It was impossible to paint a serious picture of Ingeborg in the dark little parlour at the parsonage, and as there was no other room at all that they could use Ingram began a series of sketches of her out of doors, in the garden, in the punt, anywhere and everywhere.
“I must get some idea of you,” he said, perceiving that a reason for his coming every day had to be provided. “Later on I’ll do the real picture. In a proper studio.”
“I wonder how I’ll get to a proper studio?” smiled Ingeborg.
“I’ve got a very good one in Venice. You must sit to me there.”
“As though it were round the corner! But these are very wonderful,” she said, taking up the sketches. “I wish I were really like that.”
“It’s exactly you as you were at the moment.”
“Nonsense,” she said; but she glowed.
She knew it was not true, but she loved to believe he somehow, by some miracle, saw her so. The sketches were exquisite; little impressions of happy moments caught into immortality by a master. Hardly ever did he do more than her head and throat, and sometimes the delicate descent to her shoulder. The day she saw his idea of the back of her neck she flushed with pleasure, it was such a beautiful thing.
“That’s not me,” she murmured.
“Isn’t it? I don’t believe anybody has ever explained to you what you’re like.”
“There wasn’t any need to. I can see for myself.”
“Apparently that’s just what you can’t do. It was high time I came.”
“Oh, but wasn’t it,” she agreed earnestly.
He thought her frankness, her unadorned way of saying what she felt, as refreshing and as surprising as being splashed with clear cold shining mountain water. He had never met anything feminine that was quite so near absolute simplicity. He might call her the most extravagantly flattering things, and she appreciated them and savoured them with a kind of objective delight that interested him at first extraordinarily. Then it began to annoy him.
“You’re as unselfconscious,” he told her one afternoon a little crossly, when he had been ransacking heaven and earth and most of the poets for images to compare her with, and she had sat immensely pleased and interested and urging him at intervals to go on, “as a choir-boy.”
“But what a nice, clean, soaped sort of thing to be like!” she said. “And so much more alive than lettuces.”
“I wonder if you are alive?” he said, staring at her; and she looked at him with her head on one side and told him that if she were not a bishop’s daughter and a pastor’s wife and a child of many prayers and trained from infancy to keep carefully within the limits of the allowable in female speech she would reply to that, “You bet.”
“But that’s only if I were vulgar that I’d say that,” she explained. “Gentility is the sole barrier, I expect really, between me and excess.”
“You and excess! You little funny, cold-watery, early-morningy thing. One would as soon connect the dawn and the fields before sunrise and small birds and the greenest of green young leaves with excess.”
He was more near being quite happy during this first week than he could remember to have been since that period of pinafore in which the world is all mother and daisies. He was enjoying the interest of complete contrast, the freshness that lies about beginnings. From this remoteness, this queer intimate German setting, he looked at his usual life as at something entirely foolish, hurried, noisy, and tiresome. All those women — good heavens, all those women — who collected and coagulated about his path, what terrible things they seemed from here! Women he had painted, who rose up and reproached him because his idea of them and their idea were different; women he had fallen in love with, or tried to persuade himself he had fallen in love with, or tried to hope he would presently be able to persuade himself he had fallen in love with; women who had fallen in love with him, and fluffed and flapped about him, monsters of soft enveloping suffocation; women he had wronged — absurd word! women who had claims on him — claims on him! on him who belonged only to art and the universe. And there was his wife — good heavens, yes, his wife....
From these distresses and irksomenesses, from a shouting world, from the crowds and popularity that pushed between him and the one thing that mattered, his work, from the horrors of home life, the horrors of society and vain repetitions of genialities, from all the people who talked about Thought, and Art, and the Mind of the World, from jealousies, affections, praises, passions, excitement, boredom, he felt very safe at Kökensee. To be over there in the middle of the distracting emptiness of London was like having the sour dust of a neglected market-place blown into one’s face. To be over here in Kökensee was to feel like a single goldfish in a bowl of clear water. Ingeborg was the clear water. Kökensee was the bowl. For a week he swam with delight in this new element; for a week he felt so good and innocent, exercising himself in its cool translucency, that almost did he seem a goldfish in a bib. Then Ingeborg began to annoy him; and she annoyed him for the precise reason that had till then charmed him, her curious resemblance to a boy.
