"But how do you manage to be so alive? For you shine, you know. When I think of all the thingsI'vedone since I was here last—" He broke off, and looked away from her across the lake. "Oh, well. Sickening things, really, most of them," he finished.
"Wonderful pictures," said Ingeborg, leaning forward and flushing with her enthusiasm. "That's what you've done."
"Yes. One paints and paints. But in between—it's those in between the work-fits that hash one up. What doyoudo in between?"
"In between what?"
"Whatever it is you do in the morning and whatever it is you do in the evening."
"I enjoy myself."
"Yes. Yes. That's whatI'dlike to do."
"But don't you?"
"I can't."
"What—youcan't?" she said. "But you live in beauty. You make it. You pour it over the world—"
She stopped abruptly, hit by a sudden thought. "I beg your pardon," she said. "I don't know anything really. Perhaps—you're in mourning?"
He looked at her. "No," he said, "I'm not in mourning."
"Or perhaps—no, you're not ill. And you can't be poor. Well, then, why in the world don't you enjoy yourself?"
"Aren't you ever bored?" he answered.
"The days aren't long enough."
He looked round at the empty landscape and shuddered.
"Here. In Kökensee," he said. "It's spring now. But what about the wet days, the howling days? What about unmanageable months like February? Why"—he turned to her—"you must be a perfect little seething vessel of independent happiness, bubbling over with just your own contentments."
"I never was called a seething vessel before," said Ingeborg, hugging her knees, her eyes dancing. "What an impression for a respectable woman to produce!"
"What a gift to possess, you mean. The greatest of all. To carry one's happiness about with one."
"But that's exactly whatyoudo. Aren't you spilling joy at every step? Splashing it into all the galleries of the world? Leaving beauty behind you wherever you've been?"
He twisted himself round to lie at full length and look up at her. "What delightful things you say!" he said. "I wish I could think you mean them."
"Mean them?" she exclaimed, flushing again. "Do you suppose I'd waste the precious minutes saying things I don't mean? I haven't talked to any one really for years—not to any one who answered back. And now it'syou! Why, it's too wonderful! As though I'd waste a second of it."
"You're the queerest, most surprising thing to find here on the edge of the world," he said, gazing up at her. "And there's the sun just got at your hair through the trees. Are you always full of molten enthusiasms for people?"
"Only for you."
"But what am I to say to these repeated pattings?" he cried.
"You got into my imagination that day I met you and you've been in it ever since. I was in the stupidest state of dull giving in. You pulled me out."
He stared at her, his chin on his hand. "Imagine me pulling anybody out of anything," he said. "Generally I pull them in."
"It's true I've had relapses," she said. "Five relapses."
"Five?"
She nodded. "Five since then. But here I am, seething as you call it, and it's you who started me, and I believe I shall go on now doing it uninterruptedly for ever."
Ingram put out his hand with a quick movement, as though he were going to touch the edge of her dress. "Teach me how to seethe," he said.
"That's rather like asking a worm to give lessons in twinkling to a star."
"Wonderful," he said softly, after a little pause, "to lie here having sweet things said to one. Why didn't I find you before? I've been being bored at the Glambecks' for a whole frightful week."
"Oh, have you been there a week already?" she asked anxiously. "Then you'll go away soon?"
"I was going to-morrow."
"That's like last time. You were just going when I met you."
"But now I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay and paint you."
She jumped. "Oh!" she exclaimed, awe-struck. "Oh—"
"Paint you, and paint you, and paint you," said Ingram, "and see if I can catch some of your happiness for myself. Get at your secret. Find out where it all comes from."
"But it comes from you—at this moment it's all you—"
"It doesn't. It's inside you. And I want to get as much of it as I can. I'm dusty and hot and sick of everything. I'll come and stay near you and paint you, and you shall make me clean and cool again."
"The stuff you talk!" she said, leaning forward, her face full of laughter. "As though I could do anything foryou! You're really making fun of me the whole time. But I don't care. I don't care about anything so long as you won't go away."
"You needn't be afraid I'm going away. I'm going to have a bath of remoteness and peace. I'll chuck the Glambecks and get a room in your village. I'll come every day and paint you. You're like a little golden leaf, a beech leaf in autumn blown suddenly from God knows where across my path."
"Now it's you makingmepurr," she said.
"You're like everything that's clear and bright and cool and fresh."
"Oh," murmured Ingeborg, radiant, "and I haven't even got a tail to wag!"
"Already, after only ten minutes of you, I feel as if I were eating cold, fresh, very crisp lettuce."
"That's not nearly so nice. I don't think I like being lettuce."
"I don't care. You are. And I'm going to paint you. I'm going to paint your soul. Tell me some addresses for lodgings," he said, snatching up a sheet of paper and a pencil.
"There aren't any."
"Then I must stay at your vicarage."
"You'll have to sleep with Robert, then."
"What? Who is Robert?"
"My husband."
"Oh, yes. But how absurd that sounds!"
"What does?"
"Your having a husband."
"I don't see how you can help having a husband if you're a wife."
"No. It's inevitable. But it's—quaint. That you should be anybody's wife, let alone a pastor's. Here in Kökensee."
She got up impulsively. "Come and see him," she said. "You wouldn't last time. Come now. Let me make tea for you. Let me have the pride of making tea for you."
"But not this minute!" he begged, as she stood over him holding out her hand to pull him up.
"Yes, yes. He's in now. He'll be out in his fields later. He'll be frightfully pleased. We'll tell him about the picture. Oh, but you didmeanit, didn't you?" she added, suddenly anxious.
He got up reluctantly and grumbling: "I don't want to see Robert. Why should I see Robert? I don't believe I'm going to like Robert," he muttered, looking down at her from what seemed an immense height. "Of course I mean it about the picture," he added in a different voice, quick and interested. "It'll be a companion portrait to your sister's."
He laughed. "That would really be very amusing," he said, stooping down and neatly putting his scattered things together.
Ingeborg flushed. "But—that's rather cruel fun, isn't it, that you're making of me now?" she murmured.
"What?" he asked, straightening himself to look at her.
The light had gone out of her face.
"What? Why—didn't I tell you my picture of you is to be the portrait of a spirit?"
He pounced on his things and gathered them up in his arms.
"Come along," he said impatiently, "and be intelligent. Let me beg you to be intelligent. Come along. I suppose I'm to go in the punt. What's in it? Books by the dozen. What's this? Eucken? Keats? Pragmatism? O Lord!"
"Why O Lord?" she asked, getting in and picking up the paddle while he gave the punt a vigorous shove off and jumped on to it as it went. She was radiant again. She was tingling with pride and joy. He really meant it about the picture. He hadn't made fun of her. On the contrary.... "Why O Lord?" she asked. "You said that, or something like it, last time because Ididn'tread."
"Well, now I say it because you do," he said, crouching at the opposite end watching her movements as she paddled.
