"Ingeborg," he said the moment he was in the parlour, "I can't stand this. I can't endurethissort of thing, you know."
He rubbed both his hands through his hair and gnawed at a finger and fixed his eyes on hers in a kind of angry reproach.
"I was afraid you wouldn't like it," she said apologetically, feeling somehow as though the weather were her fault.
"Like it! And I can't idle here any more. You can't expect me to hang on here any more—"
"Oh, but I neverexpected—" she interrupted hastily, surprised and distressed that she should have produced any such impression.
"Well, it comes to the same thing, your making difficulties about coming away, your wanting such a lot of persuading."
He stopped in his quick pacing of the little room and stared at her. "Why, you're giving metrouble!" he said, in a voice of high astonishment.
And as she stood looking at him with her lips fallen apart, her eyes full of a new and anxious questioning, he began to pace about again, across and round and up and down the unworthy little room.
"God," he said, swiftly pacing, "how I do hate miss-ishness!"
And indeed it seemed to him wholly, amazingly monstrous that his great new work should be being held up a day by any scruples of any sort whatever.
"This grey headache of a sky," he said, jerking himself for a moment to the window, "this mud, this muggy chilliness—"
"But—" she began.
"The days here are lines—just length without breadth or thickness or any substance—"
"But surely—till to-day—"
"I feel in a sort of well in this place, out of sight of faith and kindliness—you shutting them out," he turned on her, "you deliberately shutting them out, putting the lid on the glory of light and life, being an extinguisher for the sake of nothing and nobody at all, just for the sake of a phantom of an idea about Robert—"
"But surely—" she said.
"I'm bored and bored here. This morning was a frightful thing. I daren't in this state even make a sketch of you. I'd spoil it. It'll rain for ever. I can't stay in this room. I'd begin to rave—"
"But of course you can't stay in it. Of course you must go."
"Go! When I can't work without you? When you're so everything to me that during the hours I'm away from you little things you've said and done float in my mind like little shining phosphorescent things in a dark cold sea, and I creep into warm little thoughts of you like some creature that shivers and gets back into its nest? I told you I was a parasite. I told you I depend on you. I told you you make me exist for myself. How can you let me beg? How can you letmebeg?"
They stood facing each other in the middle of the room, his light eyes blazing down into hers.
"You—you're sure I'd be back in ten days?" she said.
And he had the presence of mind not to catch her to his heart.
From the moment she said she would go Ingram was a changed creature. He became brisk, business-like, cheerful. Not a trace was left of the exasperated wet man who had come round through the rain, and there were no more poetic images. He was reassuringly like a pleased elder brother, a brother all alert contentment. The table was cleared by his swift hands of the litter of her English studies, and the map out of theReichskursbuchspread on it; and with the help of an old Baedeker his sharp eyes had noticed lurking in a corner he expounded to her what she was to do. He wrote down her train from Meuk to Allenstein and her train from Allenstein to Berlin; he told her where she was to stay the night in Berlin, a city he appeared to know intimately; and he made a drawing in pencil of the streets that led to it from the station.
"The dotted line," he said, explaining his drawing, "is Ingeborg's little footsteps."
She was to stay at one of those refuges for timid ladies with connections in the Church which are scattered about Berlin and calledChristliche Hospiz, places where, besides coffee and rolls, there are prayers and a harmonium for breakfast. She was to meet him next day at the Anhalter station, that happy jump-off for the south, and he would leave Kökensee at once, perhaps that evening, and wait for her in Berlin. They would proceed to Venice intermittently, getting out of the train at various points in order to see certain things—there was a walk he wanted to take her across the hills of Lake Maggiore, for instance—
"But I've only ten days," she reminded him.
"Oh, you'll see. One can do a lot—" And there was Bergamo he wanted to show her; she would, he assured her, greatly love Bergamo; and certainly they would go to Pavia if only to see if the wistaria were still in flower.
Her eyes danced. The sight of the map and the time-table was enough. She hung over him eagerly, following his pointing finger as it moved over mountains and lakes. She was like a schoolboy watching the planning out of his first trip abroad. There was no room in her for any thoughts but thoughts of glee. The names were music to her—Locarno, Cannobio, Luino, Varese, Bergamo, Brescia, Venice. She lost sight of the higher aspect of the adventure, the picture, her position as indispensable assistant in the production of a great work; her brain was buzzing with just the idea of trains and places and new countries and utter fun. After the years of inaction in Kökensee, just to go in a train to Berlin would have been tremendous enough to set her blood pulsing; and here she was going on and on, farther and farther, into more and more light, more and more colour and heat and splendour and all new things, till actually at last she would reach it, the heart of the world, and be in Italy.
"Oh," she murmured, "but it's toogoodto be true—"
And the Rigi, which up to then had been the high-water mark of her experience, collapsed into a little lump of pale indifferent mould.
When the tea began to bump against the door and she went out to help the servant, Ingram put every sign of intending travel neatly away, and by the time Herr Dremmel joined them there was no hint of anything anywhere in the room but sobriety except in Ingeborg's eyes. They danced and danced. She longed to jump up and fling her arms round Robert's neck and tell him she was off to Italy. She wanted him to share her joy, to know how happy she was. She felt all lit up and bright inside, while Ingram, on the contrary, looked forbiddingly solemn. He presently began to make solemn comments on the change in the weather, and after hearing Herr Dremmel's view and sympathising with his gratification, said that as regarded himself it put an end to his work of preparation for the painting of Frau Dremmel's portrait, and therefore he was leaving the next morning and would take the opportunity, when Herr Dremmel presently retired to his laboratory, of making his farewells.
Herr Dremmel expressed polite regrets. Ingram politely thanked him. Ingeborg felt suddenly less lit up, and her eyes left off dancing. She wanted, for some odd reason, to slip her hand into Robert's. It grew and grew on her, the desire to go and sit very close to Robert. If only he would come, too, if only he would for once take a holiday and come and see these beautiful things with her, how happy they would all be! It seemed a forlorn thing to leave him there alone in the rain while she went jaunting off to Italy. Well, but he wouldn't come; he liked rain; and he wouldn't let her go, either, if she were frankly to ask him to. The example of Lady Missenden or of any of those well-known persons would not, she knew, move him. Nor would anything she could say on the shameful absurdity of supposing evil. Liberal though he was and large as were his scoffings at convention, he was not as liberal and large, she felt sure, as Ingram, and she suspected that the conventions he scoffed at were those which did not touch himself. She could not risk asking. She must go. She must, must go. Yet—
She got up impulsively, and on the pretext of taking his cup from him went to him and put her hand with a little stroking movement on his hair. Herr Dremmel did not observe it, but Ingram did; and after tea and until he left that evening not to see her again till they met at the Anhalter station in Berlin, he was amazingly natural and ordinary and cheery, more exactly like a brother than any brother that had ever been seen or imagined.
"Of course," he said quite at the last, turning back from the doorstep before finally committing himself to the liquid masses of the dissolved farmyard—"of course I candependon you?"
