“Oh,” said Ingeborg dreamily, in her husky, soft voice, “but the wonderfullest thing, the wonderfullest jewel. My first Italian town — Cannobio....”
He ceased to be revived. He smoked in silence. The effect on her of Italy was as surprising as it was unexpected. At Kökensee she had been entirely concentrated on him, eagerly listening only to him, drinking in only what he said, worshipping. Here she seemed possessed by a rage for any sights and sounds merely because they were new. There had been moments from the very start in Berlin when he almost felt of secondary interest, and they appeared to be becoming permanent. It was disturbing. It was incredible. It was grotesque. Perhaps it would be as well to take her away from the lakes, from all that part of the country which apparently caught her imagination on its most sensitive side. Perhaps Milan for a while, with pavements and museums.
“Please, will you give me some of that money?” she asked across his reflections.
“Which money?” he said, looking at her.
“My money.”
“What on earth for?”
“I want to send Robert a picture postcard.”
He threw his cigarette away. “It would be most improper,” he said, passing his hand rapidly over his hair. “Highly improper.”
“Improper?” she echoed, staring at him. “To send Robert a picture postcard?”
“Grossly. It simply isn’t done.”
“What? Not send Robert — but he’d like to see where we’ve got to.”
“For heaven’s sake don’t talk about Robert,” he exclaimed, getting up quickly; the idea of the picture postcard profoundly shocked him.
“Not talk about him?” she repeated, staring at him in astonishment. “But he’s my husband.”
“Exactly. That’s what makes him so improper.”
“What? Why, I thought husbands were just the very things that never could be improper.”
“Ingeborg,” he said, walking angrily up and down in front of her, “are you or are you not being taken care of on this — this holiday by me? Are you or are you not travelling with me?”
“Yes, I know. But I don’t see why I shouldn’t send Rob—”
“Well, then, if you don’t see you must believe. You’ve just got to believe me when I tell you certain things are impossible.”
“But Robert—”
“Good heavens, don’t talk of Robert. If I beg you not to, if I tell you it spoils things for me, if I ask you as a favour—” He stopped in front of her. “My dear, my little mate, my everything that’s central and alive among the husks—”
“Of course I won’t, then. At least, I’ll try to remember not to,” she said, looking at him with a smile that had effort in it as well as surprise. “But I don’t see why a picture postcard—”
The steamer they had seen for so long, the last one of the day from Arona to Locarno, was nearing the pier, and the piazza suddenly swarmed with busy groups preparing to go on it or see each other off.
“Let’s come away,” said Ingram, impatiently. “Let’s come away!” he repeated with a stamp of his foot. “I hate this crowd.”
She got up and walked beside him towards the hôtel, her eyes on the ground.
“I really can’t see why I shouldn’t send Robert—” she began.
“Oh, damn Robert!” he exclaimed violently.
She looked at him. “Damn Robert?” she echoed, immensely surprised. “But — don’t you like Robert?”
“No,” said Ingram. “No,” he said, even louder. “Not here. Not now. Now don’t,” he added in extreme irritation as he saw her mouth opening, “ask me why, don’t ask me to explain. Go to bed, Ingeborg. It’s time all children under ten were in bed. And get up early, please, because we’re going to start the first thing for — anyhow, for somewhere else.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
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 s
he 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.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 170
