A WEEK IN LOVELY LUCERNE
SEVEN DAYS FOR SEVEN GUINEAS
THOSE WHO INTEND TO JOIN NEXT TRIP INQUIRE
WITHIN
Now Ingeborg’s maternal grandmother had been a Swede, a creature of toughness and skill on skis, a young woman, when caught surprisingly by the washed-out English tourist Ingeborg’s grandfather, drenched in frank reading and thinking and in the smell of the abounding forests and in wood strawberries and sour cream. She had lived, up to the day when for some quite undiscoverable reason she allowed herself to be married to the narrow stranger, in the middle of big beautiful things — big stretches of water, big mountains, big winds, big lonelinesses; and Ingeborg, who had never been out of England and had spent years in the soft and soppy west, seeing the picture of the great lake and the great sky in the window in Regent Street, felt a quick grip on her heart.
It was the fingers of her grandmother.
She stood staring at the picture, half-remembering, trying hard to remember quite, something beautiful and elusive and remote that once she had known — oh, that once she had known — but that she kept on somehow forgetting. The urgencies of daily life in episcopal surroundings, the breathless pursuit of her duties, the effort all day long to catch them up and be even with them, the Bishop’s buttons, the Bishop’s speeches, the Bishop’s departures by trains, his all-pervadingness when at home, his all-engulfing mass of correspondence when away— “She is my Right Hand,” he would say in stately praise — the Redchester tea-parties to which her mother couldn’t go because of the sofa, the county garden-parties to which Judith had to be taken, the callers, the bazaars, the cathedral services, the hurry, the noise — life at home seemed the noisiest thing — these had smothered and hidden, beaten down, put out and silenced that highly important and unrecognized part of her, her little bit of lurking grandmother. Now, however, this tough but impulsive lady rose within her in all her might. Her granddaughter was in exactly the right state for being influenced. She was standing there staring, longing, seething with Scandinavia, and presently arguing.
Why shouldn’t she? The Bishop, as she had remarked with wonder earlier in the afternoon, seemed to have faded quite pallid that long way off. And arrangements had been made. He had engaged an extra secretary; his chaplain had been warned; Judith was going perhaps to do something; her mother would stay safely on the sofa. They did not expect her back for at least a week, and not for as much longer as her tooth might ache. If her tooth were still in her mouth it would be aching. If the dentist had decided to stop it, it would have been a fortnight before such a dreadful ache as that could be suppressed, she was sure it would. And the ten pounds her father had given her for taxis and tips and other odds and ends, spread over a fortnight what would have been left of it anyhow? Besides, he had said — and indeed the Bishop, desirous of taking no jot from his generosity in the whole annoying business, had said it, and said it with the strong flavour of Scripture which hung about even his mufti utterances — that she might keep any fragments of it that remained that nothing be lost.
“Your father is very good to you,” said her mother, in whose prostrate presence the gift had been made.— “But bishops,” flashed across Ingeborg’s undisciplined and jerky mind, “have to be good” — (she caught the flash, however, and choked it out before it had got half-way)— “you’ll be able to get yourself a spring hat.”
“Yes, mother,” said Ingeborg, holding her face.
“And I should think a blouse as well,” said her mother thoughtfully.
“Yes, mother.”
“My dear, remember I require Ingeborg here,” said the Bishop, uneasy at this vision of an indispensable daughter delayed by blouses. “You will not, of course, forget that, Ingeborg.”
“No, father.”
And here she was forgetting it. Here she was in front of a common poster forgetting it. What the Ritz and the Thackeray Hôtel with all their attractions had not been able to do, that crude picture did. She forgot the Bishop — or rather he seemed at that distance such a little thing, such a little bit of a thing, a tiny little black figure with a dab of white on its top, compared to this vision of splendid earth and heaven, that she wilfully would not remember him. She forgot her accumulating work. She forgot that her movements had all first to be sanctioned. A whirl of Scandinavianism, of violent longing for freedom and adventure, seemed to catch her and lift her out of the street and fling her into a place of maps and time-tables and helpful young men framed in mahogany.
“When — when—” she stammered breathlessly, pointing to a duplicate of the same poster hanging inside, “when does the next trip start?”
“To-morrow, madam,” said the young man her question had tumbled on.
A solemnity fell upon her. She felt it was Providence. She ceased to argue. She didn’t even try to struggle. “I’m going,” she announced.
And her ten pounds became two pounds thirteen, and she walked away conscious of nothing except that the very next day she would be off.
CHAPTER II
She was collected by the official leader of this particular Dent’s Excursion at Charing Cross the next morning and swept into a second-class carriage with nine other excursionists, and next door there were more — she counted eighteen of them at one time crowding round the leader asking him questions — and besides these there was a crowd of ordinary passengers bustling about with holiday expressions, and several runaway couples, and every single person seemed like herself eager to be off.
