She sat quite still after that while he talked. After that one
deplorable bald word she said no more at all; and Ingram's passionate
explanations and asseverations only every now and then caught her ear.
She was going home. That was all she knew and could think of. Back to
Robert. Away from Ingram. Somehow. At once. Robert would turn her
out--Ingram was saying so, she heard that. Robert might kill her--Ingram
was saying so, she heard that, too; he didn't say kill, he called it
ill-using, but whatever it was who cared? She would at least, she
thought with a new grimness, be killed legitimately. She was going back
to Robert, going to tell him she was sorry. Anyhow that. Then he could
do what he chose. But how to get to him? Oh, how to get to him? Her
thoughts whirled. Ingram wouldn't let her go, but she was going. Ingram
had her money, but she was going. That very night. Her thoughts,
whirling and whizzing, went breathless here in dark, terrifying places.
And while she was flying along on them like a leaf on a hurricane blast,
Ingram was still kissing her hand, still pouring out phrases as he had
been doing ever since--surely ever since Time began? She stared at him,
remembering him in a kind of wonder. She caught a word here and there:
pellucid, he was saying something was, translucent. She felt no
resentment. She had deserved all she had got. Not Ingram and what he had
told her or not told her mattered, but Robert. How to reach Robert, how
to get near enough to him to say, "See--I've come back. Draggled and
muddied. Everybody believes it. You'll believe it, though I tell you
it's not true. And if you believe it or not it's your ruin. You'll have
to leave this place, and all your work and hopes. Now kill me."
"A man," she heard Ingram going on, still passionately explaining what
was so completely plain, "must pretend things at the beginning to get
his dear woman--"
"Of course, of course," nodded her thoughts in hurried agreement,
rushing past him to the swift turning over of ways of reaching
Robert--who cared about dear women?--how to hide from Ingram that she
was going, how to keep him from suspecting her, from watching her every
instant....
A vision of herself in the restaurant car handing him over the money she
had, chaining herself of her own accord to him, rose for a
moment--danced mockingly, it was so ludicrously important an action and
at the same time so small and natural--before her eyes. The chances of
life! The way small simplicities worked out great devastations. She
threw back her head in a brief, astonished laugh.
Instantly Ingram kissed her throat.
"I--I--" she gasped, getting up quickly.
"It--has been so hot all day," she said with a little look of
apologising, remembering to gather her terror and misery tightly round
her like a cloak, so that it should not touch him, so that he should not
by so much as a flutter of it feel that it was there; for then he would
watch her, and she--she gripped her hands together--would be lost,
lost....
"I think I'm--tired," she said.
He became immediately all reasonableness, the kindly reasonableness of
one who has cleared away much confusion and can now afford to wait.
He got up, too, agreeing about the heat of the day, and reminding her
also of its length, of the journeys by land and water it had contained,
and of the inadequate meal of rusks that had been their sole support for
nearly six hours. No wonder she was tired. He was tenderness and concern
itself. "Poor little _dear_ thing," he whispered, drawing her hand
through his arm and holding it there clasped in his other hand as he led
her away towards the entrance and went with her out into the streets
again, making her walk slowly lest she should be more tired, restraining
her when she tried to hurry; and seeing a cheerful restaurant with
crowded tables on the pavement in front of it, he suggested they should
stop at it and have supper.
But Ingeborg said in a low voice, kept carefully controlled, that she
was afraid she would go to sleep over supper she was so tired; might she
have some milk at the hôtel and go to bed?
His tenderness for her as he conceded the milk was nurse-like.
But he, she murmured, he must have supper--would he not send her back in
a cab and stay here and have some?
No, he would certainly not trust a thing so precious to some careless
cabman; he would take her back to the hôtel, and then perhaps have food.
But the hôtel, she murmured, was so stuffy--did he think he would like
food there?
Well, perhaps when she was safely in it he would come out again to one
of these pavement places.
She seemed more pliantly feminine as she went with quiet steps through
the streets on his arm than he had yet known her. It was as though she
had wonderfully been converted from boyhood to womanhood, smitten
suddenly with womanhood there in those gardens, and every muscle of her
mind and will had relaxed into a sweet fatigue of abandonment. He adored
her like that, so gentle, giving no trouble, accepting the situation and
his comfortings and his pattings of the hand on his arm and all his
further explanations and asseverations with a grown-up dear
reasonableness he had not yet seen in her. In return he took infinite
care of her, protective and possessive, whenever they came to a crowd or
a puddle. And he stroked her hand, and looked into her face, demanding
and receiving an answering obedient smile. And he wanted her and asked
her to lean heavily on his arm so that she should not be so tired. In a
word, he was fond.