She laughed. She stood on the top step with the light of the lamp in the passage behind her, a little torch of resolution and adventure and imagination well let loose.
"I'm going to Italy," she said, flinging out both her arms as though she would put them round that land of dreams; and so complex is man and so simple in his complexity that Ingram went away in the wet twilight quite sincerely offering thanks to God.
But when it came to the moment of telling Robert about Berlin and shopping, her heart beat very uncomfortably. It was at tea-time the next afternoon. All day she had been trying to do it, but her tongue refused. At breakfast she tried, and at dinner she tried, and in between she went twice to the laboratory door and stood on the mat, and instead of going in went away again on the carefullest toe-tips. And there was Ingram getting to Berlin, got to Berlin, kicking his heels there waiting....
At tea-time, after a tempestuous walk in the wet during which, as she splashed through sodden miles of sad-coloured wilderness, she took her gods to witness that the thing should be done that afternoon, she did finally bring it out. She had meant to say with an immense naturalness that she wished to go to Berlin in order to buy boots. She had thought of boots as simple objects, quickly bought and resembling each other; not like hats or dresses which might lead later on to explanations. And she needed boots. She really would buy them. It would, she felt, help her to be natural if what she said so far as it went were true.
But so greatly was she chagrined in her soul that she should have to talk of boots at all instead of telling him, her Robert, her after allkindRobert, with delight of Italy and of her discoveries in beautiful new feelings, that when she had gulped and cleared her throat and gulped again and opened her mouth she found herself not talking of boots nor yet of Berlin, but addressing him with something of the indignant irrelevance of a suffragette who because she has been forcibly fed demands the vote.
He had, as his custom was, brought literature with him, and was sitting bent over his cup with the book propped against the hot-water jug. It was calledEliminierung der Minusvarianten, and was apparently, as all the books he brought to meals also were apparently, absorbing. The sound of the dripping of the rain on the ivy was unbroken at first except by the sound of Herr Dremmel drinking his tea, and the room was so gloomy under the pall of heavy sky that almost one needed a lamp.
"You see," said Ingeborg, most of the blood in her body surging up into her face as she suddenly, after ten minutes' silent struggle, leaned across the table and plunged into the inevitable, "my feeling so uncomfortable about a simple thing like this is really the measure of the subjection of women."
Herr Dremmel raised his head but not his eyes from his book, expressing thereby both a civilised attentiveness to anything she might wish to say and a continued interest in the sentence he was at. When he had finished it he looked at her over his spectacles, and inquired if she had spoken.
"Why should I not go and come unquestioned?" she asked, flushed with indignation that his prejudices should be forcing her to the low cunning that substituted boots for Italy. "Youdo."
He examined her impartially. "What do I do, Ingeborg?" he asked with patience.
"Go away when you want to and come back when you choose. You've been quite far. You went once to a place the other side of Berlin. Oh, I know it's business you go on, but I don't think that makes it any better—on the contrary, it isn't half as good a reason as going because it's beautiful to go, and fine and splendid. And it isn't as though I even had to ask you to give me money for it. I simply roll in that hundred a year you allow me. I haven't spent a quarter of it for years. My cupboard upstairs is stuffed with notes."
He looked at her, but finding it impossible to discover any meaning in her remarks began to read again.
"Robert—"
With patience he again removed his eyes from his book and looked at her. Beneath the table she was pressing her hands together, twisting them about in her lap.
"Well, Ingeborg?" he said.
"Don't you think it's unworthy, the way women have to ask permission to do things?"
"No," said Herr Dremmel; but he was thinking of theMinusvarianten, and it was mere chance that he did not say Yes.
"When husbands go away they don't ask their wives' permission, and it never would occur to the wives that they ought to. So why should the wives have to ask the husbands'?"
Herr Dremmel gazed at her a moment, and then made a stately, excluding, but entirely kindly movement with his right hand. "Ingeborg," he said, "I am not interested." And he began to read again.
She poured herself out some more tea, drank it hastily and hot, and said with a great effort, "It's nonsense about permissions. I—I'm going to Berlin."
Then she waited with her heart in her mouth and both hands clutching the edge of the table.
But nothing happened. He read on.
"Robert—" she said.
Once more he endeavoured to place his attention at her disposal, dragging it away reluctantly from his book. "Yes, Ingeborg?" he said.
"Robert—I'm going to Berlin."
"Are you, Ingeborg?" he inquired with perfect mildness.
"Why?"
"I've got to get things. Shop."
"And why Berlin, Ingeborg? Is not Meuk nearer?"
"Boots," she said. "There aren't any in Meuk. I neversawany in Meuk."
"And in Königsberg? That also is nearer than Berlin."
"You must have heard," she said, laying hold, because she was afraid, of the first words that came into her head, "of Berlin wool. Well, the same thing exactly applies to boots."
He stared at her as one who feels about for some point of contact with an alien intelligence.
"Naturally if you have to go you must," he said.
"Yes. For ten days."
"Ten, Ingeborg? On account of boots?"
She nodded defiantly, her hands beneath the table twisted into knots.
He adjusted his mind to the conception.
"Ten days for boots?"
"Ten, ten," she said recklessly, prepared to brave any amount of opposition. "I want to see a few things while I'm about it—the galleries, for instance. It isn't going to beallboots. I haven't stirred from here since our marriage, except to go to Zoppot—it's time I went—it's reallyridiculouslytime I went—"
"But," said Herr Dremmel, with the complete reasonableness of one who is indifferent and has no desire whatever to argue, "but naturally. Of course, Ingeborg."
"Then—you don't mind?"
"But why should I mind?"
"You—you're not even surprised?"
"But why should I be surprised?" And once again he reflected on her apparently permanent obtuseness to values.
She gazed at him with the astonishment of a child who has screwed itself up for a beating and finds itself instead being blessed. She felt relief, but a pained relief; an aggrieved, almost angry relief; such as he feels who putting his entire strength into the effort to lift a vessel he fears is too heavy for him finds it light and empty. Her soul, as it were, tumbled over backwards and sprawled.
"How funny!" she murmured. "How very funny! And here I've been afraid to tell you."
But once more he had ceased to listen. His eye had been caught by a statement on the page in front of him that interested him acutely, and he read with avidity to the end of the chapter. Then he got up with the book in his hand and went to the door, thinking over what he had read.
She sat looking after him.
"I expect—I think—I suppose I shall start to-morrow," she said as he opened the door.
"Start?" he repeated absently. "Why should you start?"
"Oh, Robert—I can't get there if I don't start."
"Get where, Ingeborg?" he asked, his eyes on hers but his thoughts in unimaginable distances.
"Oh, Robert—but to Berlin, of course."
"Berlin. Yes. Very well. Berlin."
And, deeply turning over the new and pregnant possibilities suggested to him by what he had just been reading, he went out.
