Pastor's Wife — 16 Section 16

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.

Just as she reached her door Ingram appeared, hurrying up the stairs two steps at a time.

She clutched hold of the handle of her door, suddenly unable to stand.

"I--I--" she began.

But he did not seem surprised to see her there; he was intent on something else.

"Just think," he said, coming quickly towards her.

"I left my pocket-book in my room, full of notes.

The whole afternoon lying in the drawer of the table.

I wonder--" He hurried past her almost at a run.

She got into her room somehow, feeling Heaven had forsaken her.

After a minute or two she heard him coming along again.

He stopped at her door and called to her softly: "It's all right.

It was still there.

Wasn't it lucky?"

"Very," said Ingeborg; but so faintly that he did not hear.

"Good night, my Little One," she heard him say.

"Now I'm going out to get that supper."

"Good night," said Ingeborg, again so faintly that he heard nothing; and after a pause of listening he went away.

She tumbled down on to the bed.

She felt sick.

It was a quarter past ten.

She had three hours to wait.

She knew what she was going to do, try to do.

At one o'clock she would take off her shoes and go down the passage and see if his door were locked.

He would be asleep.

He must, oh, he must be asleep--she twisted about in the terror that smote her at the thought that he might perhaps not be asleep....

"God _does_ love me," she said to herself, "I _am_ His child.

Haven't I sinned and repented?

Haven't I done all the things?

He's bound to help me, to save me.

It _is_ the wicked He saves--I _am_ wicked--" Her heart stood still at the fearful thought that perhaps she had not yet been after all wicked enough, not wicked enough to be saved.

People belonging to the other rooms began to come back to bed.

Somebody in the next room sang while he was undressing, a gay Italian song, and presently he smoked, and the smoke came in under the door between her room and his.

She lay in the dark, or rather in the lights and shadows of the uncurtained room, and every two or three minutes a tramcar passed and shut out other sounds.

Ingram must have come in long ago.

When it was midnight she got up and arranged her shoes and hat just inside the door so that she could seize them as she came back, supposing she had been successful, and rush on straight downstairs and out and to the station.

All other thoughts were now lost in the intentness with which she was concentrated on what she had to do exactly next.

She would not let herself look aside at the abyss yawning if she were not successful.

She gripped hold of the thing she had to do, the getting of the money, and fixed her whole self on that alone.

She lay down on the bed again, her hands clenched as though in them she held her determination.

Once her thoughts did slip off to Robert, to the extreme desolation of what was waiting for her there, and tears came through her tightly shut eyelids.

"It's what you've deserved," she whispered, struggling to stop them.

"Yes, but _he_ hasn't deserved it.

Robert hasn't deserved it--you've ruined _him_--" she was forced to go on.

She shook off the unnerving thoughts.

By her watch it was a quarter to one.

She stood up and began to listen.

The tramcars passed now only every ten minutes.

In between their passing the hôtel was quiet.

She would wait for the approach of the next one--in the stillness she could hear it coming a long way off--then she would run down the passage in her stockinged feet to Ingram's door and open it just as the noise was loudest.

An icy hand seemed holding her heart, so icy that it burned.

She had not known she had so many pulses in her body.

They shook her and shook her;

great, heavy, hammering things.

She crept to her door and opened it a chink.

There was a dim light in the passage.

She heard the distant rumbling of a tramcar.

Now--she must run.

But she could not.

She stood and shook.

There it was, coming nearer, and not another for ten minutes.

She began to sob and say prayers.

The tramcar struck its bell sharply, it had reached the corner of the piazza, it would be passing in another minute.

She wrenched the door open and ran like a flying shadow down the passage, and just as the car was at its loudest turned the handle of Ingram's door.

It was not locked.

She stood inside.

The tramcar rumbled away into the distance.

Ingram--she nearly wept for relief--was breathing deeply, was asleep.

"But how funny," she thought, after one terrified glance at him as he lay in the bar of light the street lamp cast on the bed, thinking with a top layer of attention while underneath she was entirely concentrated on the pocket-book, "how funny to go to bed in one's beard!..."

She stole over to the table and peered about frantically among the things scattered on it, saw nothing, began with breathless care to try to open its drawer noiselessly, listening all the while for the least pause in the breathing on the bed, and all the while with the foolish detached layer of thoughts running in her head like some senseless tune-- "_Funny_ to go to bed in a beard--_funny_ to sleep in a thing like that--_funny_ not to take it off at night and hang it up outside the door with one's clothes and have it properly brushed--" The drawer creaked as it opened.

The regular breathing paused.

She stood motionless, hit rigid with terror.

Then the breathing began again; and, after all, there was nothing in the drawer.

She looked round the room in despair.

On the little table by his pillow lay his watch and handkerchief.

Nothing else.

But in the table was a small drawer.