"But that doesn't seem to have much consistency, does it?" she said.
"Hang consistency! I don't want you addled. And you'll get addled if you topple all these different stuffs into your little head together."
"But I'd rather be addled than empty."
"Nonsense! If I could I'd stop your doing anything that may alter you a hairbreadth from what you are at this moment."
To that she remarked, suspending her paddle in mid air, her face as sparkling as the shining drops that flashed from it, that she really was greatly enjoying herself; and they both laughed.
Ingram waited in the parlour, where he stood taking in with attentive eyes the details of that neglected, almost snubbed little room, while Ingeborg went to the laboratory, so happy and proud that she forgot she was breaking rules, to fetch, as she said, Robert.
Robert, however, would not be fetched. He looked up at her with a great reproach on her entrance, for as invariably happened on the rare occasions when the tremendousness of what she had to say seemed to her to justify interrupting, he thought he had just arrived within reach, after an infinite patient stalking, of the coy, illusive heart of the problem.
"Mr. Ingram's here," she said breathlessly.
He gazed at her over his spectacles.
"In the parlour," said Ingeborg. "He's come to tea. Isn't it wonderful? He's going to paint—"
"Who is here, Ingeborg?"
"Mr. Ingram. Edward Ingram. Come and talk to him while I get tea."
She had even forgotten to shut the door in her excitement, and a puff of wind from the open window picked up Herr Dremmel's papers and blew them into confusion.
He endeavoured to catch them, and requested her in a tone of controlled irritation to shut the door.
"Oh, how dreadful of me!" she said, hastily doing it, but with gaiety.
"I do not know," then said Herr Dremmel, mastering his annoyance, "Mr. Ingram."
"Rut, Robert, it'stheMr. Ingram. Edward Ingram. The greatest artist there is now. The great portrait painter. Berlin has—"
"Is he a connection of your family's, Ingeborg?"
"No, but he painted Ju—"
"Then it is not necessary for me to interrupt my afternoon on his behalf."
And Herr Dremmel bent his head over his papers again.
"But, Robert, he'sgreat—he'sverygreat—"
Herr Dremmel, with a wetted thumb, diligently rearranged his pages.
"But—why, I told him you'd love to see him. What am I to say to him if you don't come?"
Herr Dremmel, his eye caught by a sentence he had written, was reading with a deep enormous appetite.
"Tea," said Ingeborg desperately. "There's tea. You alwaysdocome to tea. It'll be ready in a minute."
He looked up at her, gathering her into his consciousness again. "Tea?" he said.
But even as he said it his thoughts fell off to his problem, and without removing his eyes from hers he began carefully to consider a new aspect of it that in that instant had occurred to him.
There was nothing for it but to go away. So she went.
Ingram's visit to the Glambecks, had in any case been coming to an end the next day, when he was to have gone to Königsberg on his way to the Caucasus, a place he hoped might trick him by its novelty for at least a time out of boredom, and the Baron and Baroness were greatly surprised when he told them he was not going to the Caucasus but to Kökensee instead.
With one voice they exclaimed, "Kökensee?"
"To paint the pastor's wife's hair," said Ingram.
The Baron and Baroness were silent. The explanation seemed to them beyond comment. Its disreputableness robbed them of speech. Herr Ingram, of course, an artist of renown—if he had not been of very great renown they could not have seen their way to admitting him on terms of equality into their circle—might paint whoever's hair he pleased; but was there not some ecclesiastical law forbidding that the hair of one's pastor's wife should be painted? To have one's hair painted when one was a pastor's wife was hardly more respectable than having it dyed. People of family were painted in order to hand down their portrait to succeeding generations, but you had to have generations, you had to have scions, you had to have a noble stock for the scions to spring from, and the painting was entered into soberly, discreetly, advisedly, in the fear of God, for the delectation of children, not lightly or wantonly, not for effect, not, as Herr Ingram had added of Frau Pastor's hair, because any portion of one's person was strangely beautiful. Strangely beautiful? They looked at each other; and the Baroness raised her large and undulating white hands from her black lap for a moment and let them drop on to it again, and the Baron slowly nodded his entire agreement.
Ingram had found a room in the village inn at Kökensee, a place so sordid, so entirely impossible as the next habitation after theirs for one who had been their guest, that the Baron and Baroness were concerned for what their servants must think when they heard him direct their coachman in the presence of their butler and footman, as he clambered nimbly into the dogcart, to take him to it. And the Baroness went in and wrote at once to her son Hildebrand in Berlin, who had introduced Ingram to Glambeck, and told him she did not intend permitting Herr Ingram to visit her again. "To please you," she wrote, "I did it. But how true it is that these artists can never rise beyond being artists! I have finished with outsiders, however clever. Give me gentlemen."
She did not mention, she found she could not mention, the hair; and to the Baron that evening she expressed the hope that at least the picture would only be in watercolour. Watercolour, she felt, seemed somehow nearer the Commandments than oils.
It was impossible to paint a serious picture of Ingeborg in the dark little parlour at the parsonage, and as there was no other room at all that they could use Ingram began a series of sketches of her out of doors, in the garden, in the punt, anywhere and everywhere.
"I must get some idea of you," he said, perceiving that a reason for his coming every day had to be provided. "Later on I'll do the real picture. In a proper studio."
"I wonder how I'll get to a proper studio?" smiled Ingeborg.
"I've got a very good one in Venice. You must sit to me there."
"As though it were round the corner! But these are very wonderful," she said, taking up the sketches. "I wish I were really like that."
"It's exactly you as you were at the moment."
"Nonsense," she said; but she glowed.
She knew it was not true, but she loved to believe he somehow, by some miracle, saw her so. The sketches were exquisite; little impressions of happy moments caught into immortality by a master. Hardly ever did he do more than her head and throat, and sometimes the delicate descent to her shoulder. The day she saw his idea of the back of her neck she flushed with pleasure, it was such a beautiful thing.
"That's not me," she murmured.
"Isn't it? I don't believe anybody has ever explained to you what you're like."
"There wasn't any need to. I can see for myself."
"Apparently that's just what you can't do. It was high time I came."
"Oh, but wasn't it," she agreed earnestly.
He thought her frankness, her unadorned way of saying what she felt, as refreshing and as surprising as being splashed with clear cold shining mountain water. He had never met anything feminine that was quite so near absolute simplicity. He might call her the most extravagantly flattering things, and she appreciated them and savoured them with a kind of objective delight that interested him at first extraordinarily. Then it began to annoy him.
'But these are very wonderful,' she said, taking up the sketches. 'I wish I were really like that.'
"You're as unselfconscious," he told her one afternoon a little crossly, when he had been ransacking heaven and earth and most of the poets for images to compare her with, and she had sat immensely pleased and interested and urging him at intervals to go on, "as a choir-boy."
"But what a nice, clean, soaped sort of thing to be like!" she said. "And so much more alive than lettuces."
