The Pastor's Wife Part 49

"Oh--Robert. I _see_ his face if I suggested he should let me be a pilgrim."

"But of course you mustn't suggest."

"What?" She stood still and looked up at him. "Just go?"

"Of course. It was what you did when you ran away to Lucerne. If you'd suggested you'd never have got there. And you did that for merest fun.

While this--"

He looked at her, and the impishness died out of his face.

"Why, this," he said, after a silence, "this is the giving back to me of my soul. I need you, my dear. I need you as a dark room needs a lamp, as a cold room needs a fire. My work will be nothing without you--how can it be with no light to see by? It will be empty, dead. It will be like the sky without the star that makes it beautiful, the hay without the flower that scents it, the cloak one is given by G.o.d to keep out the cold and wickedness of life slipped off because there was no clasp to hold it tight over one's heart."

She began to warm again. She had been a little cooled while he laughed by himself over Lady Missenden's unregretted journeyings. To go to Italy; to go to Italy at all; but to go under such conditions, wanted, indispensable to the creation of a great work of art; it was the most amazing cl.u.s.ter of joys surely that had ever been offered to woman.

"How long would I have to be away?" she asked. "How long is the shortest time one wants for a picture?"

He airily told her a month would be enough, and, on her exclaiming, immediately reduced it to a week.

"But getting there and coming back--"

"Well, say ten days," he said. "Surely you could get away for ten days?

To do," he added, looking at her, "some long-delayed shopping in Berlin."

"But I don't want to shop."

"Oh, Ingeborg, you're relapsing into your choir-boy condition again. Of course you don't want to shop. Of course you don't want to go to Berlin.

But it's what you'll say to Robert."

"Oh?" she said. "But isn't that--wouldn't that be rather--"

"Why can't you be as simple as when you went to Lucerne? You wanted to go, so you went. And you were leaving your father who tremendously needed you. You were his right hand. Here you're n.o.body's right hand.

I'm not asking you to do anything that would hurt Robert. All you've got to do is to arrange so that he knows nothing beyond Berlin. Surely after these years he can let you go away for ten days?"

She walked with him in silence down the lilac path as far as the gate into the yard. She was exalted, but her exaltation was shot with doubt.

What he said sounded so entirely right, so obviously right. She had no reasoning to put up against it. She longed intolerably to go. She was quite certain it was a high and beautiful thing to go. And yet--

Herr Dremmel's laboratory windows were open, for the evening was heavy and quiet, and they could see him in the lamplight, with disregarded moths fluttering round his head, bent over his work.

"Good night," Ingram called in at the window with the peculiar cordial voice reserved for husbands; but Herr Dremmel was too much engrossed to hear.

Towards two o'clock there was a thunderstorm and sheets of rain, and when Ingeborg got up next morning it was to find the summer gone. The house was cold and dark and mournful, and it was raining steadily.

Looking out of the front door at the yard that had been so bright and dusty for five weeks she thought she had never seen such a sudden desolation. The rain rained on the ivy with a drawn-out dull dripping.

The pig standing solitary in the mud was the wettest pig. The puddles were all over little b.u.t.tons made of raindrops. Invariably after a thunderstorm the weather broke up for days, sometimes for weeks. What would she and Ingram do now? she thought; what in the world would they do now? Shut up in the dark little parlour, he unable to work, and no walks, and no punting--why, he'd go, of course, and the wonder-time was at an end.

"A week of this," said Herr Dremmel, coming out of his laboratory to stand on the doorstep and rub his hands in satisfaction, "a week of this will save the situation."

"Which situation, Robert?" she asked, her mind as confused and dull as the untidy grey sky. He looked at her.

"Oh, yes," she said hastily, "of course--the experiment fields. Yes, I suppose this is what they've been wanting all through that heavenly weather."

"It was a weather," said Herr Dremmel, "that had nothing to do with heaven and everything to do with h.e.l.l. Devils no doubt might grow in it, wax fat and big and heavy-eared, devils used to drought, but certainly not the kindly fruits of the earth."

And for an instant he gave his mind to reflection on how great might be the barrier created between two people living together by a different taste in weather.