As though to assure her of what she already knew, that she was on the threshold of the most glorious ten days of her life, the world when she looked out of the window next morning was radiant with sunshine and sparkling with freshness. Far away on the edge of Russia the great rain clouds that had come up to Kökensee from the west and folded it for two days in a stupor of mist were disappearing in one long purple line. The garden glistened and laughed. Sweet fragrances from the responsive earth hurried to meet the sun like eager kisses. If she had needed reassuring, this happy morning warm and scented would have done it; but now that the night was over, a time when those who are going to have doubts do have them, and the dark sodden days when if facts are going to be blurred they are blurred, she felt no scruples nor any misgivings—she had simply got to the beginning of the most wonderful holiday of her life.
Everything was easy. Robert went away after an early breakfast to his fields to see the improvement forty-eight hours' soaking must have made, and obviously did not mind her impending departure in the least; one of the horses, till lately lame, was recovered, Karl told her, and able to take her in to Meuk; the servant Klara seemed proud to be left in sole charge; the train left Meuk so conveniently that she would have time to visit Robertlet and Ditti on the way. Singing she packed her smallest trunk; singing she thrust money from the cupboard where it had so long lain useless into her blouse—one, two, three, ten blue German notes of a hundred marks each—while she wondered, but not much, if it would be enough, and wondered, but equally not much, if it would be too little; singing she pinned on unfamiliar objects such as a hat and veil, and sought out gloves; singing she handed over the keys to Klara; singing she stood on the steps watching Karl harness the horses. All the birds of Kökensee were singing, too, and the pig sunning itself in a thick ecstasy of appreciation also sang according to its lights, and it was not its fault, she thought excusingly, if what happened when it sang was that it grunted.
"Life is really the heavenliest thing," she said to herself, buttoning her gloves, her face sober with excess of joy. "Thethingsit has round its corners! The dear surprises of happiness." And when the buttons came off she didn't mind, but excused them, too, on the ground that they were not used to being buttoned, and let her gloves happily dangle. She would have excused everything that day. She would have forgiven everybody every sin.
Klara brought her out a packet of sandwiches with her luggage, and a little bunch of rain-washed flowers.
"How kind every one is!" she thought, smiling at Klara, wondering if she would mind very much if she kissed her, her heart one single all-embracing Thank you that reached right round the world. And then suddenly, just as Karl was ready and the carriage was actually at the door and the little trunk being put into it, and her umbrella and sandwiches and flowers, she ran back into the house and scribbled a note to Robert and put it on the table in his laboratory where he would not be able to avoid seeing it when he came in that afternoon.
"Ican'tnot tell him," was the thought that had winged her impulse, "Ican'tnot tell the truth this heavenly, God-given day of joy."
"It wasn't true about the boots," she wrote, inking her gloves, too frantically hurried to take them off. "I'm going to Italy with Mr. Ingram—to Venice—it's his picture—and of course other things, too on the way—if you think it over you won't really mind—I must run or I'll miss the train—
"INGEBORG."
And she climbed up into the carriage and drove off greatly relieved and strong in her faith, if you gave him time and quiet, in Robert's understanding of a thing so transparently reasonable. She would write again, she said to herself, a real letter from Berlin and put her points of view and Ingram's before him. Of course that was the right thing to do. Of course a highly intelligent man like Robert was bound ultimately to understand.
But her train did not get to Berlin till eleven o'clock that night, and when she reached theChristliche Hospizshe found a letter from Ingram telling her she must be at the Anhalter station next morning at nine, and though she meant to get up early and write she spent the time, being very tired, asleep instead, and it was only when the strains of a harmonium penetrated into her room and wandered round her head making slow Lutheran noises that she woke up and realised how nearly she was on the verge of missing the train to Italy.
Breakfastless and prayerless and almost without paying her bill she hurried forth from theChristliche Hospiz, her clothes full of an odd smell of naphthalin and the meals that had been eaten there before she arrived, the ancient meals of all the yesterdays. From the smell she concluded, cautiously and reluctantly sniffing while she put down both windows of her cab, that what they had to eat in theChristliche Hospizwas the chorales of the harmonium expressed in cabbage; and whether it was the cab or whether it was her clothes she did not know, but there inside it with her still was cabbage.
"It's the odour of piety," she explained hastily to Ingram when he on meeting her at the station looked at her with what she thought a severe inquiry.
"It's that you're within an ace of missing the train," he said, catching hold of her elbow and hurrying her down the platform to a door that still stood open, with an angry official, glaring dreadfully in spite of his tip, waiting beside it to shut it.
"I'm so sorry," she said, panting a little as she dropped into a corner of the carriage opposite him and the train slipped away from the station, "but I couldn't get here any sooner."
"Why couldn't you?" he asked, still severely, for he had spent a distressing and turbulent half hour. "You only had to get up in time."
"But I couldn't get up because I was asleep."
"Nonsense, Ingeborg. You could tell them to call you."
"Well, but I didn't tell them."
"And why don't you button your gloves? Here—I'll button them."
"You can't. There aren't any buttons."
"What? No buttons?"
"They came off."
"But why in heaven's name didn't you sew them on again?"
"Do buttons matter? I was in such a tremendous hurry to start." And she smiled at him a smile of perfect happiness.
"To come to me. To come to me," he said, his eyes on hers.
"Yes. And Italy."
"Italy! Well, you very nearly missed me. What would you have done then?"
"Oh, gone to Italy."
"What, just the same?"
"Well, ItalyisItaly, isn't it? Look at this sky. Isn't it wonderful to-day, isn't it perfectly glorious? Can the sky in Italy possibly be bluer than this?"
He made an impatient movement. "Choir-boy," he said; and added, catching sight of her finger-tips, "Why is your glove all over ink?"
"Because I wrote to Robert in it."
"What? You came away without saying anything at all?"
"Oh, no. I said all the things about Berlin and shopping, and he didn't mind a bit."
"There, now—didn't I tell you? But what did you write?"
"Oh, just the truth. That I'm going with you to Italy."
"What? You did?"
"I couldn't bear after all to start like that, in that—that lying sort of way."
"And you wrote that you were going with me?"
"Yes. And I said—"
"And he'll find the letter when he comes in?"
"Yes. He can't help seeing it. I put it on his laboratory table, right in the middle."
Ingram leaned forward, his face flushed, laughter and triumph in his eyes, and caught hold of her right hand in its inky glove.
"Adorable inkstains," he said, looking at them and then looking up at her. "You little burner of ships."
And as she opened her mouth in what was evidently going to be a question he hurried her away from it with a string of his phrases.
"You are all the happiness," he said, with an energy of conviction astonishing at half-past nine in the morning, "and all the music, and all the colour, and all the fragrance there is in the world."
"Then you haven't noticed the cabbage?" she asked, immensely relieved.
He let go her hand. "What cabbage?" he asked shortly, for it nettled him to be interrupted when he was spinning images, and it more than nettled him to be interrupted in the middle of an emotion.
But when she began—vividly—to describe the inner condition of theChristliche Hospizhe stopped her.
"I don't want to talk of anything ugly to-day," he said. "Not to-day of all days in my life." And he added, leaning forward again and looking into her eyes, "Ingeborg, do you know what to-day is?"
"Thursday," said Ingeborg.