"I wonder if youarealive?" he said, staring at her; and she looked at him with her head on one side and told him that if she were not a bishop's daughter and a pastor's wife and a child of many prayers and trained from infancy to keep carefully within the limits of the allowable in female speech she would reply to that, "You bet."
"But that's only if I were vulgar that I'd say that," she explained. "Gentility is the sole barrier, I expect really, between me and excess."
"You and excess! You little funny, cold-watery, early-morningy thing. One would as soon connect the dawn and the fields before sunrise and small birds and the greenest of green young leaves with excess."
He was more near being quite happy during this first week than he could remember to have been since that period of pinafore in which the world is all mother and daisies. He was enjoying the interest of complete contrast, the freshness that lies about beginnings. From this remoteness, this queer intimate German setting, he looked at his usual life as at something entirely foolish, hurried, noisy, and tiresome. All those women—good heavens, all those women—who collected and coagulated about his path, what terrible things they seemed from here! Women he had painted, who rose up and reproached him because his idea of them and their idea were different; women he had fallen in love with, or tried to persuade himself he had fallen in love with, or tried to hope he would presently be able to persuade himself he had fallen in love with; women who had fallen in love with him, and fluffed and flapped about him, monsters of soft enveloping suffocation; women he had wronged—absurd word! women who had claims on him—claims on him! on him who belonged only to art and the universe. And there was his wife—good heavens, yes, his wife....
From these distresses and irksomenesses, from a shouting world, from the crowds and popularity that pushed between him and the one thing that mattered, his work, from the horrors of home life, the horrors of society and vain repetitions of genialities, from all the people who talked about Thought, and Art, and the Mind of the World, from jealousies, affections, praises, passions, excitement, boredom, he felt very safe at Kökensee. To be over there in the middle of the distracting emptiness of London was like having the sour dust of a neglected market-place blown into one's face. To be over here in Kökensee was to feel like a single goldfish in a bowl of clear water. Ingeborg was the clear water. Kökensee was the bowl. For a week he swam with delight in this new element; for a week he felt so good and innocent, exercising himself in its cool translucency, that almost did he seem a goldfish in a bib. Then Ingeborg began to annoy him; and she annoyed him for the precise reason that had till then charmed him, her curious resemblance to a boy.
This frank affection, this unconcealed delight in his society, this ever-ready excessive admiration, were arresting at first and amusing and delicious after the sham freshness, the tricks, the sham daring things of the women he had known. They were like a bath at the end of a hot night; like a country platform at the end of a stuffy railway journey. But you cannot sit in a bath all day, or stay permanently on a platform. You do want to go on. You do want things to develop.
Ingram was nettled by Ingeborg's apparent inability to develop. It was all very well, it was charming to be like a boy for a little while, but to persist in it was tiresome. Nothing he could say, nothing he could apply to her in the way of warm and varied epithet, brought the faintest trace of self-consciousness into her eyes. What can be done, he thought, with a woman who will not be self conscious? She received his speeches with enthusiasm, she hailed them with delight and laughter, and, what was particularly disconcerting, she answered back. Answered back with equal warmth and with equal variety—sometimes, he suspected, annoyed at being outdone in epithet, with even more. To judge from her talk she almost made love to him. He would have supposed it was quite making love if he had not known, if he had not been so acutely aware that it was not. With a face of radiance and a voice of joy she would say suddenly that God had been very good to her; and when he asked in what way, would answer earnestly, "In sending you here." And then she would add in that peculiar sweet voice—she certainly had, thought Ingram, a peculiar sweet voice, a little husky, again a little like a choir-boy's, but a choir-boy with a slight sore throat—"I've missed you dreadfully all these years. I've been lonely for you."
And the honesty of her; the honest sincerity of her eyes when she said these things. No choir-boy older than ten could look at one with quite such a straight simplicity.
Every day punctually at two o'clock, by which time the daily convulsion of dinner and its washing up was over at the parsonage, he walked across from his inn, while Kökensee's mouths behind curtains and round doors guttered with excited commentary, telling himself as he gazed down the peaceful street that this was the emptiest, gossip-freest place in the world, to the Dremmel gate; and dodging the various rich puddles of the yard, passed round the corner of the house along the lilac path beneath the laboratory windows to where, at the end of the lime-tree avenue, Ingeborg sat waiting. Then he would sketch her, or pretend to sketch her according as the mood was on him, and they would talk.
By the second day he knew all about her life since her marriage, her six children—they amazed and appalled him—her pursuit, started by him, of culture, her housekeeping, her pride in Robert's cleverness, her solitude, her thirst for some one to talk to. Persons like Ilse and Rosa, Frau Dremmel, Robertlet and Ditti, became extraordinarily real to him. He made little drawings of them while she talked up the edge of his paper. And he also knew, by the second day, all about her life in Redchester, its filial ardours, its duties, its difficulties when it came to disentangling itself from the Bishop; and his paper sprawled up its other edge with tiny bishops and unattached, expressive aprons. The one thing she concealed from him of the larger happenings of her life was Lucerne, but even that he knew after a week.
"So you can do things," he said, looking at her with a new interest. "You can do real live things."
"Oh, yes. If I'm properly goaded."
"I wonder what you mean by properly goaded?"
"Well, I was goaded then. Goaded by being kept in one place uninterruptedly for years."
"That's what is happening to you now."
"Oh, but this is different. And I've been to Zoppot."
"Zoppot!"
"Besides,you'rehere."
"But I won't be here for ever."
"Oh, but you'll be somewhere in the same world."
"As though that were any good."
"Of course it is. I shall read about you in the papers."
"Nonsense," he said crossly. "The papers!"
"And I shall curl up in your memory."
"As if I were dead. You sometimes really are beyond words ridiculous."
"I expect it's because I've had so little education," she said meekly.
At tea-time almost every day Herr Dremmel joined them in the garden, and the conversation became stately. The sketches were produced, and he made polite comments. He discussed art with Ingram, and Ingram discussed fertilizers with him, and as neither knew anything about the other's specialty they discussed by force of intelligence. Ingeborg poured out the tea and listened full of pride in them both. She thought how much they must be liking and admiring each other. Robert's sound sense, his quaint and often majestic English, his obviously notable scientific attainments must, she felt sure, deeply impress Ingram. And of course to see and speak to the great Ingram every day could not but give immense gratification to Robert, now that he had become aware of who he was. She sat between the two men in her old-fashioned voluminous white frock, looking from one to the other with eager pride while they talked. She did not say anything herself out of respect for such a combination of brains, but she was all ears. She drank the words in. It was more mind-widening she felt even than theClarion.
