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.
It was the evening at Luino that he definitely decided on Milan.
They had walked that day along the wooded paths that lead ultimately
across to Ponte Tresa, and she had once again, on returning to Luino and
seeing a revolving column of picture postcards outside a tobacconist's
shop and catching sight of some that showed the place of rocks and
falling water in which they had eaten their luncheon, wanted to send one
to Robert. She had not said so, but she had hovered round the column
looking hungry. Picture postcards seemed to have a dreadful fascination
for her; and as for Ingram, the mere sight of them at this point of
their journey made him see red. He had instantly observed her hungry
hovering, and had flared out into a leaping rebuke in which there was
more of the angry schoolmaster than the lover. He had felt it himself,
and seen, quick as he was to see, a little look of surprised and
questioning fear for a moment in her eyes.
"Well, it's because you're always thinking of Robert," he flashed at her
in an attempt that caught fire on the way to apologise.
"Not _always_," she said hesitatingly, with a smile that for the first
time was propitiating; and the accidents of the pavement making him walk
for a few yards in front of her she found herself looking at his back,
his high thin shoulders and the rims of his ears, with a startled
feeling of entire strangeness.
A dim thought rose and disappeared again somewhere in the back of her
mind, a whisper of a thought, hardly breathed and gone again--"I'm
_used_ to Robert."
He took her to Milan next day. That loud and sweltering city was, by its
hot dulness, to bore her into awareness of him, to toss her by sheer
elimination of other interests to his breast. Inexorably he kept her on
the steamer and turned a deaf ear to her prayers that they might land
when it stopped at attractive villages on its journey down the lake. She
thought this unreasonable; for why come at all to these lovely places,
come so close that one could almost touch them, and then whisk away and
hardly let one look? And she could not help feeling, after he had been
short with her about the Borromean Islands, at one of which
unfortunately the steamer touched, that it would be both blessed and
splendid to travel round here alone--free, able to get out at islands if
one wanted to.
"Yes, those are islands," he said, when first they loomed on her
enraptured gaze. "Yes, one can land on them, but we're not going to.
Yes, yes, beautiful--but we've got to catch the train."
She began to turn a slightly perplexed attention to him. Surely he was
different from what he was at Kökensee! And there were the Borromean
Islands slipping away, the beautiful islands; there they were being
passed, going out of her life; it was unlikely she would ever see them
again....
To Ingram on that leaden afternoon the lake looked like a coffin, and
the islands as dull and shabby as three nails in it; to Ingeborg they
looked like three little miracles of God. Just as he who for the first
time goes abroad would give up Rome if he might stop at Calais, so did
Ingeborg hanker after detailed exploration of new places she was
inexorably whisked away from. The Borromean Islands were beautiful, but
if they had been dull she still would have hankered after them.
Beautiful or dull they were different from Kökensee; and when the
travelled Ingram put his hopes in Milan he did not realise how great on
Ingeborg after her strictly cloistered Kökensee existence was the effect
of the merely different. The platform at Arona, the flat fields the
train presently lumbered across, the factories and suburbs of Milan, the
noisy streets throbbing heavily with heat that grey and lowering
afternoon, the shapes of things, of dull things, of tramcars and cabs
and washerwomen, the shop windows, the behaviour and foreign faces of
dogs, the behaviour of children, the Italian eyes all turned to her, all
staring at her--they fascinated and absorbed her like the development of
a vivid dream. Who were these people? What would they all do next? What
were they feeling, thinking, saying? Where were they going, what had
they had for breakfast, what were the rooms like they had just come out
of, what sorts of things did they keep in their cupboards?
"If one of them would lend me a cupboard," she exclaimed to Ingram, "and
leave me alone with what it has got inside it, I believe I'd know all
Italy by the time I'd done with it. Everything, everything--the desires
of its soul and its body, and what it works at and plays at and eats,
and what it hopes is going to happen to it after it is dead."
And he had been supposing, from her silence as she walked beside him,
that she was finding Milan dull. Hastily he led her away from the
streets into an English tea-room and made her sit with her back to the
window and gave her rusks.