The conductor—it was a corridor train, and though they had the compartment to themselves the passage outside was busy with people squeezing past each other and begging each other's pardons—came in to look at their tickets.
"There is a restaurant car on the train," he said in German, giving information with Prussian care, a disciplinary care for the comfort of his passengers, who were to be made comfortable, to be forced to use the means of grace provided, or the authorities would know the reason why.
"Yes," said Ingram.
"You do not change," said the conductor, with Prussian determination that his passengers should not, even if they wanted to and liked it, go astray.
"No," said Ingram.
"Not until Basel," said the conductor menacingly, almost as if he wanted to pick a quarrel.
"No," said Ingram.
"At Basel you change," said the conductor eyeing him, ready to leap on opposition.
"Yes," said Ingram.
"You will arrive at Basel at 11.40 to-night," said the conductor, in tones behind which hung "Do you hear? You've just got to."
"Yes," said Ingram.
"At Basel—"
"Oh, go tohell!" said Ingram, suddenly, violently, and in his own tongue.
The conductor immediately put his heels together and saluted. From the extreme want of control of the gentleman's manner he knew him at once for an officer of high rank disguised for travelling purposes in civilian garments, and silently and deferentially withdrew.
"If there's a restaurant car can I have some breakfast?" asked Ingeborg.
"Haven't you had any? You poor little thing. Come along."
She followed him out into the corridor, he going first to clear people out of the way and turning to give her his hand at the crossings from one coach to the next. The restaurant was in the front of the train, and it required perseverance and the opening of many difficult doors to get to it. Each time he turned to help her and gripped hold of her hand as they swayed against the sides and were bumped they looked at each other and laughed. What fun it all was, she thought, and how entirely new and delicious being taken care of as though she were a thing that mattered, a precious thing!
He had had breakfast in Berlin, but he sat watching her with an alert interest that missed not the smallest of her movements, very reminiscent in his attitude and pleasure of a cat watching its own dear mouse, observing it with a whiskered relish, its own dear particular mouse that it has ached for for years before it ever met it, filling itself dismally meanwhile with the wrong mice who disagreed with it—its mouse that, annexed and safely incorporated, was going to do it so much good and make it twice the eat it was before; and he buttered her roll for her, and poured out her tea, and did all the things a cat would do in such a situation if it were a man, pleased that its mouse should fatten, aware that anything it ate and drank would ultimately, so to speak, remain in the family.
The splendid June morning, the last morning of June, shone golden through the long, continuous windows of the car. The fields of the Mark lay bathed in light. It was early still, but it had already begun to be hot, and haymakers straightening themselves to watch the train go by wiped their faces, and the prudent cows were gathered in the shade of trees, and in the ear the ventilator twirled and hummed, and the waiter in his white linen jacket who brought her strawberries, each one of which had been examined and passed as fit and sound by the proper authorities suitably housed in Berlin in buildings erected for the purpose, was a credit to the Prussian State Railway by-law which decrees, briefly and implacably, that waiters shall be cool.
She pulled out one of the blue German hundred mark notes from her blouse when he brought the bill, and more of them came out with it.
"What on earth is all that for?" Ingram asked.
"To pay with. And you must tell me how much my ticket was to—wasn't it Locarno you said we got out at?"
"You can't go about with money loose like that. Give it to me. I'll take care of it for you."
She gave it to him, nine blue notes out of her blouse and the change of the tenth out of a little bag she had brought and was finding great difficulty, so much unused was she to little bags, in remembering.
"I hope it's enough," she said. "Don't forget I've got to get back again."
He laughed, tucking the notes away into his pocket-book. "Enough? It's a fortune. You can go to the end of the world with this," he said.
"Isn't it all glorious, isn't it all too wonderful to be true?" she said, her face radiant.
"Yes. And the most glorious part of it is that you can't go anywhere now," he said, putting the pocket-book in his breast pocket and patting it and looking at her and laughing, "without me."
"But I don't want to. I'd muchrathergo with you. It's so extraordinarily sweet that you want me to. You know, I never can quite believe it."
He bent across the table. "Little glory of my heart," he murmured.
The waiter came back with the change.
"I wish Robert were here," said Ingeborg, gazing round her out of the windows with immense contentment. "If only he could have got away I believe he'd have loved it."
Ingram pushed back his chair with a jerk. "I don't think he'd have loved it at all," he said; and going back through the length of the train to their compartment though he helped her at the difficult places, it was by putting out his hand behind him for her to clutch, he did not this time turn round and look into her eyes and laugh.
It grew very hot as the day wore on, and extremely dusty. The thunderstorm that had deluged East Prussia had not come that way, and there had been no rain from the look of things for a long while. The dust came in in clouds, and they were obliged to shut the windows, but it still came in through chinks and settled all over them and choked them, and even lay in the delicate details of Ingeborg's nose. He had made her take off her hat and veil, so she had nothing to protect her, and he watched her with a singular annoyance turning gradually drab-coloured. He wanted to lean forward and dust her, he hated to see her whiteness being soiled, it fidgeted him intolerably. He himself stood long train journeys badly; but though it was so hot, so insufferably hot, she was as active and restless as a child, continually jumping up and running out into the dreadful blazing corridor to see what there was to see that side.
They passed Weimar; and she was of an intemperate zeal on the subject of Goethe, putting down the window and craning out to look and quotingKennst Du das Land wo die Citrone blüht—quoting to him, who loathed quotations even in cool weather. They passed Eisenach; and again she displayed zeal, talking eagerly of Luther and the Wartburg and the inkpot and the devil—and of St. Elizabeth, of course: he knew she would get to St. Elizabeth. She told him the legends—told him who knew all legends, told him who had a headache and could only keep alive by going into the lavatory and plunging his head every few minutes into cold water, and she did not in the least mind when she craned out of the window to look at things that she should come back into the carriage again with her hair in every sort of direction and her face not only dusty but with smuts.
At the hottest moment of the day he felt for a lurid instant as if it were not one choir-boy he was with but the entire choir having its summer treat and being taken by him single-handed for a long dog-day to the Crystal Palace; but that was after luncheon in the restaurant car, a luncheon that seemed to his fevered imagination to consist of bits of live cinder served in sulphur and eaten in a heaving, swaying lake of brimstone. Even the waiter who attended to their table was, in the teeth of regulations, a melted man; and when the inspector passed through, looking about him with the eye of a Prussian eagle to see that all was in order and the standard set by law was being reached of cool waiters and hot food and tepid passengers, he instantly pounced on the manifestly melted waiter who, unable to deny the obvious fact that he was beaded, put his heels together and endeavoured to escape a fine by anxious explanation that he knew he was in a perspiration but that it was a cold one.
They were having tea when they passed Frankfurt, and dinner when they passed Heidelberg. A great full moon was rising behind the castle at Heidelberg, and the Neckar was a streak of light. The summer day was coming to an end in perfect calm. The quiet roads leading away into woods and through orchards were starred on either side with white flowers. In the dusk it was only the white flowers that still shone, the stitchworts, the clusters of Star of Bethlehem, the spikes of white helleborine; and all the colours of the day, the blue of the chickory and delicate lilac of dwarf mallows, the bright yellow of wood loosestrife and rose-colour of campions, were already put out for the night.
