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 the
_Reichskursbuch_ spread 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 called
_Christliche 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 too _good_ to 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 can _depend_ on 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 all
_kind_ Robert, 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 called _Eliminierung 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. "_You_ do."
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 the _Minusvarianten_,
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 never _saw_ any 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 be _all_ boots. I haven't
stirred from here since our marriage, except to go to Zoppot--it's time
I went--it's really _ridiculously_ time 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.