Ingram hated tea-time at the parsonage. Every day it was more of an effort to meet Herr Dremmel's ceremoniousness appropriately, and his scientific thirst for facts about art bored Ingram intolerably. He detested the large soft creases of his clothes and the way they buttoned and bulged between the buttonings. He disliked him for having sleeves and trousers that were too long. He shuddered at the thought of the six children. He did not want to hear about super-phosphates, and resented having regularly every afternoon to pretend he did; and he did want, and this became a growing wish and a growing awkwardness, to make love to Herr Dremmel's wife.
Herr Dremmel's large unconsciousness of such a possibility annoyed him, particularly his obliviousness to the attractiveness of Ingeborg. He would certainly deserve, thought Ingram, anything he got. It was scandalous not to take more care of a little thing like that. Every day at tea-time he was enraged by this want of care in Herr Dremmel, and every day before and after tea he was engrossed, if abortive efforts to philander can be called so, in not taking care of her himself.
"You see," said Ingeborg when he commented on the immense personal absences and withdrawals of Herr Dremmel, "Robert is verygreat. He's wonderful! The things he does with just grains! And of course if one is going to achieve anything one has to give up every minute to it. Why, even when he loved me he usedn't to—"
"Even when he loved you?" interrupted Ingram. "What, doesn't he now?"
"Oh, yes, yes," she said quickly, flushing. "I meant—of course he does. And besides, one always loves one's wife."
"No, one doesn't."
"Yes, one does."
They left it at that.
At the end of his second week in Kökensee Ingram found himself increasing the number of his adjectives and images and comparisons, growing almost eagerly poetical, for the force of proximity and want of any one else to talk to or to think about was beginning to work, and it was becoming the one thing that seemed to him to matter to get self-consciousness into her frank eyes, something besides or instead of that glow of admiring friendliness. He was now very much attracted, and almost equally exasperated. She was, after all, a woman; and it was absurd, it was incredible, that he, Ingram, with all these opportunities should not be able to shake her out of her first position of just wonder at him as an artist and a celebrity.
She was so warm and friendly and close in one sense, and so nowhere at all in another; so responsive, so quick, so ready to pile the sweetest honey of flattery and admiration on him, and so blank to the fact that—well, that there they were, he and she. And then she had a sense of fun that interrupted, a sense most admirable in a woman at any other time, but not when she is being made love to. Also she was very irrelevant; he could not fix her; she tumbled about mentally, and that hindered progress, too. Not that he cared a straw for her mentality except in so far as its quality was a hindrance; it was that other part of her, her queer little soul that interested him, her happiness and zest of life, and, of course, the graces and harmonies of her lines and colouring.
"You know, I suppose," he said to her one evening as they walked slowly back along the path through the rye-field, and the cool scents of the ended summer's day rose in their faces as they walked, "that I'd give a hundred days of life in London or Paris for an hour of this atmosphere, this cleanness that there is about you."
"I don't think a hundred's much. I'd give themallto be with you. Here. Now. In the rye-field. Isn't it wonderful this evening—isn't it beautiful? Did you smell that?" She stopped and raised her nose selectingly. "Just that instant? That's convolvulus."
"You have such faith in my gods," he went on, when he could get her away from the convolvulus, "such a bravery of belief, such a dear bravery of belief."
"Well, but of course," she said, turning shining eyes on to him. "Who wouldn't believe in your gods? Art, love of beauty—"
"But it isn't only art. My gods are all sweet things and all fine things," said Ingram, convinced at the moment that he had never done anything but worship gods of that particular flavour, so thoroughly was he being purged by the hyssop of life in Kökensee.
"Oh," said Ingeborg with an awed enthusiasm, "how wonderful it is that you should be exactly what you are! But it'scleverof you," she added with a little movement of her hands, smiling up at him, "to be soexactlywhat you are."
"And do you know what exactly you are? You're the open window in the prison-house of my life."
She held her breath a moment. "How very beautiful!" she then said. "Howverybeautiful! And how kind you are to think of me like that! But why is it a prison-house? You of all people—"
"It isn't living, you see. It's existence in caricature over there. It's like dining perpetually with Madame Tussaud's waxworks, or anything else totally unreal and incredible."
"But I don't understand how a great artist—"
"And you're like an open window, like the sky, like sweet air, like freedom, like secret light—"
"Oh," she murmured, deprecating but enchanted.
"When I'm with you I feel an intolerable disgust for all the chatter and flatulence of that other life."
"And when I'm with you," she said, "I feel as if I were stuffed with—oh, with stars."
He was silent a moment. Then, determined not to be outdone, he said:
"When I'm with you I begin to feel like a star myself."
"As though you weren't always one."
"No. It's only you. Till I found you I was just an angry ball of mud."
"But—"
"A thirsty man in a stuffy room."
"But—"
"An emptiness, a wailing blank, an eviscerated thing."
"A what?" asked Ingeborg, who had not heard that word before.
"And you," he went on, "are the cool water that quenches me, the scent of roses come into the room, liquid light to my clay."
She drew a deep breath. "It's wonderful, wonderful," she said. "And it sounds so real somehow—really almost as though you meant it. Oh, I don't mind you making fun of me a bit if only you'll go on saying lovely things like that."
"Fun of you? Have you no idea, then, positively no idea, how sweet you are?"
He bent down and looked into her face. "With little kisses in each of your eyes," he said, scrutinizing them.
In Redchester nobody talked of kisses. They were things not mentioned. They were things allowable only under strictly defined conditions—if you did not want to kiss, for instance, and the other person did not like it—and confined in their application to the related. Like pews in a parish church, they were reserved for families. Aunts might kiss: freely. Especially if they were bearded—Ingeborg had an aunt with a beard. Mothers might kiss; she had seen her calm mother kiss a new-born baby with a sort of devouring, a cannibalism. Bishops might kiss, within a certain restricted area. As for husbands, they did kiss, and nothing stopped them till the day when they suddenly didn't. But no one, aunts, mothers, bishops, or husbands, regarded the practice as a suitable basis for conversation.
How refreshing, therefore, and how altogether delightful it was that Ingram should be so natural, and how she loved to know that, though of course he was pretending about the little kisses in her eyes, he thought it worth while to pretend! With glee and pride and amusement she wondered what Redchester would say if it could hear the great man it, too, honoured being so simple and at the same time so very kind. For the first time she did not answer back; she was silent, thinking amused and pleasant thoughts. And Ingram walking beside her with his hands in his pockets and a gayness about his heels felt triumphant, for he had, he thought, got through to her self-consciousness, he had got her quiet at last.
Not that he did not enjoy the incense she burned before him, the unabashed expression of her admiration, but a man wants room for his lovemaking, and once he is embarked on that pleasant exercise he does not want the words taken out of his mouth. Ingeborg was always taking the words out of his mouth and then flinging them back at him again with, as it were, a flower stuck behind their ear. He had known that if once he could pierce through to her self-consciousness she would leave off doing this, she would become aware that he was a man and she was a woman. She would become passive. She would let go of persisting that he was a demi-god and she a sort of humble pew-opener or its equivalent in his temple. Now apparently he had pierced through, and her silence as she walked beside him with her eyes on the ground was more sweet to him than anything she had ever said.