Ingeborg gazed through the window with the face of a happy goblin. Her eyes looked brighter than ever out of their surrounding smuts, and her hair was all ends, little upright ends that stirred in the draught. The dreadful day, the hours and hours of heat and choking airlessness, had made no impression on her apparently, except to turn her from clean to dirty, while Ingram lay back in his corner a thing hardly human, wanting nothing now in the world but cold water poured over him and he to lie while it was poured on a slab of iced marble. But the sun was down at last, dew was falling and quieting the dust, and the final journey to the restaurant car had been made, a journey on which it was Ingeborg who opened the doors and nobody helped anybody at the crossings. He had walked behind her, and had fretfully observed her dress and how odd it was, like old back numbers of illustrated papers, the sleeves wrong, the skirt wrong, too much of it in places, too little in others, but mostly there was too much, for it was the year when women were skimpy.
"You'll have to get some clothes in Italy," he said to her at dinner.
"What for?" she asked, surprised.
"What for? To put on," he said with a limp acerbity.
But now at last between Strassburg and Bâle, when all glare had finally departed and the lamp in their compartment was muffled into grateful gloom by the shade he drew across it, and the windows were wide open to the great dusky starry night, and a thousand dewy scents were stirred in the fields as the train passed through them, he began to feel better.
At his suggestion she had gone out and washed her face, so that he could look at it again, delicately fair in the dusk, with satisfaction. And presently because of some curves the rails took the moon shone in on her while he still sat in shadow, and her face, turned upwards to the stars with the wonder on it of her happiness, once more seemed to him the most spiritual thing he had yet found in a woman—unconscious spirit, exquisitely independent and aloof. He watched her out of the shadow of his corner for a long time, taking in every curve and line, trying to fix her look of serenity and clear content on his memory, the expression of an inner tranquillity, of happy giving oneself up to the moment that he had not seen before except in children. To watch her like that soothed him gradually quite out of the fever and fret of the day. As his habit was, he forgot his other mood as if he had never had it. Growing cool and comfortable with the growing coolness of the night, his irritations, and impatiences, and desire—it had for several hours in the afternoon been paramount with him—for personal absence from her, were things wiped out of recollection. He forgot, in the quiet of her attitude, that she had ever been restless, and in her expressive and beautiful silence that she had ever quoted, and, watching her whiteness, that she had ever been drab. She was, he thought considering her, his head very comfortable now on the cushions and a most blessed draught deliciously lifting his hair, like the soft breast of a white bird. She was like diamonds, only that she was kind and gentle. She was like spring water on a thirsty day. She was like a very clear, delicate white wine. Yes; but what was it she was most like?
He searched about for it in his mind, his eyes on her face; and presently he found it, and leaned forward out of the shadow to tell her.
"Ingeborg," he said, and at the moment he entirely meant it, "you are like the peace of God."
At Bâle there was hurry and bustle, the half hour they ought to have had there wasted away by some unaccountable loosening of the bandages of discipline on the German side to four minutes—the conductor when questioned said the engine had gone wrong, and explained, with a shrug that was to help hide his shame in this failure of the infallible, that engines were but human—and again there was an undignified scamper down steps and up steps and along platforms, and they arrived panting, pushed in by porters, only just in time into a compartment studded round with sleeping Swiss.
Ingram left Ingeborg sitting temporarily on the edge of the seat clasping her umbrella and coat and little bag, while he walked through the train in search of more space, refusing to believe such a repulsive thing could happen to him as that he should be obliged to travel to Bellinzona with four sleeping Swiss; but the train seemed to be a popular one, else a national festival was preparing or some other upheaval that caused people to move about that night in numbers, and all the compartments were full.
He went back to Ingeborg in a condition of resentful gloom. The four Swiss were sleeping in the four corners, and the carriage smelt of crumbs. He opened the window, and there was an immediate simultaneous resurrection of the four Swiss into angry life. Ingram, fluent in French, met them with an equal volubility, standing with his back to the open window protecting it from their assaults, while Ingeborg looked on in alarm; but the conductor when he came pronounced in favour of the four Swiss. Pacified, they instantly fell asleep again; and Ingram, at least not taking care of their legs, strode out into the corridor, where he stood staring through the open window at midnight nature and cursing himself for not having broken the journey at Bâle, while Ingeborg peeped anxiously at his back round her coat and her umbrella.
From Bâle to Lucerne he was as unaware of her as if he had never met her, so very angry was he and so very tired. Then at Lucerne two of the Swiss got out, and turning round he saw her asleep in the compartment, tumbled over a little to one side, still holding her things, and once again she filled his heart. She was utterly asleep, in the most uncomfortable position, dropped away in the middle of how she happened to be sitting like a child does or a puppy; and he went in and sat down beside her and lifted her head very cautiously and gently on to his arm.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him along his sleeve without moving, in a sort of surprise.
"This is Lucerne," he whispered, bending down; how soft she was, and how little!
"Is it? Why, that's where Robert and I—"
But she was asleep again.
She slept till he woke her up before Bellinzona, and so she never knew the moment she had thrilled to think of when they would in the dawn of the summer morning come out on the other side of the St. Gothard into what, in spite of anything the Swiss might say, was Italy; and still half asleep, mechanically putting on her hat and pausing to rub her eyes while he urged her to be quick, she did not realise where she was. When she did, and looked eagerly at the window, it was to turn to him immediately in consternation.
"Oh!" she said.
"Yes," said Ingram, passing his hand quickly over his hair, a gesture of his when annoyed.
It was raining.
They got out on to what seemed the most melancholy platform in the world, a grey wet junction with a grey level sky low down over it and over all the country round it. The Locarno train was waiting, and they went to it in silence. It was a quarter to six, a difficult time of day. The train, almost empty, jogged slowly through the valley of the Ticino. Down the windows raindrops chased each other. On the road alongside the railway, a road bound also for Locarno and dreary with brown puddles, an occasional high cart crawled drawn by a mule and driven by a huddled human being beneath a vast umbrella. The lake when they came in sight of it was a yawn of mist.
Ingeborg stared out at these things in silence. It was incredible that this should be Italy—again in spite of anything the Swiss might say—while on the other side of the Alps all Germany, including Kökensee, lay shimmering in light and colour. Ingram sat in the farthest corner of the carriage, his hands thrust in his pockets, his hat pulled over his eyes, looking straight in front of him. He was a mass of varied and profound exasperations. Everything exasperated him, even to the long trickle slowly creeping towards him down the floor from Ingeborg's wet umbrella. There was nothing she could have said or done at that moment that would not have rubbed his exasperation into a flame of swift and devastating speech. Luckily she said and did nothing, but sat quite silent with her face turned away towards the blurred window panes. But if she did not speak or do she yet was; and he was acutely conscious, though he never took his eyes off the cushions opposite, of every detail of her in that grey and horrible light, of her crumpled clothes, her drooping smudgedness, her hat grown careless, and her hair in wisps. He had wanted to show her Italy, he had extraordinarily wanted to show her Italy in its summer magnificence, and there was—this. As a result what he now extraordinarily wanted was to upbraid her. He did not stop to analyse why.