She must look in that, too; she must go over and look in that; but how to open it so close to his head without walking him?

She crept across to it, stopping at each step.

Holding her breath she waited and listened before daring to take another.

The drawer was not quite shut, and the slight noise of pulling its chink a little wider did not interrupt Ingrain's breathing.

She put in her hand and drew out the pocket-book, drew out some notes--Italian notes, the first she found, a handful of them--pushed the pocket-book into the drawer again, and was in the act of turning to run when she was rooted to the floor.

Ingram was looking at her.

His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.

Sleepily, hardly awake, like one trying to focus a thought.

She stood fascinated with horror, staring at him, not able to move, her hand behind her back clutching the money.

Then he put out his arm and caught her dress.

"Ingeborg?"

he said in a sleepy wonder, still half in the deep dreams he had come up out of, "You?

My little angel love--you?

You've come?"

"Yes--yes," she stammered, trying to pull her dress away, wild with fear, flinging herself as usual in extremity on to the first words that came into her head--"Yes, yes, but I must go back to my room a minute--just one minute--please let me go--just one minute--I--I've forgotten my toothbrush--" And Ingram, steeped in the heaviness of the first real sleep he had had for nights and only half awake, murmured, with the happy, foolish reasonableness of that condition-- "Don't be long, then, sweetest little mate," and let her go.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Two days later the porter at the Meuk station beheld Frau Pastor Dremmel trying to open the door of a third-class compartment in the early afternoon train from Allenstein, and going to her assistance, there being no other passenger to distract him, was surprised to find she had no luggage.

Yet only the week before with his own hands he had put in a trunk for her and labelled it Berlin.

With the interest of a lonely man whose time is his own, he inquired whether she had lost it and was surprised to find she did not answer.

He then told her, or rather called after her, for she was moving away, that the pastoral carriage had not yet come for her, and was surprised again, for again she did not answer.

He stood watching her, wondering what was wrong.

He was too much accustomed to dilapidations and dirt in himself to see them in others, so that these outer signs of exhaustion and prolonged travelling escaped him.

Puzzled, he shook his head as she disappeared through the station door; then he remembered that the poor lady was an _Engländerin_, and was able to turn away calmed, with the satisfaction of him who has found the right label and stuck it on.

Meuk, as she passed through it, shook its head over her, too, consoling itself when she returned no greetings, did not even seem to see greetings, with the same explanation and shrug--_Engländerin_.

Robertlet and Ditti, walking along neatly to afternoon school, and suddenly aware of the approach down the street towards them of a disordered parent who not only did not stop but apparently did not see them, murmured to each other, being by now well instructed by their grandmother, the same explanation--_Engländerin_.

Frau Dremmel, leaning on her window-sill to watch her charges safely round the corner, and lingering a moment in the mellow summer air, explained her daughter-in-law, who went by without a glance, walking conspicuously in the middle of the road, with no parcel in her hand to legitimise her being out and not so much as an umbrella to give her a countenance, just with empty ungloved hands hanging down, and a scandalous scarcity of hairpins, and her clothes all twisted, in the same brief manner, _Engländerin_.

Baroness Glambeck, driving towards the town along the shade-flecked highroad, bent on one of those errands of mercy that are forced at intervals upon the great, with a basket of the properties, principally home-made jam and mittens, at her feet, endeavoured though vainly to mitigate the shock she received on being cut by her own pastor's wife, and a pastor's wife producing curiously the effect of somehow being in tatters, by using the same word to the female dependent who accompanied her on these occasions because somebody had to carry the jam--_Engländerin_.

The very birds in the branches, being German birds, were no doubt singing it; the dogs, as they met her, scented misfortune and barked furiously, instantly detecting the alien, angered by her batteredness, discovering nothing in her clothes however diligently they sniffed that an honest German dog could care about; and when on a lonely stretch of the road she came to a tramp, instead of begging he offered her a drink.

The lane turning off to Kökensee was so lovely that afternoon in the bright bravery of early summer, and so glanced and shone and darted with busy birds and insects and the glory of young leaves in the sun, that the dingy human figure faltering along it seemed an indecency.

In that vigorous world what place was there for blind fatigue?

In that world of triumph what place for a failure?

It was the sort of day that used to make Ingeborg's heart lift up; now she saw nothing, felt nothing, except that the sand was deep.

She began to cry presently because the sand was deep.

It seemed to give way on purpose beneath her feet, try on purpose to make her stumble and not get home.

The line of roofs up against the afternoon sky did not appear to come any nearer, and yet she kept on trying to get home.

The tears fell down her face as she laboured along.

She was afraid she wouldn't get home in time before she had to leave off walking because she couldn't walk any farther.

It seemed to her a dreadful thing that she who could walk so well should not be able to walk now and get home.

And this white sand--how fine it was, how it slid away on each side of one's feet wherever one put them!

