And as if he had heard the word lovers in her mind he said it.
“Other lovers,” he said, “are engaged perpetually in sycophantic adaptations—”
“In what?”
She thought he had been going to say engaged to be married, for though she had known even at Redchester, in spite of the care taken to shut such knowledge out, that the world included wicked persons who loved without engagements or marriages, sometimes indeed even without having been properly introduced, persons who were afterwards punished by the correctly plighted by not being asked to tea, they were, the Bishop informed an anxious inquirer once when he had supposed her out of the room, in God’s infinite mercy numerically negligible.
But Ingram did not heed her. “Except us,” he went on.
“Us?” she echoed. Well, if one took the word in its widest sense.
“We fit,” he said. “We fit, and reflect each other. I in your heart, you in my heart, like two mirrors that hang opposite one another for ever.”
A doubt as to the expediency of so much talk of hearts and love crept into her mind, but she quieted it by remembering how much worse the Song of Solomon was— “And yet so respectable really,” she said, continuing her thought aloud, “and all only about the Church.”
“What is so respectable? Come and sit on that seat by the bush covered with roses,” he said. “Look — in this faint light they are as white and delicate as you.”
“The Song of Solomon. It — just happened to come into my head. Things do,” she added, beginning to lay hold of the first words that occurred to her, no longer at her ease.
She sat down on the edge of the seat where he put her.
“It’s stone,” she said nervously, looking up at him, for he had taken a step back and was considering her, his head on one side. “Do you think it’s good for us?”
“You beautiful little thing,” he murmured, considering her. “You exquisite little lover.”
Her hands gripped the edge of the seat more tightly. A sudden very definite longing for Robert seized her.
“Oh, but—” she began, and faltered.
She tried again. “It’s so kind of you, but — you know — but I don’t think—”
“What don’t you think, my dear, my discoverer, my creator, my restorer—”
“Oh, I know there was Solomon,” she faltered, holding on to the seat, “saying things, too, and they meant something else, but — but isn’t this different? Different because — well, I suppose through my not being the Church? I’m very sorry,” she added apologetically, “that I’m not the Church — because then I suppose nothing would really matter?”
“You mean you don’t want me to call you lover?”
“Well, I am married,” she said, in the voice of one who apologised for drawing his attention to it. “There is no getting away from that.”
“But we have got away from it,” said Ingram, sitting down beside her and loosening the hand nearest him from its tight hold on the seat and kissing it, while she watched him in an uneasiness and dismay that now were extreme. “That’s exactly what we have done. Oh,” he went on, kissing her hand with what seemed to her a quite extraordinary emotion, “you brave, beautiful little thing, you must know — you can’t not know — how completely and gloriously you have burned your ships!”
“Ships?” she echoed.
She stared at him a moment, then added with a catch in her breath:
“Which — ships?”
“Ingeborg, Ingeborg, my fastness, my safety, my darling, my reality, my courage—” said Ingram, kissing her hand between each word.
“Yes,” she said, brushing that aside, “but which ships?”
“My strength, my helper, friend, sister, lover, unmerited mate—”
“Yes, but won’t you leave off a minute? It — it would be convenient if you’d leave off a minute and tell me which ships?”
He did leave off, to look into her eyes in the dusk, eyes fixed on him in a concentration of questioning that left his epithets on one side as so much irrelevant lumber.
“Little worshipful thing,” he said, still gripping her hand, “did you really think you could go back? Did you really think you could?”
“Go back where?”
“To that unworthy rubbish heap, Kökensee?”
She stared at him. Their faces, close together, were white in the dusk, and their eyes looking into each other’s were like glowing dark patches.
“Why should I not think so?” she said.
“Because, you little artist in recklessness, you’ve burned your ships.”
She made an impatient movement, and he tightened his hold on her hand.
“Please,” she said, “do you mind telling me about the ships?”
“One of them was this.”
“Was what?”
“Coming to Italy with me.”
“You said heaps of people—”
“Oh, yes, I know — a man has to say things. And the other was writing that letter to Robert. If you’d left it at boots and Berlin!”
He laughed triumphantly and kissed her hand again.
“But that wouldn’t have helped, either, really,” he went on, “because directly the ten days were up and you hadn’t come back he’d have known—”
“Hadn’t come back?”
“Oh, Ingeborg — little love, little Parsifal among women, dear divine ignorance and obtuseness — I adore you for believing the picture could be done in a week!”
“But you said—”
“Oh, yes, yes, I know — a man has to say things at the beginning—”
“What beginning?”
“Of this — of love, happiness, all the wonders of joy we’re going to have—”
“Please, do you mind not talking about those other things for a minute? Why do you tell me I can’t go back, I can’t go home?”
“They wouldn’t have you. Isn’t it ridiculous — isn’t it glorious?”
“What, not have me home? They wouldn’t have me? Who wouldn’t? There isn’t a they. I’ve only got Robert—”
“He wouldn’t. After that letter he couldn’t. And Kökensee wouldn’t and couldn’t. And Glambeck wouldn’t and couldn’t. And Germany, if you like, wouldn’t and couldn’t. The whole world gives you to me. You’re my mate now for ever.”
She watched him kissing her hand as though it did not belong to her. She was adjusting a new thought that was pushing its way like a frozen spear into her mind, trying to let it in, seeing, she could not keep it out, among all those happy thoughts so warmly there already about Ingram and her holiday and the kindness and beauty of life, without its too cruelly killing too many of them too quickly. “Do you mean—” she began; then she stopped, because what was the use of asking him what he meant? Quite suddenly she knew.
An immense slow coldness, an icy fog, seemed to settle down on her and blot out happiness. All the dear accustomed things of life, the small warm things of quietness and security, the everyday things one nestled up to and knew, were sliding away from her. “So that,” she heard herself saying in a funny clear voice, “there’s only God?”
“How, only God?” he asked, looking up at her.
“Only God left who wouldn’t call it adultery?”
The word in her mouth shocked him.
CHAPTER XXXVI
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 ho
w 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 bette
r 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?”
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 172