At the hôtel in Locarno where they went for baths and breakfast—he had planned originally to show her the beautiful walk from there along the side of the lake to Cannobio, but now beyond baths and breakfast he had no plan—a person in shirt sleeves and a green apron who inadequately represented the hall-porter, for it was not yet seven and the hall-porter was still in bed, unintelligently and unfortunately spoke to Ingeborg of Ingram in his hearing asMonsieur votre père.
This strangely annoyed Ingram. "It's your short skirt," he said, with suppressed sulphur. "You positively must get some clothes. Dressed like that you suggest perambulators."
"But this is mybestdress," she protested. "It's quite new. I mean, I've never had it on before since it was made."
And with the easy tactlessness of one who has not yet learned to be afraid, she looked at him and laughed.
"Why," she said, "this morning I'm perambulators and only last night, quite late last night, I was the peace of God."
To this, however, he did not trust himself to reply, but vanished with a kind of pounce into his bathroom.
He came to breakfast clean, but in a mood that could bear nothing, least of all good temper. Ingeborg was by nature good tempered. She sat there pleased and refreshed—after all, he remembered resentfully, she had had five hours' sleep in the train while he had not had a wink—gaily making the best of things. She pointed out the strength of the coffee and the crispness of the rolls. She asked him if he did not think it a nice hôtel. She did not agree when he alluded to the waiter as blighted. She predicted a break in the weather at eleven, and said that it had always come true what her old nurse used to tell her, that rain at seven meant fine at eleven.
He hated her old nurse.
Until he had had some sleep, a long steady sleep, he would, he knew, be nothing but jarred nerves. When then after breakfast she inquired, with a cheerful air of being ready for anything, what they were going to do next, he briefly announced that he was going to sleep.
"Oh? Shall I have to go, too?" she asked, her face falling.
"Of course not."
"Then," she said eagerly, "I'll go out and explore."
"What, in this rain?"
"Oh, I've got goloshes."
Goloshes! He retreated into his room.
It annoyed him intensely that she should be not only ready but pleased to go out for her first walk in Italy without him. He threw himself angrily on the bed, rang the bell, and bade the person who answered it, the same young man in shirt sleeves and a green apron who had welcomed them, tell Madame that if he were not awake by luncheon time she was not to wait for him, but was to have luncheon at the proper hour just the same.
The young man sought out Ingeborg in her room. She was tugging on her goloshes, one foot on a chair, her face flushed with effort and expectancy.
"Monsieur votre père—" he began.
"Ce n'est pas mon père," said Ingeborg, turning an amused face to him as she tugged.
"Monsieur votre mari—"
"Quoi? Certainement pas," said Ingeborg, who in spite of her prize for French was unacquainted with the refinements of that language. "Ce n'est pas mon mari," she said, energetically repudiating.
"Ah—Monsieur n'est pas le mari de Madame," said the young man trippingly.
"Certainement pas," said Ingeborg. "Mon mari est à la maison."
"Ah—tiens," said the young man.
"C'est mon ami," said Ingeborg.
"Ah—tiens, tiens," said the young man; and he delivered his message with a sudden ease and comfort of manner.
But though the young man's manner grew easy, after his report of this brief dialogue the hôtel's manner grew stiff, for on the slip of paper presented to Ingram to be filled in with his name he had, unaware of the things Ingeborg was saying, described himself and her as Mr. and Mrs. Dobson, and the hôtel, in which English Church services were held, and which was at that moment, though the season was over, being stayed in by several representative English spinsters, and a clergyman also from England with a wife and grown-up daughters, most respectable nice ladies who all took him out every day twice, once after breakfast and once after tea, for a little walk—the hôtel decided, putting its heads together in the manager's office, that it would, using tact, encourage the Dobsons to depart.
It could do nothing, however, for the moment, for the lady had disappeared with an umbrella into the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, was sleeping; and this condition of things continued for many hours, the lady not coming into luncheon but remaining in the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, going on sleeping. Then it became aware that they were both having tea in a distant corner of the slippery windowed wilderness of bamboo chairs and tables described in its prospectus as the Handsome Palmy Lounge, and that they had drawn up a second table to the one their tea was on and piled it with undesirably dripping branches of the yellow broom that grew high up in the hills, and that they were being noticed with suspicion by the hôtel's authentic guests who were used to having their tea in the silent stupor of the really married, because the gentleman, contrary to the observed habits of genuine husbands, was talking to the lady instead of reading theDaily Mail.
The hôtel was nothing if not competent. It could handle any sort of situation competently, from runaway couples to that most unpleasant form of guest of all, the kind that came alive and went away dead. Full of tact, it allowed the lady and gentleman to finish their tea undisturbed; then it sent some one sleek to inform them that, most unfortunately, their rooms had been engaged for weeks beforehand for that very night, and therefore—
But before this person could even begin to be competent the gentleman requested him to have a carriage round in half an hour as he intended going on that evening; and thus the parting was accomplished, as all partings should be, urbanely, and the manager was able to display his doorstep suavity and bow and wish them a pleasant journey.
The Dobsons departed in a gay mood, with the branches of yellow broom rhythmically nodding between them over the edge of the waterproof apron that buttoned them in. Ingram had slept soundly for seven hours, and felt altogether renewed. He was taking her to Cannobio, along the road he had hoped to walk with her in sunshine; but Ingeborg, who had climbed hills till her blood raced and glowed, saw peculiar beauties even in the wetness, and would not believe that sun could make things lovelier. Outside Locarno, in that flat and grassy place beyond the town where the beautiful small hills draw back for a little from the lake, and the ox-eyed daisies grow so big, and the roads are strewn white with the blossoms of acacias, it stopped raining and Ingram had the hood put down. The mountains on the other side of the lake were indigo-coloured, with pulled-off tufts of woolly clouds lying along them down near the water. The lake was a steely black. The valley brooded in sullen lushness; and the branches of broom they carried with them in the carriage cut through the sombre background like a golden knife.
"The one doubt I have," said Ingeborg, breathing in the warm scented air in long breaths, "is that it's all too good to be true."
"It isn't," said Ingram, safely disentangled for a while from the intricate effect on his enthusiasms of fatigue and dirt and headaches, "it's absolutely good and absolutely true. But only," he said, turning and looking at her, "because you're here, you dear close sister of my dreams. Without you it would be nothing but grey empty space in which I would just hang horribly."
"You wouldn't. You couldn't not be happy in this," she said, gazing about her.
"If you weren't here I wouldn't see it," said Ingram, firmly believing it in the face of the fact that nothing ever escaped his acute vision. "I see all this only through you. You are my eyes. Without you I go blind, I grope about with the light gone out. You don't know what you are to me, you little shining crystal thing—you don't begin to realise it, my dear, my dear sweet Found-at-Last."