And it got into one's shoes, and one couldn't stop and empty them for fear if one sat down one wouldn't be able to get up again, and then one wouldn't get home.

Slower and more slowly she laboured along.

By the time she reached the steep part just before the village she was crawling like a hurt insect.

She had forgotten to eat on the journey, and in Milan there had only been the rusks.

The street was asleep, empty that fine afternoon, the inhabitants away at work in the fields, and only the pig and the geese were visible in the parsonage yard.

Luckily the gate in the wire-netting fence that shut off the house and garden was not latched, for she could not have opened it, but would have stood there holding on to it and foolishly sobbing till some one came and helped.

The least obstacle now would be a thing that in no way could be got over.

The front door was shut, and sooner than go up the steps and try to get it open, she went round the path to the side of the house where the lilacs grew and Robert's window was.

That way she could reach the kitchen, whose door stood always open and was level with the garden.

Robert would be out in his fields.

She would go into his laboratory and wait for him.

Nobody but Robert _knew_ yet.

She had come back before the end of her leave.

His shame was not yet public property.

If he just beat her, she thought, in a disinterested weak way, and there was an end of it, wouldn't that do?

Then no one need ever know, and he could stay on in Kökensee and go on with his work, and she wouldn't have ruined him.

It was the thought of having ruined Robert that clove her heart in two.

To have ruined him, when all her ambition and all her hope had been to make him so happy....

Well did she know that a pastor whose wife had broken the seventh commandment would be driven out, would be impossibly scandalous in any parish.

And her not having broken it was quite beside the point; it didn't matter what you didn't do so long as you looked as though you had done it.

And if Robert killed her it wouldn't help him, either; he would have done the only decent thing, as the Baroness and her son Hildebrand had said that time long ago, and avenged his honour in the proper German way, but there were drawbacks to avenging one's honour--one was, illogically, punished for doing it, and even though it were mild punishment, any punishment ended a pastor's career.

She crept round the corner of the house.

She was so tired that if she had to wait for him long in his laboratory she felt sure she wouldn't be able to keep awake.

Well, if he came in and killed her while she was asleep it would be for her the pleasantest thing; she was so very tired that it would be nice, she thought vaguely, to wake up afterwards, and find oneself comfortably dead.

But Robert was not in his fields.

From the path beneath his window she could see his head, as she had seen it hundreds of times, bending over his desk.

At the sight she stopped, and her heart seemed to shrink into quite a little, scarcely beating thing.

There he was, her dishonoured husband, the being who in her life had been kindest to her, had loved her most, still working, still going on doggedly among the ruins she had created, up to the last moment when public opinion, brutal and stupid, making her the chief thing when she so utterly was not, while it thrust her and her wishes and intimate knowledge aside as not mattering when, as in the question of more children, or no more children, they so utterly did, would on her sole account, on the sole account of what seemed to her at that moment the most profoundly naturally unimportant thing in life, a woman who had been silly, put a stop to his fine work and refuse to give the world a chance to profit by his brains.

Well, she couldn't think about that now.

She couldn't hold on to any of her thoughts for more than an instant.

She only knew that the moment had come for facing him, and that she was very tired.

She really was extraordinarily tired.

Her mind was just as dim and reluctant to move as her body.

Whatever Robert was going to do to her she would cling to him with her arms round his neck while he did it.

She was so tired that she thought if he didn't mind her just putting her arms round his neck she would very likely go to sleep while he beat her.

But poor Robert, she thought--how hot it was going to make him to have to be violent, to have to beat!

It was not at all good beating weather....

And it was almost a pity to waste punishment on somebody too tired to be able properly to appreciate it, to take it, as it were, properly in.

She moved along down the path towards the back door.

When one came to think of it it was a strange thing to be going in to Robert to be hurt.

Well, but she had deserved it; she perfectly understood about his honour and its needs.

Oh, yes, she perfectly understood that.

A man has to--what had she just been going to think?

What does a man have to?

Oh, well.

If only what he did to her could blot out every consequence of what she had done to him, be a full, perfect, and sufficient--no, that was profane; tiresome how one thought in the phrases of the Prayer-book and how difficult it was if one had had much to do with prayer-books not to be profane.

As it was, her punishment wouldn't do anybody any good that she could see.

Funny, the punishment idea.

Of what use was it really?

The consequences of the things one did were surely enough in their devastating effect; why increase devastation?

And forgiveness didn't seem to be of much use, either.

It blotted out the past, she had heard people in pulpits say, but it didn't blot out the future, that daily living among consequences which she perceived was going to be so dreadful.

Well, she couldn't think now.

And here was the kitchen door; and here--yes, wasn't that Klara, staring at her open-mouthed, arrested in the middle of emptying a bucket?

Why did she stare at her?

Did she then _know_?