Элизабет фон Арним
The Pastor's Wife
CHAPTER XXXV
They stood there for what seemed to the beadle at the bottom an intolerable time, the lady, evidently nobody certificated, with her cheek on the gentleman's hand, and he himself, as honest a man as ever wanted to get his tip and be done with it, kept waiting with nothing to do but curse and rattle his keys; and though it was summer the crypt was cold, and so would his feet be soon; and what could the world be coming to when people carried their caressings even into crypts? Becoming maddened by these delays the beadle cursed them both, their present, past, and future, roundly and thoroughly and also profanely—for by the accident of his calling he was very perfect in profanity—beneath his breath.
"I'm so sorry, so sorry," Ingeborg was murmuring, who did nothing by halves, neither penitence, nor humility, nor gratitude.
"My worshipped child," whispered Ingram, immensely moved by this swift change in her, and changed as swiftly himself by the softness of her cheek against his hand.
"Oughtn't we to go to Venice to-night?" she asked, still standing in that oddly touching attitude of apology.
"Not to-night."
"But how can a picture get painted in just that little time?"
"Ah, but you know I'm good at pictures."
"But I can't stay a minute longer than Thursday. I have to be back on Saturday at the very latest."
"You'll see. It will all be quite easy."
"But to think that I forgot the picture!" she said, looking up at him shocked, while the ancient humility in which the Bishop had so carefully trained her descended on her once more, only four-fold this time, like a garment grown voluminous since last it was put on.
They had for some reason been talking in murmurs, and the embittered beadle, losing his self-control, began to say things audibly. Strong in the knowledge of tourist ignorance when it came to real language in Italian, he said exactly what he thought; and what he thought was so monstrous, so inappropriate to beadles and to the atmosphere of a crypt, besides being so extremely and personally rude, that it roused Ingram, who knew Italian almost better than the beadle—for his included scholarly by-ways in vituperation, strange and curious twists beyond the reach of the uneducated—to pour a sudden great burning blast of red-hot contumely down on to his head; and having done this he turned, and holding Ingeborg's hand led her up the steps again, leaving the beadle at the bottom, solitary, shrivelled, and singed.
They thought no more of crypts and beadles. They looked neither to the right nor to the left. Ingram held her by the hand all the way down the Cathedral, and the piazza when they came out on to it with its crowds of vociferating men and bell-ringing tramcars and sellers of souvenirs seemed to Ingeborg nothing now but a noisy irrelevance. Whole strips of postcards were thrust unnoticed into her face. The purpose of her journey was the picture. Marvellous that she should have lost sight of it and of the wonder and pride of being needed for it—needed at last for anything, she who so profoundly had longed to be needed, but needed for this, as a collaborator actually, even though passive and humble, in the creation of something splendid.
He put her into a cab and drove with her away from the fuss and din. She was exquisite again to him, adorable altogether. The memory of the fret and hot irritation of the day was wiped out as though it had never been by that other memory of her sweet apology on the steps of the crypt. He told the driver, for it was towards evening, to take them to those gardens described by the guide-book as probably the finest public park in Italy; and presently, as they walked together in the remoter parts, the dusk dropped down like a curtain between them and the Sunday night crowd collecting round the fountains. Tall trees, and clumps of box, and rose-bushes shut out everything except mystery; and she in that quiet place of trickling water and dim flowers began again to talk to him as she had talked at Kökensee, softly, deliciously, about nothing except himself. It was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land; it was infinite refreshment and relief.
She talked about the picture, with reverence, adoringly. She told him how in the rush of new impressions she had been forgetting everything that really mattered, not only that greatest of them all, but the other things she had to thank him for besides—Italy, her unexpected holiday, due so entirely to him. She said, her husky voice softer than ever with gratitude, "You have been giving me happiness and happiness. You've heaped happiness on me with both your hands." She said, searching only for words that should be sweet enough, "Do you know I could cry to think of it all—of all you've been to me since you came to Kökensee. When I'm back there again, this time with you will be like a hidden precious stone, and when I'm stupid and thinking that life is dull I'll get it out and look at it, and it will flash colour and light at me."
"When you talk like that," said Ingram, greatly stirred, "it is as though a little soul had come back into a deserted and forgotten body."
"Is it?" she murmured, so glad that she could please him, perfectly melted into the one desire to make up.
"When you talk like that," he said, "life becomes a thing so happy that it shines golden inside. You have the soul I have always sought, the thing that comes through me like light through a stained-glass window, so that I am lit, so that my heart is all sweet fire."
"And you," said Ingeborg, picking up his image as she so often irritatingly did, only now it did not irritate him, and flinging it back with a fresh adornment, "the thought of you, the memory of you when I've gone back to my everyday life, will be like a perfect rose-window in a grey wall."