This frank affection, this unconcealed delight in his society, this ever-ready excessive admiration, were arresting at first and amusing and delicious after the sham freshness, the tricks, the sham daring things of the women he had known. They were like a bath at the end of a hot night; like a country platform at the end of a stuffy railway journey. But you cannot sit in a bath all day, or stay permanently on a platform. You do want to go on. You do want things to develop.
Ingram was nettled by Ingeborg’s apparent inability to develop. It was all very well, it was charming to be like a boy for a little while, but to persist in it was tiresome. Nothing he could say, nothing he could apply to her in the way of warm and varied epithet, brought the faintest trace of self-consciousness into her eyes. What can be done, he thought, with a woman who will not be self conscious? She received his speeches with enthusiasm, she hailed them with delight and laughter, and, what was particularly disconcerting, she answered back. Answered back with equal warmth and with equal variety — sometimes, he suspected, annoyed at being outdone in epithet, with even more. To judge from her talk she almost made love to him. He would have supposed it was quite making love if he had not known, if he had not been so acutely aware that it was not. With a face of radiance and a voice of joy she would say suddenly that God had been very good to her; and when he asked in what way, would answer earnestly, “In sending you here.” And then she would add in that peculiar sweet voice — she certainly had, thought Ingram, a peculiar sweet voice, a little husky, again a little like a choir-boy’s, but a choir-boy with a slight sore throat— “I’ve missed you dreadfully all these years. I’ve been lonely for you.”
And the honesty of her; the honest sincerity of her eyes when she said these things. No choir-boy older than ten could look at one with quite such a straight simplicity.
Every day punctually at two o’clock, by which time the daily convulsion of dinner and its washing up was over at the parsonage, he walked across from his inn, while Kökensee’s mouths behind curtains and round doors guttered with excited commentary, telling himself as he gazed down the peaceful street that this was the emptiest, gossip-freest place in the world, to the Dremmel gate; and dodging the various rich puddles of the yard, passed round the corner of the house along the lilac path beneath the laboratory windows to where, at the end of the lime-tree avenue, Ingeborg sat waiting. Then he would sketch her, or pretend to sketch her according as the mood was on him, and they would talk.
By the second day he knew all about her life since her marriage, her six children — they amazed and appalled him — her pursuit, started by him, of culture, her housekeeping, her pride in Robert’s cleverness, her solitude, her thirst for some one to talk to. Persons like Ilse and Rosa, Frau Dremmel, Robertlet and Ditti, became extraordinarily real to him. He made little drawings of them while she talked up the edge of his paper. And he also knew, by the second day, all about her life in Red
chester, its filial ardours, its duties, its difficulties when it came to disentangling itself from the Bishop; and his paper sprawled up its other edge with tiny bishops and unattached, expressive aprons. The one thing she concealed from him of the larger happenings of her life was Lucerne, but even that he knew after a week.
“So you can do things,” he said, looking at her with a new interest. “You can do real live things.”
“Oh, yes. If I’m properly goaded.”
“I wonder what you mean by properly goaded?”
“Well, I was goaded then. Goaded by being kept in one place uninterruptedly for years.”
“That’s what is happening to you now.”
“Oh, but this is different. And I’ve been to Zoppot.”
“Zoppot!”
“Besides, you’re here.”
“But I won’t be here for ever.”
“Oh, but you’ll be somewhere in the same world.”
“As though that were any good.”
“Of course it is. I shall read about you in the papers.”
“Nonsense,” he said crossly. “The papers!”