They were staying at an hôtel near the station, just off the station
square down a side street, a place frequented by middle-class Italians
and commercial travellers, noisy with passing tramcars, and of little
promise in the matter of food. Ingram had taken rooms there that
afternoon when the determination was strong upon him that Ingeborg, in
Milan, should not be comfortable. Now he was sorry; for the happy turn
things had taken, the immense stride he had made in the direction of
Venice by opening her eyes to the facts of the situation, made this
excess of martyrdom unnecessary. But there they were, the rooms, engaged
and unpacked in, on the first floor almost, on a level with the
ceaseless passing tops of the bumping tramcars, and it was too late that
night to change.
He felt, however, very apologetic now as he went with her up the dingy
stairs to the door of her room in case some too cheery commercial
traveller should meet her on the way and dare to look at her.
"It's an unworthy place for my little shining mate," he said, "but
Venice will make up for it all. You'll love my rooms there--the
spaciousness of them, and the sunset on the lagoons from the windows.
To-morrow we'll go--"
He searched her face as she stood in the crude top light of the
corridor. Naturally she was tired after such a day, but he observed a
further dimness about her, a kind of opaqueness, like that of a lamp
whose light has been put out, and it afflicted him. The light would be
lit again, he knew, and burn more brightly than ever, but it afflicted
him that even for a moment it should go out; and swiftly glancing up and
down the passage he took both her hands in his and kissed them.
"Little dear one," he said, "little sister--you do forgive me?"
"Oh, but of course, of course," said Ingeborg quickly, with all her
heart; and she felt for a moment the acute desolation of life, the
inevitable hurtings, the eternal impossibility, whatever steps one took,
of not treading to death something that, too, was living and
beautiful--this thing or that thing, one or the other.
Her eyes as she looked at him were suddenly veiled with tears. Her
thoughts stopped swirling round ways of escape. And very vivid was the
perception that her escape, if she did succeed in it, was going to be
from something she would never find again, from a light and a warmth,
however fitful, and a greatness.... If he had been her brother she would
have put her arms round him and kissed him. If she had been his mother
she would have solemnly blessed him. As it was there was nothing to be
done but the bleak banality of turning away into her room and shutting
the door.
She heard his footsteps going down the passage. She went to the window,
and saw him going down the street. There was not an instant to lose--she
must find out a train now, while he was away, have that at least ready
in her mind for the moment when she somehow had got the money. First
that; then think out how to get the money.
She stole into the passage again--stole, for she felt a breathless fear
that in spite of his being so manifestly gone he yet would hear her
somehow if she made a noise and come back--stole along it and down the
stairs into the entrance hall where hung enormously a giant time-table,
conspicuous and convenient in an hôtel that supplied no _concierge_ to
answer questions, and whose _clientèle_ was particularly restless.
Nobody was in the hall. It was not an hour of arrival or departure; and
the man in the green apron she had seen there before, who at odd moments
became that which in better hôtels is uninterruptedly a _concierge_, was
nowhere to be seen, either. She had to get on a chair, the trains to
Berlin were so high up on the great sheet, and tremblingly she kept an
eye on the street door, through whose glass panels she could see people
passing up and down the street, and they in their turn could and did see
her. Yes--there was a night train at 1.30. It came from Rome. Travellers
might arrive by it. The hôtel door would be open. Her thoughts flew. It
got to Berlin at six something of the morning after the next morning.
Suddenly the glass door opened, and she jumped so violently that she
nearly fell off her chair, and she fled upstairs, panic-stricken,
without even looking to see if it were Ingram.
Safe in her room she was horrified at herself for such a panic. How was
she going to do everything there was to be done if she were like that?