Ingram arrived at two o'clock in a state of extreme irritation. He splashed through the farmyard with the collar of his coat turned up and angrily holding an umbrella. In his wet-weather mood it seemed to him entirely absurd and unworthy to be wading through an East Prussian farmyard mess in pouring rain, beneath an umbrella, in order to sit with a woman. He wanted to be at work. He was obsessed by his picture. He was in the fever to begin that seizes the artist after idleness, the fever to get away, to be off back to the real concern of life--the fierce fever of creation. He had not yet had to come into the house on his daily visits, and when he got into the pa.s.sage he was immediately and deeply offended by the smell that met him of what an hour before had been a German dinner. The smell came out, as it were, weighty with welcome. It advanced _en bloc_. It was ma.s.sive, deep, enveloping. The front door stood open, but nothing but great s.p.a.ce of time could rid the house in the afternoons of that peculiar and all-pervading smell. He was shocked to think his white and golden one, his little image of living ivory and living gold, must needs on a day like this be swathed about in such fumes, must sit in them and breathe them, and that his communings with her were going to be conducted through a heavy curtain of what seemed to be different varieties of cabbage and all of them malignant.

The narrow gloom of the house, its unpiercedness on that north side by any but the coldest light, its abrupt ending almost at once in the kitchen and servant part, struck him as incredibly, preposterously sordid. What a place to put a woman in! What a place, having put her in it, to neglect her in! The thought of Herr Dremmel's neglects, those neglects that had made his own stay possible and pleasant, infuriated him. How dare he? thought Ingram, angrily wiping his boots.

Herr Dremmel, Kokensee, everything connected with the place except Ingeborg, seemed in his changed mood ign.o.ble. He forgot the weeks of suns.h.i.+ne there had been, the large afternoons in the garden and forest and rye-fields, the floating on great stretches of calm water, and just hated everything. Kokensee was G.o.d-forsaken, distant, alien, ugly, dirty, dripping, evil-smelling. Ingeborg herself when she came running out of the parlour to him into the concentrated cabbage of the corridor seemed less s.h.i.+ning, drabber than before. And so unfortunately active was his imagination, so quick to riot, that almost he could fancy for one dreadful instant as he looked at her that there was cabbage in her very hair.

"Ingeborg," he said the moment he was in the parlour, "I can't stand this. I can't endure _this_ sort of thing, you know."

He rubbed both his hands through his hair and gnawed at a finger and fixed his eyes on hers in a kind of angry reproach.

"I was afraid you wouldn't like it," she said apologetically, feeling somehow as though the weather were her fault.

"Like it! And I can't idle here any more. You can't expect me to hang on here any more--"

"Oh, but I never _expected_--" she interrupted hastily, surprised and distressed that she should have produced any such impression.

"Well, it comes to the same thing, your making difficulties about coming away, your wanting such a lot of persuading."

He stopped in his quick pacing of the little room and stared at her.

"Why, you're giving me _trouble_!" he said, in a voice of high astonishment.

And as she stood looking at him with her lips fallen apart, her eyes full of a new and anxious questioning, he began to pace about again, across and round and up and down the unworthy little room.

"G.o.d," he said, swiftly pacing, "how I do hate miss-ishness!"

And indeed it seemed to him wholly, amazingly monstrous that his great new work should be being held up a day by any scruples of any sort whatever.

"This grey headache of a sky," he said, jerking himself for a moment to the window, "this mud, this muggy chilliness--"

"But--" she began.

"The days here are lines--just length without breadth or thickness or any substance--"

"But surely--till to-day--"

"I feel in a sort of well in this place, out of sight of faith and kindliness--you shutting them out," he turned on her, "you deliberately shutting them out, putting the lid on the glory of light and life, being an extinguisher for the sake of nothing and n.o.body at all, just for the sake of a phantom of an idea about Robert--"

"But surely--" she said.

"I'm bored and bored here. This morning was a frightful thing. I daren't in this state even make a sketch of you. I'd spoil it. It'll rain for ever. I can't stay in this room. I'd begin to rave--"

"But of course you can't stay in it. Of course you must go."

"Go! When I can't work without you? When you're so everything to me that during the hours I'm away from you little things you've said and done float in my mind like little s.h.i.+ning phosph.o.r.escent things in a dark cold sea, and I creep into warm little thoughts of you like some creature that s.h.i.+vers and gets back into its nest? I told you I was a parasite. I told you I depend on you. I told you you make me exist for myself. How can you let me beg? How can you let _me_ beg?"