"And this morning," said Ingeborg, smiling at him, but only with a passing smile on her way to all the other things she wanted to look at, "you said I suggested perambulators."
For a space they drove on in silence, for he deplored her trick of reminding him of past moods. But beyond Ascona, where the mountains come down to the lake and leave only just room enough between them and the water for the road to twist through, he recovered again, consoled by her joy in the beauty of the drive and unable to see her happiness without feeling pleased. After all, what he most loved in her was that she was, so miraculously, a child; a child with gleams of wisdom flickering like a lizard's tongue in her mouth, and who even when she was silly was silly also somehow in gleams—gleams of silver and sunshine. And always at the back of her, far away, hidden in what he thought of as depths of burning light, was that elusive thing by which he was so passionately attracted, the thing he was going to paint, the thing his own secret self crept to, knowing that here was warmth, here was understanding, her dear, dear little soul.
The evening at Cannobio was unsatisfactory. Ingeborg manifestly enjoyed herself, but it was with an absorption in what she was seeing and an obliviousness to himself that seemed to him both excessive and tiresome. Here was everything to make two people so happily alone whisper—warmth, dusk, the broad shadow of plane-trees, unruffled water, lights romantically twinkling in corners, the twanging of a distant guitar, laughter and singing and the glint of red wine from the little lit-up tables along the front of the restaurants beneath the arcade at the back of the piazza, and he there, Ingram, after all a person of real importance, Edward Ingram at her feet, only asking to be allowed to explain to her in every variety of phrase how sweet she was. But she was dead to her opportunities. There wasn't another woman in Europe, he told himself angrily, who would not have whispered.
They wandered out of their hôtel after dinner, a square pink Italian albergo facing the lake where the town left off, and free, as indeed Cannobio altogether was, from transitory English with their awful eyes, and they strolled about looking at things. He did not look much, for he knew these Italian sights and sounds by heart, and at that moment only wanted to look at her; but the least little thing caught her attention away from him absolutely, to the exclusion of anything he might be saying. Positively she even preferred to listen to the throb of the steamer coming nearer from the other end of the lake than to him; and she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence that intimately concerned herself to stand still in the piazza and ask him what he thought of the smells.
"I don't think about them at all," he said shortly.
"Oh, but there are such a lot of them," she exclaimed, sorting them out with her lifted nose. "There's the smell of roses, and the smell of lake, and the smell of frying, and there's more roses, and then there's garlic, and then there's a quite dim one, and then there's a little puff of something else—I don't know what—sheer Italy, I expect.Inever smelt so many smells," she ended, with a gesture of astonishment.
He tried to get her away from them. He led her to a bench beneath a plane-tree. "Come and sit by me and I will tell you things," he said, luring her. "Look, there's the moon got free from the clouds—and do you see how the coloured lights of the steamer that's coming shine right down a ladder of light into the water? And what do you think of the feel of the air, little sister? Isn't it soft and gentle? Doesn't it remind you of all kind and tender things?"
"But much the most wonderful of anything are these smells," she said, absorbed in them. "There are at least twelve different ones."
"Never mind them. I want to talk."
"But they're so amusing," she said. "There are interesting ones, and exciting ones, and beautiful ones, and disquieting ones, and awful ones, and too-perfect-for-anything ones, and they're all chasing each other up and down and round and round us."
He lit a cigarette. "There," he said, "that will blot the whole lot of them into only one, and you'll talk to me reasonably. Let us talk while we can, my dear. In a little time we shall be dead to all feeling for ever and ever."
"Yes, we shall be little shreds of rottenness," she said placidly.
"God, who wastes a sunset every night—" he said, getting up to stamp on the match he had thrown away—
"If they were mine," she interrupted, "I'd keep them all in a gallery or a portfolio."
"—understands, I suppose," he went on, sitting down again, "why such dear things as this evening here, this time of being alone together here, should end and be forgotten."
"As long as I live," she said with earnestness, "it will not be forgotten. All my other memories will be like a string of—oh, just beads and nuts and fir-cones, till I get to this one, and then on the string there'll be suddenly a shining jewel."
"Really? Really?" he murmured, stopping to look into her eyes, revived by this speech. "Little flame in my heart, really?"
"Oh," said Ingeborg dreamily, in her husky, soft voice, "but the wonderfullest thing, the wonderfullest jewel. My first Italian town—Cannobio...."
He ceased to be revived. He smoked in silence. The effect on her of Italy was as surprising as it was unexpected. At Kökensee she had been entirely concentrated on him, eagerly listening only to him, drinking in only what he said, worshipping. Here she seemed possessed by a rage for any sights and sounds merely because they were new. There had been moments from the very start in Berlin when he almost felt of secondary interest, and they appeared to be becoming permanent. It was disturbing. It was incredible. It was grotesque. Perhaps it would be as well to take her away from the lakes, from all that part of the country which apparently caught her imagination on its most sensitive side. Perhaps Milan for a while, with pavements and museums.
"Please, will you give me some of that money?" she asked across his reflections.
"Which money?" he said, looking at her.
"My money."
"What on earth for?"
"I want to send Robert a picture postcard."
He threw his cigarette away. "It would be most improper," he said, passing his hand rapidly over his hair. "Highly improper."
"Improper?" she echoed, staring at him. "To send Robert a picture postcard?"
"Grossly. It simply isn't done."
"What? Not send Robert—but he'd like to see where we've got to."
"For heaven's sake don'ttalkabout Robert," he exclaimed, getting up quickly; the idea of the picture postcard profoundly shocked him.
"Not talk about him?" she repeated, staring at him in astonishment. "But he's my husband."
"Exactly. That's what makes him so improper."
"What? Why, I thought husbands were just the very things that never could be improper."
"Ingeborg," he said, walking angrily up and down in front of her, "are you or are you not being taken care of on this—this holiday by me? Are you or are you not travelling with me?"
"Yes, I know. But I don't see why I shouldn't send Rob—"
"Well, then, if you don't see you must believe. You've just got to believe me when I tell you certain things are impossible."
"But Robert—"
"Good heavens, don'ttalkof Robert. If I beg you not to, if I tell you it spoils things for me, if I ask you as a favour—" He stopped in front of her. "My dear, my little mate, my everything that's central and alive among the husks—"
"Of course I won't, then. At least, I'll try to remember not to," she said, looking at him with a smile that had effort in it as well as surprise. "But I don't see why a picture postcard—"
The steamer they had seen for so long, the last one of the day from Arona to Locarno, was nearing the pier, and the piazza suddenly swarmed with busy groups preparing to go on it or see each other off.
"Let's come away," said Ingram, impatiently. "Let's comeaway!" he repeated with a stamp of his foot. "I hate this crowd."
She got up and walked beside him towards the hôtel, her eyes on the ground.
"I really can't see why I shouldn't send Robert—" she began.
"Oh, damn Robert!" he exclaimed violently.
She looked at him. "Damn Robert?" she echoed, immensely surprised. "But—don't youlikeRobert?"