She stood in the middle of the floor twisting her hands. If in her life
she had needed complete self-control and clear thinking and calm acting
she knew it was now. But how to keep calm and clear when her body was
shaking with fear? She felt, standing there struggling with herself, so
entirely forlorn, so entirely cut off from warmth and love, so horribly
with nothing she could look back to and believe in and nothing she could
look forward to and hope in, that just to speak to somebody, just to
speak to a stranger who because he was a stranger would have no
prejudices against her, would simply recognise a familiar distress--for
surely the other human beings in the hôtel must all at some time have
been unhappy?--seemed a thing of comfort beyond expressing. Her longing
was intolerable to get close for a moment to another human soul, to ask
of it how it had fared when it, too, went down into the sea without
ships, leaving its ships all burned behind it, and yet its business had
inexorably been in deep waters. "Oh, haven't you been unhappy, too?" she
wanted to ask of it "haven't you sometimes been very unhappy? Dear
fellow-soul--please--tell me--haven't you sometimes felt _bitter_ cold?"
But there was no one; there was no brotherhood in the world, except at
the rare obvious moments of common catastrophes and deaths.
She began to walk up and down the room. Half-past one that night was the
hour of her escape, and somehow between now and then she must get the
money. Perhaps by some chance he had left it in his room? Forgotten in a
moment of carelessness in the pocket of the coat he had changed when
they arrived that afternoon? It was not likely, for he was, she had
noticed, of an extreme neatness and care about all such things. He never
forgot. He never mislaid. Still--there was the chance.
She opened the door again, this time in deadly fear, for perhaps he
would be coming back, not choosing after all to stay out there having
supper.
There was no one in the passage. His room, she knew, was farther down;
she had seen him going into it, four doors down on the same side as
hers. She went out and stood a moment listening, then began to walk
along towards it with an air of unconcern as though rightfully going
down the corridor till she came to his door; then with her heart in her
mouth she bolted in.
The lights from the street and the houses opposite shone in through the
unshuttered window, and she could see into every corner of the shabby
hôtel bedroom, a reproduction of the one she was in herself, trailed
over dingily by traces of hundreds of commercial travellers and smelling
memorially, as hers did, too, of their smoke and their pomades. She was
hot and cold with fear; guilty as a thief. His coat hung behind the
door. She ran her trembling fingers over it. Not a thing in any of his
pockets. Nowhere anything that she could see. His unpacking had been
done with orderliness itself. Of course he would not forget his
pocket-book. With a gasp that was almost relief she slipped out of the
room, shut the door quickly behind her, and assuming what she tried to
hope was an unconcerned swagger, a sort of "I am-as-good-as-you-are" air
for the impressing of any one she might meet, walked down the passage
again.
Just as she reached her door Ingram appeared, hurrying up the stairs two
steps at a time.
She clutched hold of the handle of her door, suddenly unable to stand.
"I--I--" she began.
But he did not seem surprised to see her there; he was intent on
something else.
"Just think," he said, coming quickly towards her. "I left my
pocket-book in my room, full of notes. The whole afternoon lying in the
drawer of the table. I wonder--"
He hurried past her almost at a run.
She got into her room somehow, feeling Heaven had forsaken her.
After a minute or two she heard him coming along again. He stopped at
her door and called to her softly:
"It's all right. It was still there. Wasn't it lucky?"
"Very," said Ingeborg; but so faintly that he did not hear.
"Good night, my Little One," she heard him say. "Now I'm going out to
get that supper."
"Good night," said Ingeborg, again so faintly that he heard nothing; and
after a pause of listening he went away.
She tumbled down on to the bed. She felt sick. It was a quarter past
ten. She had three hours to wait. She knew what she was going to do, try
to do. At one o'clock she would take off her shoes and go down the
passage and see if his door were locked. He would be asleep. He must,
oh, he must be asleep--she twisted about in the terror that smote her at
the thought that he might perhaps not be asleep....
"God _does_ love me," she said to herself, "I _am_ His child. Haven't I
sinned and repented? Haven't I done all the things? He's bound to help
me, to save me. It _is_ the wicked He saves--I _am_ wicked--"
Her heart stood still at the fearful thought that perhaps she had not
yet been after all wicked enough, not wicked enough to be saved.
People belonging to the other rooms began to come back to bed. Somebody
in the next room sang while he was undressing, a gay Italian song, and
presently he smoked, and the smoke came in under the door between her
room and his.