“And I shall curl up in your memory.”
“As if I were dead. You sometimes really are beyond words ridiculous.”
“I expect it’s because I’ve had so little education,” she said meekly.
At tea-time almost every day Herr Dremmel joined them in the garden, and the conversation became stately. The sketches were produced, and he made polite comments. He discussed art with Ingram, and Ingram discussed fertilizers with him, and as neither knew anything about the other’s specialty they discussed by force of intelligence. Ingeborg poured out the tea and listened full of pride in them both. She thought how much they must be liking and admiring each other. Robert’s sound sense, his quaint and often majestic English, his obviously notable scientific attainments must, she felt sure, deeply impress Ingram. And of course to see and speak to the great Ingram every day could not but give immense gratification to Robert, now that he had become aware of who he was. She sat between the two men in her old-fashioned voluminous white frock, looking from one to the other with eager pride while they talked. She did not say anything herself out of respect for such a combination of brains, but she was all ears. She drank the words in. It was more mind-widening she felt even than the Clarion.
Ingram hated tea-time at the parsonage. Every day it was more of an effort to meet Herr Dremmel’s ceremoniousness appropriately, and his scientific thirst for facts about art bored Ingram intolerably. He detested the large soft creases of his clothes and the way they buttoned and bulged between the buttonings. He disliked him for having sleeves and trousers that were too long. He shuddered at the thought of the six children. He did not want to hear about super-phosphates, and resented having regularly every afternoon to pretend he did; and he did want, and this became a growing wish and a growing awkwardness, to make love to Herr Dremmel’s wife.
Herr Dremmel’s large unconsciousness of such a possibility annoyed him, particularly his obliviousness to the attractiveness of Ingeborg. He would certainly deserve, thought Ingram, anything he got. It was scandalous not to take more care of a little thing like that. Every day at tea-time he was enraged by this want of care in Herr Dremmel, and every day before and after tea he was engrossed, if abortive efforts to philander can be called so, in not taking care of her himself.
“You see,” said Ingeborg when he commented on the immense personal absences and withdrawals of Herr Dremmel, “Robert is very great. He’s wonderful! The things he does with just grains! And of course if one is going to achieve anything one has to give up every minute to it. Why, even when he loved me he usedn’t to—”
“Even when he loved you?” interrupted Ingram. “What, doesn’t he now?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” she said quickly, flushing. “I meant — of course he does. And besides, one always loves one’s wife.”
“No, one doesn’t.”
“Yes, one does.”
They left it at that.
At the end of his second week in Kökensee Ingram found himself increasing the number of his adjectives and images and comparisons, growing almost eagerly poetical, for the force of proximity and want of any one else to talk to or to think about was beginning to work, and it was becoming the one thing that seemed to him to matter to get self-consciousness into her frank eyes, something besides or instead of that glow of admiring friendliness. He was now very much attracted, and almost equally exasperated. She was, after all, a woman; and it was absurd, it was incredible, that he, Ingram, with all these opportunities should not be able to shake her out of her first position of just wonder at him as an artist and a celebrity.
She was so warm and friendly and close in one sense, and so nowhere at all in another; so responsive, so quick, so ready to pile the sweetest honey of flattery and admiration on him, and so blank to the fact that — well, that there they were, he and she. And then she had a sense of fun that interrupted, a sense most admirable in a woman at any other time, but not when she is being made love to. Also she was very irrelevant; he could not fix her; she tumbled about mentally, and that hindered progress, too. Not that he cared a straw for her mentality except in so far as its quality was a hindrance; it was that other part of her, her queer little soul that interested him, her happiness and zest of life, and, of course, the graces and harmonies of her lines and colouring.
“You know, I suppose,” he said to her one evening as they walked slowly back along the path through the rye-field, and the cool scents of the ended summer’s day rose in their faces as they walked, “that I’d give a hundred days of life in London or Paris for an hour of this atmosphere, this cleanness that there is about you.”
