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. "The _things_ it 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.
"I _can't_ not tell him," was the thought that had winged her impulse,
"I _can't_ not 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 the _Christliche Hospiz_ she 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 the _Christliche 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 the _Christliche
Hospiz_ was 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, Italy _is_ Italy, 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 the
_Christliche Hospiz_ he 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 to _hell_!" 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 much _rather_ go 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 quoting
_Kennst 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."