The runaway couples, from the ravaged expressions on their faces, were being torn by doubts, perhaps already by repentances; but Ingeborg, though she was deceiving her father who, being a bishop, should have been peculiarly inviolate, and her mother who, being sofa-ridden, should have appealed to her better nature, and her sister who, being exquisite, should have been guarded from any shadow that might dim her beauty, had none. She had been frightened that morning while she was packing and getting herself out of her aunt’s house. The immense conviction of the servants that she was going home cowed her. And she had had to say little things — Paddington, for instance, to the taxi driver when she knew she meant Charing Cross, and had blushed when she changed it through the window. But here she was, and there was a crowd of people doing exactly the same thing whose secure jollity, except in the case of those odd, sad couples, was contagious, and she felt both safe and as though she were the most normal creature in the world.
“What fun,” she thought, her blood dancing as she watched the swarming, surging platform, “what fun.”
Often had she been at the Redchester station in attendance on her departing father, but what a getting off was that compared with this hilarity. There was bustle, of course, because trains won’t wait and people won’t get out of the way, but the Bishop’s bustlings, particularly when their end was confirmations, were conducted with a kind of frozen offendedness; there was no life in him, she thought, remembering them, he didn’t let himself go. On the other hand, she reflected, careful to be fair, you couldn’t snatch illicitly at things like confirmations in the way you could at a Dent’s Tour and devour them in secret with a fearful hidden joy. She felt like a bulb must feel, she thought, at the supreme moment when it has nosed its little spear successfully up through the mould it has endured all the winter and gets it suddenly out into the light and splendour of the world. The freedom of it! The joy of getting clear!
The excursionists in the carriage struggled to reach the window across her feet and say things to their friends outside. They all talked at once, and the carriage was full of sound and gesticulations. The friends on the platform could not hear, but they nodded and smiled sympathetically and shouted at intervals that it was going to be a good crossing. Everybody was being seen off except herself and the runaway couples; indeed, you could know which those were by the gaps along the platform. She sat well back in her place, anxious to make herself as convenient as possible and to get her feet tucked out of the way, a typical daughter of
provincial England and a careful home and the more expensive clergy, well-dressed, inconspicuous, and grey. Her soft mouse-colour hat, as the fashion that spring still went on decreeing in the west, came down well over her eyes and ears, and little rings of cheerful hair of a Scandinavian colouring wantoned beneath it. Her small face was swallowed up in the shadow of the hat; you saw a liberal mouth with happy corners, and the nostrils of a selective nose, and there was an impression of freckles, and of a very fair sunny sort of skin.
The square German gentleman opposite her, knowing nobody in London and therefore being, but for a different and honourable reason, in her position of not having any one to see him off, filled up the time by staring. Entirely unconscious that it might be embarrassing he sat and stared. With the utmost singleness of mind he wished to see the rest of her, when he would be able to determine whether she were pretty or not.
Ingeborg, absorbed by the wild excitement on the platform, had not noticed him; but immediately the train started and the other passengers had sorted themselves into their seats and were beginning the furtive watchfulness of one another that was presently to resolve itself into acquaintanceship, she knew there was something large and steady opposite that was concentrated upon herself.
She looked up quickly to see what it was, and for a moment her polite intelligent eyes returned his stare. He decided that she had missed being pretty, and with a faint regret wondered what God was about.
“Fattened up — yes, possibly,” he thought. “Fattened up — yes, perhaps.”
And he went on staring because she happened to be exactly opposite, and there was nothing else except tunnels to look at.
The other excursionists were all in pairs; they thought Ingeborg was, too, and put her down at first as the German gentleman’s wife because he did not speak to her. There were two couples of young women, one of ladies of a riper age, and one of earnest young men who were mentioning Balzac to each other almost before they had got to New Cross. Indeed, a surprising atmosphere of culture pervaded the compartment. Ingeborg was astonished. Except the riper ladies, who persisted in talking about Shoolbred, they were all presently saying educated things. Balzac, Blake, Bernard Shaw, and Mrs. Florence Barclay were bandied backwards and forwards across the carriage as lightly and familiarly as though they had been balls. In the far corner Browning was being compared with Tennyson; in the middle, Dickens with Thackeray. The two elder ladies, who kept to Shoolbred, formed a sort of dam between these educated overflowings and the silent back-water in which Ingeborg and the German gentleman sat becalmed. Presently, owing to a politeness that could not allow even an outlying portion of any one else’s clothing or belongings to be brushed against without “Excuse me” having been said and “Don’t mention it” having been answered, acquaintanceships were made; chocolates were offered; they introduced each other to each other; for a brief space the young men’s caps were hardly on their heads, and the air was murmurous with gratified noises. But the two riper ladies, passionately preoccupied by Shoolbred, continued to dam up Ingeborg and her opposite neighbour into a stagnant and unfruitful isolation.