"No," said Ingram. "No," he said, even louder. "Not here. Not now. Now don't," he added in extreme irritation as he saw her mouth opening, "ask me why, don't ask me to explain. Go to bed, Ingeborg. It's time all children under ten were in bed. And get up early, please, because we're going to start the first thing for—anyhow, for somewhere else."
Ingram was not only a great painter, he was practised in minor accomplishments, and among them was the art of running away. He had done it several times and had attained fluency. Indeed, so easy had practice made it that it grew to be hardly running so much as walking. He walked away, at last quite leisurely, from an uncommenting wife to a lady whose affection for him was invariably already so great that there was nothing left for it to do but to decline; and when it had declined, assisted and encouraged in various ways by him, the chief cooling factor being his expressed impatience to get to his painting again undisturbed by non-essentials—each lady found it cooling to be called a non-essential—he avoided the part that is sometimes a little difficult, the part in which recriminations are apt to gather like clouds about a sunset, the part that lies round ends, by skilful treatment, by a gradual surrounding of her who was now not so much a lover as a patient with an atmosphere of affection for her home. She came by imperceptible degrees to thirst for her home. She came to thirst, and such was his skill that she thirsted healthily, for her husband or her father or whoever it was she had left, for worries, catastrophes, disgrace—for anything so long as it was so obliging as not to be love. If poorer in other ways she departed at least richer in philosophy, without a trace of jealousy of what he might do next, not minding what he did if only she did not have to do it, too, and he, until such time as he again was lured from paths of austerity and work by the hope that he had found the one predestined mate, enjoyed the condition in which he was altogether happiest, the freedom of spirit that disdains love.
But how different from those comfortable excursions, as straightforward and as uneventful to him in their transitory salubrious warming as bread and milk, was this running away! It was distressingly different. Almost, except that he had no desire to laugh, ridiculously different. The first step, the process of the actual removal from Kökensee to Berlin, from legality to illicitness, had in its smoothness been positively glib; and he had supposed that, once alone together, love-making, which was the very marrow of running away—else why run?—would follow with a similar glibness. Nothing, however, seemed less inclined to follow. The only things that did follow were two confused exasperating days in which his moods varied with every hour, almost at last with everything she said. The capaciousness of her beliefs and acceptances amazed him. They were as capacious as her enthusiasms. She believed so firmly what he had told her over there away in Kökensee, where of course a man had to say things in order to get a beginning made, about the friendly frequent journeyings of other people, she had so heartily accepted his assurance that it was absurd and disgraceful in its suggestion of evil-mindedness not to travel frankly anywhere with anybody—"Are we not the children of light, you and I?" he had asked her—the things a man says! he thought; but they should not be brought up against him in this manner, clad in an invincible armour of acceptance—"And shall we be hindered in our free comings and goings by the dingy scruples of those heavy others, the groping and afraid children of darkness?"—that plainly the idea that she was doing anything even remotely wrong had not occurred to her. The basis of her holiday was this belief in frank companionship. She had no difficulty, he observed, himself infinitely fretted by this constant closeness to her, in being just a frank companion. She was so carelessly secure in friendship, so empty of any thought beside, that she could and did say things to him which said by any other woman in the same situation would have instantly led to lovemaking. But Ingram, who was fastidious, could no more make love to her, violently begin, robustly stand no nonsense, so long as she was steeped in obliviousness, than he could to a child or a chair. There must be some response, some consciousness. Her obtuseness to the real situation was so terribly healthy minded that it was almost a disease; the awful candour of soul of bishops' daughters and pastors' wives appalled him.
For three days the weather continued heavy, pressing down on his eyes. He did not sleep. He was all nerves. In the morning, a time he had not yet known her in, for at Kökensee they were together only in the afternoons, she produced the effect on him of some one different and in some subtle annoying way strange. Was it because she flickered more in the mornings? He could not describe it better than that—she flickered. She always flickered mentally, her thoughts just giving each subject a little lick and then blowing off it to something else, but in the afternoons and evenings the flickering was often beautiful, or at those warmer more indulgent hours it seemed so, and in the morning it was not. A man in the morning wants somebody pinned down for a companion, somebody reasonable and fixed. Nothing but a rather silent reasonableness, and if enunciations are unavoidable brief ones, go well with coffee and with rolls. At breakfast he found he could hardly speak to her so exceedingly then was she on his nerves—her dreadful healthy restedness when he had been tossing all night, her fearful readiness for the new day when he had not even begun to recover from the old one, her regularity of enthusiasm, her punctual happiness. And every evening he was in love with her.
He was exasperated. This being with her among the hills and lakes of Italy that he had thought of as going to be the sweetest time he had known was sheer exasperation; for even in the evenings when he was in love with her—the condition, indeed, set in at any time from tea onwards, and could on occasion be induced before tea if she happened to say the right things—he was irritably in love, and hardly knew whether it would give him more satisfaction to shake her or to kiss her. And annoying and perplexing as her untroubled conscience was it was yet not so annoying and perplexing as her wild joy in Italy. Who would not be galled by the discovery that he has become a background? Who would have supposed that she who in Kökensee thought him so wonderful, so clearly realised who he was, who walked with him there in the rye-fields and offered him every sort of incense that sweet words could invent, would, let loose in Italy, take the background he had so carefully chosen for his lovemaking and hug it to her heart and be absorbed in it and adore it beyond reason, and that he himself would turn into the background—incredible as it seemed, into just the background of his own background?
When he took her up into the hills, into solitary places where the chestnut woods went on for miles and no one ever came but charcoal-burners, he was not, as it were, there. When he took her on the lake in a sailing-boat and they hung motionless on the goodwill of the wind, he was not there, either. When they rested after a hot climb, deep in some high meadow not yet reached by the ascending haymakers, and through the stalks of its bee-haunted flowers, its delicate bending scabious and frail ragged-robins, could see little bits of lake far below and the white villages on the mountains opposite, and the whole world was only asking to be made a frame of for love, where, he inquired of himself, in the picture that was in her mind and irradiating her eyes, was he? He had not imagined, so far behind him were his own discoveries of the new, that any one could be so greedily absorbed. Watching her, while she watched everything except him, he decided he would take her to Milan. He would try something ugly. Milan this heavy hot weather ought to give her back to him if anything would. They would stay in a street where there were tramcars and noises, and they would frequent museums. They would walk much on pavements, and have their food in English tea-rooms. While the cure was in progress she might be getting herself some decent clothes, for really her clothes were distressing, and when it was accomplished, and she was thoroughly bored with things, and had come back to being aware of him, he would carry her off to Venice and begin work—work, the best thing in life, the one thing that keeps on yet is never monotonous, the supreme thing always new and joyful. But he was afraid of Venice. Venice was too beautiful. She would not sit quiet there while he painted her; she would want to go out and look. Impossible to take her there until she had learned to blot out everything in the world with his image alone. This blotting out, he perceived, would have to be achieved in Milan, and quickly. He was starving for his work. So acute was his hunger to begin the great picture that right underneath all his other emotions and wishes and moods was a violent impatience at being kept from it by what his subconsciousness alluded to with resentful incorrectness as a parcel of women.