But though her childhood had been spent among these objects, which were
esteemed at the Palace because falling just short at the last moment of
quite sweetness and quite niceness they discouraged sinful gorging, they
had none of their ancient sobering effect on her there in Milan. She ate
them and ate them, and remained as brightly detached from them as
before. Their dryness choked out none of her lively interest, their
reminiscent flavour did not quiet her, not even when combined, as it
presently was, with the sound of church bells floating across the roofs.
She might have been in Redchester with those Sunday bells ringing and
all the rusks. Sitting opposite to her at the marble-topped table in the
deserted shop Ingram decided he would give her no meals more amusing
than this in Milan. So long as she kept him there she should, except
breakfast, have all her meals in that one place: modest meals, meals
damping to the spirits and surely in the long run lowering, the most
inflaming dish provided by the tea-room being--it announced it on its
wall--poached eggs.
He kept her there as long as he could, long after the tea was cold, and
tried, so deeply upset was he becoming by the delays her curious
immaturity was causing in the normal development of running away,
actually in that place of buns to make love to her. But how difficult it
was! He, too, had eaten rusks. He wanted to tell her he adored her, and
it reached her across the teapot in the form of comments on the
uncertainties of her behaviour. He wanted to tell her her body was as
delicate as flowers and delightful as dawn, and it came out a criticism
of the quality--also the quantity--of her enthusiasms. He endeavoured to
sing the praise of the inmost core of her, the inexpressible,
illuminating, understanding, and wholly sweet core, and instead he found
himself acidly deprecating her clothes.
Ingeborg sat listening with half an ear and eyes bright with longing to
be out in the streets again. She was fidgeting to get away from the
shop, and was sorry he should choose just that moment to smoke so great
a number of cigarettes. Even the young lady who guarded the cakes
appeared to think the visit for one based only on tea and rusks had
lasted long enough, and came and cleared away and inquired in English,
it being her native tongue, whether she could not, now, get them
anything else.
"The curious admixture in you," said Ingram, starting out with the
intention of comparing her to light in the darkness and immediately
getting off the rails, "the curious admixture in you of streaks of
childishness and spasmodic maturity! You are at one moment so entirely
impulsive and irresponsible, and a moment before you were quite
intelligent and reasonable, and a moment afterwards you are splendid in
courage and recklessness."
"When was I splendid in courage and recklessness?" she asked, bringing
more attention to bear on him.
"When you left your home to come to me. The start off was splendid. Who
could dream it would fizzle out into--well, into this?"
"But has it fizzled out? You're not"--she leaned across the table a
little anxiously--"you're not scolding me?"
"On the contrary, I'm trying to tell you all you are to me."
"Oh," said Ingeborg.
"I intend somehow to isolate my consciousness of your streaks--"
"Streaks?"
"As bees wax up a dead invader."
"Oh--a dead invader?"
"I don't, you see, believe in the damning effect of one specific
outbreak, nor of one or two--"
"You're not--you're not _really_ scolding me?" she asked, again a little
anxiously.
"On the contrary, I'm believing in and clinging to your dear innermost."
"Oh," said Ingeborg.
"I believe these streaks and patches and spots your superficial self has
may be good in their ultimate effect, may save us, by interrupting, from
those too serene spells that dogs'-ear love with usage and
carelessness."
She gazed at him, her mouth a little open. He lit yet another cigarette.
"But it's rather like," he said, flinging the match away into a corner
whither the young lady followed it and with a pursed reproachfulness
trod it out, "it's rather like finding a crock of gold in one's garden
and only being able to peep at it sometimes, and having to go away and
work very hard for eleven shillings a week."
She went on gazing at him in silence.
"And not even for eleven shillings," said Ingram, reflecting on all he
had already endured. "Work very hard for nothing."
She leant across the table again. "I never _mean_ to be tiresome," she
said.
"Little star," he said stoutly.
"It's always involuntary, my tiresomeness," she said, addressing him
earnestly. "Oh, but it's so involuntary--and the dull surfaces I know I
have, and the scaly imperfections--"
He knocked the ashes off his cigarette with unnecessary vigour, almost
as though they were bits of an annoying relative's body.
"I'm warped, and encrusted, and blundering," went on Ingeborg, who was
always thorough when it came to adjectives.