Before, however, they had reached the gap in the lilac hedge that formed the simple entrance on that side to the Dremmel garden there she was beginning again.
"In Redchester—" she began.
"Oh," he interrupted, "are you going to give me a description of the town and its environs so as to keep me from giving you a description of yourself?"
"No," she laughed. "You know I could listen to you for ever."
The same frankness; the same shining look. Ingram wanted to kick.
"I was thinking," she went on, "how nobody in Redchester ever talked about kisses. Even little ones."
"So you are shocked?"
"No. What a word! I'm full of wonder at the miracle of you—you—being so kind to me—me!Saying such beautiful things, thinking such beautiful things."
This trick of gratitude was really maddening.
"Tell me about Redchester," he said shortly. "Don't they kiss each other there?"
"Oh, yes. But they don't have them in their eyes."
He shuddered.
"And people don't mention them, unless it's aunts. And then not like that. No aunt could ever possibly be of the pregnant parts needful for the invention of a phrase like that. And if she were I don't suppose I'd want to listen."
"You do at least then want to listen?"
"Want to? Aren't I listening always to every word you say with both my ears? What a mercy," she added with thankfulness, "what a real mercy, what an escape, that you'renotan aunt!"
"You can't call it exactly a hairbreadth escape," he said moodily. "I don't feel even the rough beginnings of an aunt anywhere about me."
He walked with her through the darkness of the lime-tree avenue, refusing to stay to supper. Why could he not then and there in that solitary dark place catch her in his arms and force her to wake up, to leave off being a choir-boy, a pew-opener? Or shake her. One or the other. At that moment he did not much care which. But he could not. He told himself that why he could not was because she would be so limitlessly surprised, and that for all her surprise he would be no nearer, not an inch nearer to whatever it was in her he was now so eager to reach. She might even—indeed he felt certain she would—thank him profusely for such a further mark of esteem, for being, as she would say, so very kind.
"Are you tired?" she asked, peering up at his face in the scented gloom, for it was the time of the flowering of the lime-trees, on his suddenly stopping and saying good night.
"No."
"You're feeling quite well?"
"Perfectly."
"Then," she said, "why go away?"
"I'm in slack water. I have no talk. I'd bore you. Good night."
The next day, having found the morning quite intolerably long, he approached her directly they were alone on the difficult subject of husbands.
"It's no good, Ingeborg," he said, "yes, I'm going to call you Ingeborg—we're fellow pilgrims you and I along this rocky ridiculousness called life, and we'll soon be dead, and so, my dear, let us be friends for just this little while—"
"Oh, but of course, of course—"
"It's no good, you know, barring certain very obvious subjects because of that idiotic prepossession one has for what is known as good taste. The only really living thing is bad taste. All the preliminaries to real union, union of any sort, mind or body, consist in the chucking away of reticences and cautions and proprieties, and each single preliminary is in bad taste. If we're going to be friends we'll have to go in for that. Bad taste. Execrable taste. Now—"
He stopped.
"Well?"
She was looking at him in a kind of alarm. This was the longest speech by far he had made, and she could not imagine what was coming at the end. He was busy as usual flinging her on to paper—the number of his studies of her was by this time something monstrous—and was glancing at her swiftly and professionally at every sentence.
"About husbands. Tell me what you think about husbands."
"About husbands? Butthey'renot bad taste," she said.
"Tell me what you think about them."
"Well, they're people one is very fond of," she said, with her hands clasped round her knees.
"Oh. You find that?"
"Yes. Don't you?"
"I never had one."
"The advantages of being a woman! They're people one is fond of once and for all. They rescue one from Redchester. They're good and kind. They help one roll up great balls of common memories, and all the memories grow somehow into tender things at last. And they're patient. Even when they've found out how tiresome one is they still go on being patient. And—one loves them."
"And—they love you?"
She flushed. "Of course," she said.
"You're amusing with your of courses and once for alls. Really you know there are no such things. Nothing necessarily follows. I mean, not when you get to human beings."
Ingeborg fidgeted. Too well did she know the dishonesty of her Of course; too well did she remember the sudden switching off, after Zoppot, of Robert's love. But the rest was strictly true anyhow, she thought. She did love him—dear Robert. The difference between him and an amazing friend like Ingram was, she explained to herself, that she was interested in Ingram, profoundly interested, and she was not interested in Robert. That, she supposed, was because she loved Robert. Perfect love, she said to herself, watching with careful attention the approach of a hairy and rather awful caterpillar across the path towards her shoes, perfect love cast out a lot of things besides fear. It cast out, for instance, conversation. And interest, which one couldn't very well have without conversation. Interest, of course, was an altogether second-rate feeling compared to love, and because it was second-rate it was noisier, expressing itself with a copiousness unnecessary when one got to the higher stages of feeling. One loved one's Robert, and one kept quiet. Far the highest thing was to love; but—she drew her feet up quickly under her—how very interesting it was being interested!
"Well?" he said, looking at her, "go on."
"Well, but I can't go on because I've finished. There isn't any more."
"It's a soon exhausted subject."
"That's because it's so simple and so—so dear. You know where you are with husbands."
"You mean you know you're not anywhere."
"Oh," she said, throwing back her head and facing him courageously, "how you don'trealise! And anyhow," she added, "if that were true it would be a very placid and restful state to be in."
"Negation. Death. Do you find it placid and restful with me?"
"No," she said quickly.
He put down his brushes and stared at her. "What a mercy!" he said. "What a mercy! I was beginning to be afraid you did."
By the end of the third week an odd thing had happened. He was no nearer piercing through her outer husk to any emotions she might possess than before, but she, astonishingly, had pierced through his.
The outer husk of Ingram at this time and for some years previously was a desire at all costs to dodge boredom, to get tight hold of anything that promised to excite him, squeeze it with diligence till the last drop of entertainment had been extracted, and then let it go again considerably crumpled. It was the kind of husk that causes divergences of opinion with one's wife. And behind it sat, wrapped in flame, the thing that was with him untouchably first, his work. He did not know how or why, but in that third week Ingeborg got through this husk and became mixed up in a curious inextricable way with the flaming holy thing inside.
High above, immeasurably above, any interest he had ever felt in women was his work. The divers love-makings with which his past bristled as an ancient churchyard bristles with battered tombstones, had all been conducted as it were on his doorstep. He came out to the lady, the lady destined so soon to be a tombstone, often with passion, sometimes with illusions, and always with immense goodwill to believe that here was the real thing at last, but she never came in. She might and did catch cold there for anything he cared, she should never cross the threshold and start interfering, delaying, coming between. In the end she got left out there alone, along with the scraper, feeling chilly.
And here was Ingeborg through the door, and not interfering, not delaying, but positively furthering.