"As though we could be separated again. As though being in love with somebody miles away isn't just intolerable ache. Oh, my dear, why do you look at me?" he asked with a large simplicity of manner that made her ashamed of her surprise; "because I talk of being in love? Why shouldn't two people simply love each other and say so? And if I love you it isn't with the greedy possessive love I've had for women before, but as though the feeling one has for the light on crystals or for clear shining after rain, the feeling of beauty in deep and delicate things, has become personified and exalted."
She made a little deprecating gesture. He was almost too kind to her; too kind. But nobody could reasonably object to being loved like crystals and clearness after rain. Robert couldn't possibly mind that.
She cast about for things to say back, shining things to match his, but he found them all first; it was impossible to keep up with him.
"You are delicate and fine, like translucent gold," he said. "And you are brave, and various, and alive. And you are full of sweet little fancies, little swirls of mood, kind eager things. Never in my life is there the remotest chance that I shall meet so good and deep a happiness as you again, and I put my heart once and for all between your dear cool little hands."
She felt bent beneath this generosity, she who had been so tiresome; and not only tiresome, but she who had had doubts, unworthy ones she now saw, round about breakfast time, for instance, piercing through her silly delight in Italy, as to whether she were giving even any satisfaction.
"I perceive," he went on, "I've never really loved before. I've played with dolls, and expressed myself to dummies—like a boy with a ball he must play with, and failing a playfellow he bumps it against a wall and catches it again. But you play back, my living dear heart—"
More and more was she invaded by a happy surprise. The things she had been doing without knowing it! All the right ones, apparently, the whole time—playing back, coming up to his expectations; and moments such as those at the Borromean Islands, and when there were picture postcards, and just recently in the tea-room, had not in the least been what she supposed. She had not understood. She glowed to think she had not understood.
"I've been so wearied and distressed with life," he went on, talking in a low, moved voice. "It has seemed at last such an old hairy thing of jealousies and shame and disillusionments, and work falling short of its best, and endless coming and going of people, and me for ever left with a blunted edge. And now you come, you, and are like a great sweet wind blowing across it, and like clear skies, and a moon rising before sunset. It is as though you had taken up a brush and painted out the old ugly tangles and made a new picture of me in luminous, clear watercolour."
Her surprise grew and grew, and her gladness that she had been mistaken.
"Those streaks," she thought. "He didn't really mean what he said about those streaks—"
"Somehow, though quite intelligent all along," continued Ingram, "I've been shallow and hard in my feelings about everything. Now I feel love like a deep soft river flowing through my heart. I love every one because I love you. I can set out to make people happy, I can do and say fine and generous things because of the love of you shining in my heart—"
"That beadle," she thought, "he didn't really mean what he said to that beadle—"
"You're what I've been looking for in women all my life," he went on. "You're the dream come true. I've only tried to love before. And now you've come, and made me love, which we all dream of doing, and given me love, which we all dream of getting—"
Her pleasure became tinged with a faint uneasiness, for she wouldn't have thought, left to herself, that she had been giving him love. Pastors' wives didn't give love except to their pastors. Friendship, yes; she had given him warm friendship, and an abject admiration of his gifts, and pride, and gratefulness—oh, such pride and gratefulness—that he should like being with her and saying lovely things to her; but love? She had supposed love was reserved for lovers. Well, if he liked to call it love … one must not be miss-ish it was very kind of him.... It was, also, more and more wonderful to her that she had been doing and being and giving all these things without knowing it. Her suddenly discovered accomplishments staggered her. "Is it possible," she thought with amazement, "that I'm clever?"
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 how 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 better 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?"
But there was no one; there was no brotherhood in the world, except at the rare obvious moments of common catastrophes and deaths.
She began to walk up and down the room. Half-past one that night was the hour of her escape, and somehow between now and then she must get the money. Perhaps by some chance he had left it in his room? Forgotten in a moment of carelessness in the pocket of the coat he had changed when they arrived that afternoon? It was not likely, for he was, she had noticed, of an extreme neatness and care about all such things. He never forgot. He never mislaid. Still—there was the chance.
She opened the door again, this time in deadly fear, for perhaps he would be coming back, not choosing after all to stay out there having supper.
There was no one in the passage. His room, she knew, was farther down; she had seen him going into it, four doors down on the same side as hers. She went out and stood a moment listening, then began to walk along towards it with an air of unconcern as though rightfully going down the corridor till she came to his door; then with her heart in her mouth she bolted in.
The lights from the street and the houses opposite shone in through the unshuttered window, and she could see into every corner of the shabby hôtel bedroom, a reproduction of the one she was in herself, trailed over dingily by traces of hundreds of commercial travellers and smelling memorially, as hers did, too, of their smoke and their pomades. She was hot and cold with fear; guilty as a thief. His coat hung behind the door. She ran her trembling fingers over it. Not a thing in any of his pockets. Nowhere anything that she could see. His unpacking had been done with orderliness itself. Of course he would not forget his pocket-book. With a gasp that was almost relief she slipped out of the room, shut the door quickly behind her, and assuming what she tried to hope was an unconcerned swagger, a sort of "I am-as-good-as-you-are" air for the impressing of any one she might meet, walked down the passage again.