In his irritable state, to have her abjectly cheapening herself vexed
him as much as everything else she had done that day had vexed him. He
might, under provocation, point out her weaknesses, but she must not
point them out to him. He wanted to worship her, and she persisted in
preventing him. Distressing to have a god who refuses to sit quiet on
its pedestal, who insists on skipping off it to show you its
shortcomings and beg your pardon. How could he make love to her if she
talked like this? It would be like trying to make love to a Prayer-book.
"Is it because it is Sunday," he said, "that you are impelled to
acknowledge and confess your faults? You make me feel as if a verger had
passed by and pushed me into a pew."
"Well, but I _am_ warped and encrusted and blundering," she persisted.
"You are not!" he said irritably. "Haven't I told you you are my star
and my miracle?"
"Yes, but--"
"I tell you," he said, determined to believe it, "that you are the very
bath of my tired spirit."
"How kind you are!" she said. "You're as kind to me as if you were my
brother. Sometimes I think you are rather like my brother. I never _had_
a brother, but you're very like, I think, the one I would have had if I
had had one." She warmed to the idea. "I feel as if my brother--" she
said, preparing to launch into enthusiasm; but he interrupted her by
getting up.
"It seems waste," he said, reaching for his hat, "to talk about your
brother, as you've never had him. Shall we go?"
She jumped up at once with the air of one released. He himself could not
any longer endure the tea-room or he would have stayed in it. Gloomily
he went out with her into the streets again and noted that if anything
she seemed more active and eager than before--thoroughly, indeed, rested
and refreshed. Gloomily he realised during the next hour or two that she
had an eye for buildings, and that they were always the wrong ones.
Gloomily he discovered an odd liking in her for anything, however bad,
that was wrought in iron. He could not get her past some of the iron
gates of the palaces. He hated bad gates. Without experience she could
not compare and did not select, and her interest was all-embracing,
indiscriminating as a child's. He took pains to avoid the Piazza del
Duomo, but by some accident of a twisting street and a momentary
inattentiveness he did find himself at last, after much walking as he
had thought away from it, all of a sudden facing it. Urging her on by
her elbow he hurried her nervously across it, hoping she would not see
the Cathedral; but the Cathedral being difficult not to see she did see
it, and remained, as he had feared she would, rooted.
"Ingeborg," he exclaimed, "if you tell me you like that--"
"Oh, let me look, let me look," she cried, holding his sleeve while he
tried to get her away. "It's so funny--it's so _different_--"
"Ingeborg--" he almost begged; but from its outside to its inside was an
inevitable step, and that she should gasp on first getting in seemed
also, after she had done it, inevitable.
Ingram found himself sight-seeing; looking at windows; following her
down vaults; towed by beadles. He rubbed his hand violently over his
hair.
"But this is intolerable!" he cried aloud to himself. "I shall go mad--"
And he strode after her and caught her arm just as she was disappearing
over the brim of the crypt.
"Ingeborg," he said, his eyes blazing at her in a bright astonishment,
"do you mean to tell me that I shall not reach _you_, that I'm not going
to get ever at _you_ till I paint you?"
She turned in the gloom and looked up at him.
"Oh, I know I'll get you then," he went on excitedly, while the
interrupted beadle impatiently rattled his keys. "Nothing can hide you
away from me then. I don't paint, you see, by myself--"
She stared up at him.
"And all this you're doing, all this waste of running about--have you
then forgotten the picture?"
It was as though he had shaken her suddenly awake. She stared at him in
a shock of recollection. Why, of course--the picture. Why--incredible,
but she had forgotten it. Actually forgotten it in the wild excitement
of travelling; actually she had been wanting to linger at each new
place, she who had only ten days altogether, she who had come only after
all because of the picture, the great picture, the first really great
thing that had touched her life. And here she was with him, its waiting
creator, dragging him about who held future beauty in his cunning guided
hand among all the mixed stuff left as a burden on the generations by
the past, curious about the stuff with an uneducated stupid curiosity,
wasting time, ridiculously blocking the way to something great, to the
greatest of the achievements of a great artist.
She was sobered. She was overcome by the vivid recognition of her cheap
enthusiasm.
"Oh," she said, staring up at him, wide awake, entirely ashamed, "how
_patient_ you've been with me!"
And as he still held her by the arm, his eyes blazing down at her from
the top step of the crypt, she could find no way of expressing her shame
and contrition except by bending her head and laying her cheek on his
hand.