The increasing beauty of his studies of her first made him suspect it. Their beauty began to surprise him, to take him unawares, as though it were a thing outside and apart from his own will. He had found so few things in humanity that seemed beautiful, and his pictures had been pictures of resentments—impish and wonderful exposures by a master of the littleness at the back of brave shows. For a fortnight now he had sketched and sketched and splashed about with colour just as an excuse for staying on, in the desire to make love to Ingeborg, to refresh himself for a space at this unexpectedly limpid little spring. He had been attracted, irritated, increasingly attracted, greatly exasperated, greatly attracted. He had grown eager, determined, almost anxious at last. But these various emotions had been felt by him strictly on his doorstep. She was merely a substitute, and at that only a temporary substitute, for the Caucasus.
Then in the third week he perceived that she had left off being that. She was no longer just an odd little thing, an attractive, delicious little thing to him, of the colouring he best loved, the fairness, the whiteness, a thing that offered up incense before him with unflagging zeal, a thing full of contentments and generous ready friendship; she still was all that, but she was more. Like Adam when God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, she had become a living soul, and that of which she was the living soul was his work. Not only her soul but his had begun to get into his studies of her. Each successive study unveiled more of an inner beauty. Each fixed into form and colour qualities in her and qualities in him who apprehended them that he had not known were there. It was as if he watched, while his hand was held and guided sure swift touch by sure swift touch by some one else, some one altogether greater, some splendid master from some splendid other world, who laid hold of him as one lays hold of a learner and showed him these things and said at each fresh stroke, "Look—this is what she is like, the essence of her, the spirit ... and see, it is what you are like, too, for you recognise it."
In that third week late one afternoon they went on the lake. Ingeborg paddled slowly along the middle of the quiet water towards the sunset, and Ingram sat at the other end with his back to it and watched her becoming more and more transfigured as the sun got lower.
Very early in their acquaintance he had conveyed to her that she ought always to wear white and that hats were foolish and unnecessary; therefore she did wear white, and sat hatless in the punt. The light blinded her. She could see nothing of him but a dark hunch against a blaze of sky. But when she wanted to turn the punt towards the relief of the shadows along the shore he instantly stopped her, and told her to keep on straight into the eye of the sun.
"But I can't see," she said.
"But I can. It's for my picture. It's going to be a study of light."
"Shall you be able to do it from the sketches?"
"No. From you."
"Why, you said you couldn't anywhere here because there wasn't a proper place."
"There isn't. I'm going to do it in Venice. In my studio there."
"But can you from memory?"
"No. From you."
She laughed. "How I wish I could!" she said. "I ache and ache to see things, to go to Italy—"
She sighed. The vision of it was unendurably beautiful.
"Well, you'll have to. Not only because it's monstrous you shouldn't, monstrous and shocking and unbelievable that you should be stuck in Kökensee for years on end and never see or hear or know any of the big things of life, but because you can't spoil my great picture—the greatest I shall ever have done."
"Robert could never leave his work."
"I don't want Robert to leave anything. It's you I'm going to paint. And I can't do without you."
"How very awkward," she smiled, "because Robert can't do without me, either."
He plunged his arm into the water with sudden extreme violence, scooped a handful of it high into the air, and dashed it back again.
It had seemed to him obvious throughout his life that when it came to the supremest things not only did one give up everything oneself for them but other people were bound to give up everything, too. The world and the centuries were to be enriched—he had a magnificent private faith in his position as a creator—and it was the duty of those persons who were needful to the process to deliver themselves, their souls and bodies, up to him in what he was convinced was an entirely reasonable sacrifice. If any one were necessary to his work, even only indirectly by keeping him content while he did it so that he could produce his best, it was that person's duty to come to his help. A paramount duty; passing the love of home or family. He would do as much, he was convinced, for some one else who should instead of him possess the gift. Here had he been in a state of dissatisfaction and restlessness for years, and his work, though his reputation leapt along, was, he very well knew, not what it could have been. Boredom had seized him; a great disgust of humanity. There had been harassing private complications; his wife had turned tiresome, refusing to understand. And now he had found this—this thing, he thought, looking at her in the kind of fury that seized him at the merest approach to any thwarting that touched his work, of light and fire and cleanness, this little hidden precious stone, hidden for him, waiting for him to come and make of her a supreme work of art, and she was putting forward middle-class obstacles, Philistine difficulties, ludicrous trivialities—Robert, in short—to the achievement of it.
"Do you realise," he said, leaning forward and staring at her with his strange pale eyes, "what it means to be painted by me?"
"My utter glorification," she answered, "my utter pride."
He waved his hand impatiently. "It means," he said, "and in this case it would supremely mean, another one added to the great possessions of the world."
"Oh," said Ingeborg; and then, after a slight holding of her breath, again "Oh."
She was awe-struck. His voice came out of the black shadow of him at her through clenched teeth, which gave it a strange awe-striking quality. She felt, with the sunset blinding her and that black figure in front of her and the intense clenchedness of the voice issuing from it, in the presence of immensities. She wondered whether it would have been any worse—instantly she corrected the word (it had been the merest slip of her brain) to more glorious—to be sitting in a punt with, simultaneously, Shakespeare, Sophocles. Homer, and the entire Renaissance. Weak a thing though her paddle was she pressed it tightly in her arms.
"It's—a great responsibility," she said lamely.
"Of course it is," he said, still in that clenched voice. "And it has to be met greatly."
"But what haveI—"
"Here's this picture—I feel it in me, I tell you I feel it and know it—going to be the crowning work of my life, going to be a thing of living beauty throughout the generations, going to be the Portrait of a Lady that draws the world to look at it during all the ages after we are dead—"
He broke off. He left off hurling the sentences at her. He began to beg.
"Ingeborg," he said, "you've cleaned me up and glorified me like the sunshine during this stay here, without meaning to clean or bothering to clean a bit. You've become the eyes of the universe to me, and if it weren't for you now the whole thing would be an eyeless monster and a mask and a horror. Without you—why, even during the mornings here when I mayn't come to you I'm like a ship laid up in an out-of-the-way port, an aeroplane without an engine, a book with the first and last pages lost. The mornings are like a realistic novel of Gissing's after a fairy tale. The afternoons are like a bright vision in a crystal, like a dream, like one of the drops into fairyland quite common people sometimes take. You're the littlest thing, and you leave the most enormous blank. It's extraordinary thegonenessof things directly I'm away from you. I did poor work before I found you, poor I mean compared to what I know it might be, and I'll do none at all or mere ruins if I have to work without you now. Work is everything to me, and I'm not going to be able to do it if you're not there. Jeer at me if you like. Jeer at me for a parasite. I've been an empty thing without you all these years. You can't let me go again. You can't let me drop back into the old angers, into the old falling short of the highest. You're the spirit of my inmost. You're my response, my reality, my glorification, my transmuter into a god. And the picture I'm going to do of you will be the Portrait of a Lady who gave him back his Soul."