She lay in the dark, or rather in the lights and shadows of the
uncurtained room, and every two or three minutes a tramcar passed and
shut out other sounds. Ingram must have come in long ago. When it was
midnight she got up and arranged her shoes and hat just inside the door
so that she could seize them as she came back, supposing she had been
successful, and rush on straight downstairs and out and to the station.
All other thoughts were now lost in the intentness with which she was
concentrated on what she had to do exactly next. She would not let
herself look aside at the abyss yawning if she were not successful. She
gripped hold of the thing she had to do, the getting of the money, and
fixed her whole self on that alone.
She lay down on the bed again, her hands clenched as though in them she
held her determination. Once her thoughts did slip off to Robert, to the
extreme desolation of what was waiting for her there, and tears came
through her tightly shut eyelids.
"It's what you've deserved," she whispered, struggling to stop them.
"Yes, but _he_ hasn't deserved it. Robert hasn't deserved it--you've
ruined _him_--" she was forced to go on.
She shook off the unnerving thoughts. By her watch it was a quarter to
one.
She stood up and began to listen.
The tramcars passed now only every ten minutes. In between their passing
the hôtel was quiet. She would wait for the approach of the next one--in
the stillness she could hear it coming a long way off--then she would
run down the passage in her stockinged feet to Ingram's door and open it
just as the noise was loudest.
An icy hand seemed holding her heart, so icy that it burned. She had not
known she had so many pulses in her body. They shook her and shook her;
great, heavy, hammering things. She crept to her door and opened it a
chink. There was a dim light in the passage. She heard the distant
rumbling of a tramcar. Now--she must run.
But she could not. She stood and shook. There it was, coming nearer, and
not another for ten minutes. She began to sob and say prayers. The
tramcar struck its bell sharply, it had reached the corner of the
piazza, it would be passing in another minute. She wrenched the door
open and ran like a flying shadow down the passage, and just as the car
was at its loudest turned the handle of Ingram's door.
It was not locked. She stood inside. The tramcar rumbled away into the
distance. Ingram--she nearly wept for relief--was breathing deeply, was
asleep.
"But how funny," she thought, after one terrified glance at him as he
lay in the bar of light the street lamp cast on the bed, thinking with a
top layer of attention while underneath she was entirely concentrated on
the pocket-book, "how funny to go to bed in one's beard!..."
She stole over to the table and peered about frantically among the
things scattered on it, saw nothing, began with breathless care to try
to open its drawer noiselessly, listening all the while for the least
pause in the breathing on the bed, and all the while with the foolish
detached layer of thoughts running in her head like some senseless
tune--
"_Funny_ to go to bed in a beard--_funny_ to sleep in a thing like
that--_funny_ not to take it off at night and hang it up outside the
door with one's clothes and have it properly brushed--"
The drawer creaked as it opened. The regular breathing paused. She stood
motionless, hit rigid with terror. Then the breathing began again; and,
after all, there was nothing in the drawer.
She looked round the room in despair. On the little table by his pillow
lay his watch and handkerchief. Nothing else. But in the table was a
small drawer. She must look in that, too; she must go over and look in
that; but how to open it so close to his head without walking him? She
crept across to it, stopping at each step. Holding her breath she waited
and listened before daring to take another. The drawer was not quite
shut, and the slight noise of pulling its chink a little wider did not
interrupt Ingrain's breathing. She put in her hand and drew out the
pocket-book, drew out some notes--Italian notes, the first she found, a
handful of them--pushed the pocket-book into the drawer again, and was
in the act of turning to run when she was rooted to the floor.
Ingram was looking at her.
His eyes were open, and he was looking at her. Sleepily, hardly awake,
like one trying to focus a thought. She stood fascinated with horror,
staring at him, not able to move, her hand behind her back clutching the
money. Then he put out his arm and caught her dress.
"Ingeborg?" he said in a sleepy wonder, still half in the deep dreams he
had come up out of, "You? My little angel love--you? You've come?"
"Yes--yes," she stammered, trying to pull her dress away, wild with
fear, flinging herself as usual in extremity on to the first words that
came into her head--"Yes, yes, but I must go back to my room a
minute--just one minute--please let me go--just one minute--I--I've
forgotten my toothbrush--"
And Ingram, steeped in the heaviness of the first real sleep he had had
for nights and only half awake, murmured, with the happy, foolish
reasonableness of that condition--
"Don't be long, then, sweetest little mate," and let her go.