“I don’t think a hundred’s much. I’d give them all to be with you. Here. Now. In the rye-field. Isn’t it wonderful this evening — isn’t it beautiful? Did you smell that?” She stopped and raised her nose selectingly. “Just that instant? That’s convolvulus.”
“You have such faith in my gods,” he went on, when he could get her away from the convolvulus, “such a bravery of belief, such a dear bravery of belief.”
“Well, but of course,” she said, turning shining eyes on to him. “Who wouldn’t believe in your gods? Art, love of beauty—”
“But it isn’t only art. My gods are all sweet things and all fine things,” said Ingram, convinced at the moment that he had never done anything but worship gods of that particular flavour, so thoroughly was he being purged by the hyssop of life in Kökensee.
“Oh,” said Ingeborg with an awed enthusiasm, “how wonderful it is that you should be exactly what you are! But it’s clever of you,” she added with a little movement of her hands, smiling up at him, “to be so exactly what you are.”
“And do you know what exactly you are? You’re the open window in the prison-house of my life.”
She held her breath a moment. “How very beautiful!” she then said. “How very beautiful! And how kind you are to think of me like that! But why is it a prison-house? You of all people—”
“It isn’t living, you see. It’s existence in caricature over there. It’s like dining perpetually with Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, or anything else totally unreal and incredible.”
“But I don’t understand how a great artist—”
“And you’re like an open window, like the sky, like sweet air, like freedom, like secret light—”
“Oh,” she murmured, deprecating but enchanted.
“When I’m with you I feel an intolerable disgust for all the chatter and flatulence of that other life.”
“And when I’m with you,” she said, “I feel as if I were stuffed with — oh, with stars.”
He was silent a moment. Then, determined not to be outdone, he said:
“When I’m with you I begin to feel like a star myself.”
“As though you weren’t always one.”
“No. It’s only you. Till I found you I was just an angry ball
of mud.”
“But—”
“A thirsty man in a stuffy room.”
“But—”
“An emptiness, a wailing blank, an eviscerated thing.”
“A what?” asked Ingeborg, who had not heard that word before.
“And you,” he went on, “are the cool water that quenches me, the scent of roses come into the room, liquid light to my clay.”
She drew a deep breath. “It’s wonderful, wonderful,” she said. “And it sounds so real somehow — really almost as though you meant it. Oh, I don’t mind you making fun of me a bit if only you’ll go on saying lovely things like that.”
“Fun of you? Have you no idea, then, positively no idea, how sweet you are?”
He bent down and looked into her face. “With little kisses in each of your eyes,” he said, scrutinizing them.
CHAPTER XXIX
In Redchester nobody talked of kisses. They were things not mentioned. They were things allowable only under strictly defined conditions — if you did not want to kiss, for instance, and the other person did not like it — and confined in their application to the related. Like pews in a parish church, they were reserved for families. Aunts might kiss: freely. Especially if they were bearded — Ingeborg had an aunt with a beard. Mothers might kiss; she had seen her calm mother kiss a new-born baby with a sort of devouring, a cannibalism. Bishops might kiss, within a certain restricted area. As for husbands, they did kiss, and nothing stopped them till the day when they suddenly didn’t. But no one, aunts, mothers, bishops, or husbands, regarded the practice as a suitable basis for conversation.
How refreshing, therefore, and how altogether delightful it was that Ingram should be so natural, and how she loved to know that, though of course he was pretending about the little kisses in her eyes, he thought it worth while to pretend! With glee and pride and amusement she wondered what Redchester would say if it could hear the great man it, too, honoured being so simple and at the same time so very kind. For the first time she did not answer back; she was silent, thinking amused and pleasant thoughts. And Ingram walking beside her with his hands in his pockets and a gayness about his heels felt triumphant, for he had, he thought, got through to her self-consciousness, he had got her quiet at last.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 164
