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. _Any_ day 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 all _that_. 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. _He_ went 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. I _see_ his 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 advanced _en 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.
"Ingeborg," he said the moment he was in the parlour, "I can't stand
this. I can't endure _this_ sort 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 never _expected_--" 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 me _trouble_!" 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 let _me_ beg?"
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.