She tried to peep round the lady next to her, who jutted out like a mountain with mighty boulders on it, so as to see the three people hidden in the valley beyond. Glimpses of their knees revealed that they were just like the ones on the seat opposite. They were neat knees, a little threadbare; not with the delicate threadbareness of her own home in the palace at Redchester, where splendours of carved stone and black oak and ancient glass were kept from flaunting their pricelessness too obviously in the faces of the local supporters of Disestablishment by a Christian leanness in the matter of carpets, but knees that were inexpensive because they had to be. Who were these girls and young men, and the two abundant ladies, and the man with the vast thick head and unalterable stare? All people who did things, she was certain. Not just anything, like herself, but regular things that began and stopped at fixed times, that were paid for. That was why they were able to do frankly and honourably what she was snatching at furtively in a corner. For a brief astonishing instant she was aware she liked the corner way best. Staggered at this, for she could in no way reconcile it with the Bishop, the cathedral, the home, nor with any of her thoughts down there while enfolded in these three absorbing influences, she tried to follow her father’s oft-repeated advice and look into herself. But it did not help much. She saw, indeed, that she was doing an outrageous thing, but then she was very happy — happier than she had ever been in Redchester, plied with legitimate episcopal joys. There was a keenness about this joy, the salt freshness of something jolly and indefensible done in secret. She did look at penitence sideways for an instant, but almost, at once decided that it was a thing that comes afterwards. First you do your thing. You must of course do your thing, or there couldn’t be any penitence.
She sat up very straight, her face lit with these thoughts that both amused and frightened her, her lips slightly parted, her eyes radiant, ready for anything life had to offer.
“A little fattened up,” thought the German gentleman; “a little even would probably suffice.”
There was to be a night in Paris — no time to see it, but you can’t have everything, and Paris is Paris — and next morning into the train again, and down, down, all down the slope of the map of France to Bâle, the Gate of Beauty, surely of heavenly beauty, and then you got there, and there were five whole days of wonder, and then....
Her thoughts hesitated. Why then she supposed, making an effort, you began to come back. And then....
But here she thought it wisest not to go on thinking.
“Excuse me, but do you mind having that window up?” asked the lady on her right.
“Oh, no,” said Ingeborg, darting at the strap with the readiness to help and obey she had been so carefully practised in.
It was stiff, and she fumbled at it, wondering a little why the man opposite just watched.
When she had got it up he undid the woollen scarf round his neck and unbuttoned the top button of his overcoat.
“At last,” he said in a voice of relief, heaving an enormous sigh.
He looked at her and smiled.
Instantly she smiled back. Any shreds of self-consciousness she may have had clinging to her in her earlier days had been finally scraped off when Judith, that amazing piece of loveliness, came out.
“Were you cold?” she asked, with the friendly interest of a boy.
“Naturally. When windows are open one is always cold.”
“Oh!” said Ingeborg, who had never thought of that.
She perceived from his speech that he was a foreigner. From the turned-down collar and white tie beneath his opened scarf she also was made aware that he was a minister of religion. “How they pursue me,” she thought. Even here, even in a railway carriage reserved for Dent’s excursionists only, one of them had filtered through. She also saw that he was of a drab complexion, and that his hair, drab, too, and close-cropped and thick, seemed to be made of beaver.
“But that’s what windows are for,” she said, after reflecting on it.
“No.”
The two large ladies let Shoolbred pause while they looked at each other.
They considered Ingeborg’s behaviour forward. She ought not to have spoken first. Impossible on a Dent’s Tour not to make friends — indeed the social side of these excursions is the most important — but there are rules. The other end of the carriage had observed the rules. The two ladies hoped they had not joined anything not quite high-toned. The other end had carried out the rules with rigid savoir-vivre; had accidentally touched and trodden on; had apologised; had had its apologies accepted; had introduced and been introduced; and so had cleared the way to chocolates.
“No?” repeated Ingeborg inquiringly.
“The aperture was there first,” said the German gentleman.
“Of course,” said Ingeborg, seeing he waited for her to admit it.
“And in the fulness of the ages came
man, and mechanically shut it.”
“Yes,” said Ingeborg. “But—”
“Consequently, the function of windows is to shut apertures.”
“Yes. But—”
“And not to open that which, without them, was open already.”
“Y’es. But—”
“It would be illogical,” said the German gentleman patiently, “to contend that their function is to open that which, without them, was open already.”
Reassured by the word illogical, which was a nice word, well known to and quite within the spirit of a Dent’s Tour, the two ladies went on with Shoolbred where they had left him off.
“The first day I was in England I went about logically, and shut each single window in my boarding-house. I then discovered that this embittered the atmosphere around me.”
“It would thicken it,” nodded Ingeborg, interested.
“It did. And my calling after all being that of peace, and my visit so short, that whatever happened could be endured, I relinquished logic and purchased in its place a woollen scarf. This one. Then I gave myself up unrestrictedly to their air.”
“And did you like it?”
“It made me recollect with pleasure that I was soon going home. In East Prussia there are, on the one hand, drawbacks; but, on the other, are double windows, stoves, and a just proportion of feathers for each man’s bed. Till the draughts and blankets of the boarding-house braced me to enduring instead of enjoying I had thought my holiday too short, and when I remembered my life and work at home — my official life and work — it had been appearing to me puny.”
“Puny?” said Ingeborg, her eyes on his white tie.
“Puny. The draughts and blankets of the boarding-house cured me. I am returning gladly. My life there, I say to myself, may be puny but it is warm. So,” he added, smiling, “a man learns content.”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 136
