“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 though
t, 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 dusk
y 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.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
At Bâle there was hurry and bustle, the half hour they ought to have had there wasted away by some unaccountable loosening of the bandages of discipline on the German side to four minutes — the conductor when questioned said the engine had gone wrong, and explained, with a shrug that was to help hide his shame in this failure of the infallible, that engines were but human — and again there was an undignified scamper down steps and up steps and along platforms, and they arrived panting, pushed in by porters, only just in time into a compartment studded round with sleeping Swiss.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 168
