster, and with such affection and admiration in his voice—and his wife were downstairs in his car, and wanted him to ask me to join them so that he might drive us all into the country on such a fine day.
You can imagine how quickly I put on my hat.
"It is doing you good already," he said, looking at me as we went down the four nights of stairs,—so Kloster had been telling him, too, that story about too much work.
Herr von Inster drove, and we three sat on the back seat, because he had his soldier chauffeur with him, so I didn't get as much talk with him as I had hoped, for I like him very much, and so would you, little mother. There is nothing of the aggressive swashbuckler about him. I'm sure he doesn't push a woman off the pavement when there isn't room for him.
I don't think I've told you about Frau Kloster, but that is because one keeps on forgetting she is there. Perhaps that quality of beneficent invisibleness is what an artist most needs in a wife. She never says anything, except things that require no answering. It's a great virtue, I should think, in a wife. From time to time, when Kloster has lese majestated a little too much, she murmurs Aber Adolf; or she announces placidly that she has just killed a mosquito; or that the sky is blue; and Kloster's talk goes on on the top of this little undercurrent without taking the least notice of it. They seem very happy. She tends him as carefully as one would tend a baby,—one of those quite new pink ones that can't stand anything hardly without crumpling up,—and competently clears life round him all empty and free, so that he has room to work. I wish I had a wife.
We drove out through Potsdam in the direction of Brandenburg, and lunched in the woods at Potsdam by the lake the Marmor Palais is on. Kloster stared at this across the water while he ate, and the sight of it tinged his speech regrettably. Herr von Inster, as an officer of the King, ought really to have smitten him with the flat side of his sword, but he didn't; he listened and smiled. Perhaps he felt as the really religious do about God, that the Hohenzollerns are so high up that criticism can't harm them, but I doubt it; or perhaps he regards Kloster indulgently, as a gifted and wayward child, but I doubt that too. He happens to be intelligent, and is not to be persuaded that a spade is anything but a spade, however much it may be got up to look like the Ark of the Covenant or anything else archaic and bedizened—God forbid, little mother, that you should suppose I meant that dreadful pun.
Frau Kloster had brought food with her, part of which was cherries, and they slid down one's hot dry throat like so many cool little blessings. I could hardly believe that I had really escaped the Sunday dinner at the pension. We were very content, all of us I think, sitting on the grass by the water's edge, a tiny wind stirring our hair—except Kloster's, because he so happily hasn't got any, which must be delicious in hot weather,—and rippling along the rushes.
"She grows less pale every hour," Kloster said to Herr von Inster, fixing his round eyes on me.
Herr von Inster looked at me with his grave shrewd ones, and said nothing.
"We brought out a windflower," said Kloster, "and behold we will return with a rose. At present, Mees Chrees, you are a cross between the two. You have ceased to be a windflower, and are not yet a rose. I wager that by five o'clock the rose period will have set in."