She stared at his black outline helplessly. She was overwhelmed. What could a respectable pastor's wife say to such a speech? It had the genuine ring. She did not believe it all—not, that is, the portions of it which that back part of her mind, the part that leapt about with disconcerting agility of irrelevant questioning when it most oughtn't to, called the decorations, for how could any one like Ingram really think those wonderful things of any one like her?—but she no longer suspected him of making fun. He meant some of it. What was underneath it he meant, she felt. She was scared, and at the same time caught up into rapture. Was it possible that at last she was wanted, at last she could help some one? He wanted her, he, Ingram, of all people in the world; and only a few weeks ago she had been going about Kökensee so completely unwanted that if a dog wagged its tail at her she had been glad.
"It—it's a great responsibility," she murmured a second time, while her face was transfigured with more than just the sunset.
It was. For there was Robert.
Robert, she felt even at this moment in the uplifted state when everything seems easy and possible, would not understand. Robert had no need of her himself, but he would not let her go for all that to Venice. Robert had altogether not grasped Ingram's importance in the world; he could not, perhaps, be expected to, for he did not like art. Robert, she was deadly certain, would not leave his work for an hour to take her anywhere for any purpose however high; and without him how could she go to Venice? People didn't go to Venice with somebody who wasn't their husband. They might go there with a whole trainful of indifferent persons if they were indifferent. Directly you liked somebody, directly it became wonderful to be taken there, to be shown the way, looked after, prevented from getting lost, you didn't go. It simply, as with kissing, was a matter of liking. Society seemed based on hate. You might kiss the people you didn't want to kiss; you might go to Venice with any amount of strangers because you didn't like strangers. And in a case like this—"Oh, in a case like this," she suddenly cried out aloud, flinging the paddle into the punt and twisting her hands together, overcome by the vision of the glories that were going to be missed, "when it's so important, when it so tremendously matters—to be caught by convention!"
He had got her. The swift conviction flashed through him as he jerked his feet out of the way of the paddle. Got her differently from what he had first aimed at perhaps, still incredibly without sex-consciousness, but she would come to Venice, she would come and sit to him, he was going to do his masterpiece, and the rest was inevitable.
"How do you mean?" he said, his eyes on her.
"To think the great picture's never going to be painted!"
"And why?"
"Because of convention, because of all these mad rules—"
She was twisting her fingers about in the way she did when much stirred.
"It's doomed," she said, "doomed." And she looked at him with eyes full of amazement, of aggrievedness, of, actually, tears.
"Ingeborg—" he began.
"Do you know how I've longed to go just to Italy?" she interrupted with just the same headlong impulsiveness that had swept her into Dent's Travel Bureau years before. "How I've read about it and thought about it till I'm sick with longing? Why, I've looked out trains. And the things I've read! I know all about its treasures—oh, not only its treasures of art and old histories, but other treasures, light and colour and scent, the things I love now, the things I know now in pale mean little visions. I know all sorts of things. I know there's a great rush of wistaria along the wall as you go up to the Certosa, covering its whole length with bunch upon bunch of flowers—"
"Which Certosa?"
"Pavia, Pavia—and all the open space in front of it is drenched in April with that divinest smell. And I know about the little red monthly roses scrambling in and out of the Campo Santo above Genoa in January—in January! Red roses in January. While here.... And I know about the fireflies in the gardens round Florence—that's May, early May, while here we still sit up against the stoves. And I know about the chestnut woods, real chestnuts that you eat afterwards, along the steep sides of the lakes, miles and miles of them, with deep green moss underneath, and I know about the queer black grapes that sting your tongue and fill the world with a smell of strawberries in September, and what the Appian way looks like in April when it is still waving flowery grass burning in an immensity of light, and I know the honey-colour of the houses in the old parts of Rome, and that the irises they sell there in the streets are like pale pink coral—and all one needs to do to see these things for oneself is to catch a train at Meuk.Anyday one could catch that train at Meuk. Every day it starts and one is never there. And Kökensee would roll back like a curtain, and the world be changed like a garment, like an old stiff clayey garment, like an old shroud, into allthat. Think of it! What a background, what a background for the painting of the greatest picture in the world!"
She stopped and took up the paddle again. "I wonder," she said, with sudden listlessness "why I say all this to you?"
"Because," said Ingram, in a low voice, "you're my sister and my mate."
She dipped the paddle into the water and turned the punt towards home.
"Oh, well," she said, the enthusiasm gone out of her.
The water and the sky and the forests along the banks and the spire of the Kökensee church at the end of the lake looked dark and sad going this way. At first she could see nothing after the blinding light of the other direction, then everything cleared into dun colour and bleakness. "How one talks," she said. "I say things—enthusiastic things, and you say things—beautiful kind things, and it's all no good."
"Isn't it? Not only do we say them but we're going to do them. You're coming with me to Venice, my dear. Haven't you read in those travel books of yours what the lagoons look like at sunset?"
She made an impatient movement.
"Ingeborg, let us reason together."
"I can't reason."
"Well, listen to me then doing it by myself."
And he proceeded to do it. All the way down the lake he did it, and up along the path through the rye, and afterwards in the garden pacing up and down in the gathering twilight beneath the lime-trees he did it. "Wonderful," he thought in that submerged portion of the back of his mind where imps of criticism sat and scoffed, "the trouble one takes at the beginning over a woman."
She let him talk, listening quite in silence, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes observing every incident of the pale summer path, the broken twigs scattered on it, some withered sweet-peas she had worn that afternoon, a column of ants over which she stepped carefully each time. Till the stars came out and the owls appeared he eagerly reasoned. He talked of the folly of conventions, of the ridiculous way people deliberately chain themselves up, padlock themselves to some bogey of a theory of right and wrong, are so deeply in their souls improper that they dare not loose their chain one inch or unlock themselves an instant to go on the simplest of adventures. Such people, he explained, were in their essence profoundly and incurably immoral. They needed the straight waistcoat and padded room of principles. Their only hope lay in chains. "With them," he said, "sane human beings such as you and I have nothing to do." But what about the others, the free spirits increasing daily in number, the fundamentally fine and clean, who wanted no safeguards and were engaged in demonstrating continually to the world that two friends, man and woman, could very well, say, travel together, be away seeing beautiful things together, with the simplicity of children or of a brother and sister, and return safe after the longest absence with not a memory between them that they need regret?
Why, there were—he instanced names, well-known ones, of people who, he said, had gone and come back openly, frankly, determined demonstrators for the public good of the natural. And then there were—he instanced more names, names of people even Ingeborg had heard of; and finding this unexpectedly impressive he went on inventing with a growing recklessness, taking any people well-known enough to have been heard of by Ingeborg and sending them to Venice in twos, in haphazard juxtapositions that presently began to amuse him tremendously. No doubt they had gone, or would go sooner or later, he thought, greatly tickled by the vision of some of his couples. "There was Lilienkopf—you know, the African millionaire.Hewent to Venice with Lady Missenden." He flung back his head and laughed. The thought of Lilienkopf and Lady Missenden.... "They, too, came back without a regret," he said; and laughed and laughed.
She watched him gravely. She knew neither Lilienkopf nor Lady Missenden, and was not in the mood for laughter.
"Even bishops go," said Ingram. "They go for walking tours."
"But not to Venice?"
"No. To shrines. Why, Cathedral cities are honey-combed with secret pilgrims."
"But why secret? You said—"
"Well, careful pilgrims. Pilgrims who make careful departures. One has to depart carefully, you know. Not because of oneself but because of offending those who are not imbued with the pilgrim spirit. For instance Robert."
"Oh—Robert. Iseehis face if I suggested he should let me be a pilgrim."
"But of course you mustn't suggest."
"What?" She stood still and looked up at him. "Just go?"
"Of course. It was what you did when you ran away to Lucerne. If you'd suggested you'd never have got there. And you did that for merest fun. While this—"
He looked at her, and the impishness died out of his face.
"Why, this," he said, after a silence, "this is the giving back to me of my soul. I need you, my dear. I need you as a dark room needs a lamp, as a cold room needs a fire. My work will be nothing without you—how can it be with no light to see by? It will be empty, dead. It will be like the sky without the star that makes it beautiful, the hay without the flower that scents it, the cloak one is given by God to keep out the cold and wickedness of life slipped off because there was no clasp to hold it tight over one's heart."
She began to warm again. She had been a little cooled while he laughed by himself over Lady Missenden's unregretted journeyings. To go to Italy; to go to Italy at all; but to go under such conditions, wanted, indispensable to the creation of a great work of art; it was the most amazing cluster of joys surely that had ever been offered to woman.
"How long would I have to be away?" she asked. "How long is the shortest time one wants for a picture?"
He airily told her a month would be enough, and, on her exclaiming, immediately reduced it to a week.
"But getting there and coming back—"
"Well, say ten days," he said. "Surely you could get away for ten days? To do," he added, looking at her, "some long-delayed shopping in Berlin."
"But I don't want to shop."
"Oh, Ingeborg, you're relapsing into your choir-boy condition again. Of course you don't want to shop. Of course you don't want to go to Berlin. But it's what you'll say to Robert."
"Oh?" she said. "But isn't that—wouldn't that be rather—"
"Why can't you be as simple as when you went to Lucerne? You wanted to go, so you went. And you were leaving your father who tremendously needed you. You were his right hand. Here you're nobody's right hand. I'm not asking you to do anything that would hurt Robert. All you've got to do is to arrange so that he knows nothing beyond Berlin. Surely after these years he can let you go away for ten days?"
She walked with him in silence down the lilac path as far as the gate into the yard. She was exalted, but her exaltation was shot with doubt. What he said sounded so entirely right, so obviously right. She had no reasoning to put up against it. She longed intolerably to go. She was quite certain it was a high and beautiful thing to go. And yet—
Herr Dremmel's laboratory windows were open, for the evening was heavy and quiet, and they could see him in the lamplight, with disregarded moths fluttering round his head, bent over his work.
"Good night," Ingram called in at the window with the peculiar cordial voice reserved for husbands; but Herr Dremmel was too much engrossed to hear.
Towards two o'clock there was a thunderstorm and sheets of rain, and when Ingeborg got up next morning it was to find the summer gone. The house was cold and dark and mournful, and it was raining steadily. Looking out of the front door at the yard that had been so bright and dusty for five weeks she thought she had never seen such a sudden desolation. The rain rained on the ivy with a drawn-out dull dripping. The pig standing solitary in the mud was the wettest pig. The puddles were all over little buttons made of raindrops. Invariably after a thunderstorm the weather broke up for days, sometimes for weeks. What would she and Ingram do now? she thought; what in the world would they do now? Shut up in the dark little parlour, he unable to work, and no walks, and no punting—why, he'd go, of course, and the wonder-time was at an end.
"A week of this," said Herr Dremmel, coming out of his laboratory to stand on the doorstep and rub his hands in satisfaction, "a week of this will save the situation."
"Which situation, Robert?" she asked, her mind as confused and dull as the untidy grey sky. He looked at her.
"Oh, yes," she said hastily, "of course—the experiment fields. Yes, I suppose this is what they've been wanting all through that heavenly weather."
"It was a weather," said Herr Dremmel, "that had nothing to do with heaven and everything to do with hell. Devils no doubt might grow in it, wax fat and big and heavy-eared, devils used to drought, but certainly not the kindly fruits of the earth."
And for an instant he gave his mind to reflection on how great might be the barrier created between two people living together by a different taste in weather.
Ingram arrived at two o'clock in a state of extreme irritation. He splashed through the farmyard with the collar of his coat turned up and angrily holding an umbrella. In his wet-weather mood it seemed to him entirely absurd and unworthy to be wading through an East Prussian farmyard mess in pouring rain, beneath an umbrella, in order to sit with a woman. He wanted to be at work. He was obsessed by his picture. He was in the fever to begin that seizes the artist after idleness, the fever to get away, to be off back to the real concern of life—the fierce fever of creation. He had not yet had to come into the house on his daily visits, and when he got into the passage he was immediately and deeply offended by the smell that met him of what an hour before had been a German dinner. The smell came out, as it were, weighty with welcome. It advanceden bloc. It was massive, deep, enveloping. The front door stood open, but nothing but great space of time could rid the house in the afternoons of that peculiar and all-pervading smell. He was shocked to think his white and golden one, his little image of living ivory and living gold, must needs on a day like this be swathed about in such fumes, must sit in them and breathe them, and that his communings with her were going to be conducted through a heavy curtain of what seemed to be different varieties of cabbage and all of them malignant.
The narrow gloom of the house, its unpiercedness on that north side by any but the coldest light, its abrupt ending almost at once in the kitchen and servant part, struck him as incredibly, preposterously sordid. What a place to put a woman in! What a place, having put her in it, to neglect her in! The thought of Herr Dremmel's neglects, those neglects that had made his own stay possible and pleasant, infuriated him. How dare he? thought Ingram, angrily wiping his boots.
Herr Dremmel, Kökensee, everything connected with the place except Ingeborg, seemed in his changed mood ignoble. He forgot the weeks of sunshine there had been, the large afternoons in the garden and forest and rye-fields, the floating on great stretches of calm water, and just hated everything. Kökensee was God-forsaken, distant, alien, ugly, dirty, dripping, evil-smelling. Ingeborg herself when she came running out of the parlour to him into the concentrated cabbage of the corridor seemed less shining, drabber than before. And so unfortunately active was his imagination, so quick to riot, that almost he could fancy for one dreadful instant as he looked at her that there was cabbage in her very hair.