He waved his hand impatiently. "It means," he said, "and in this case it would supremely mean, another one added to the great possessions of the world."

"Oh," said Ingeborg; and then, after a slight holding of her breath, again "Oh."

She was awe-struck. His voice came out of the black shadow of him at her through clenched teeth, which gave it a strange awe-striking quality.

She felt, with the sunset blinding her and that black figure in front of her and the intense clenchedness of the voice issuing from it, in the presence of immensities. She wondered whether it would have been any worse--instantly she corrected the word (it had been the merest slip of her brain) to more glorious--to be sitting in a punt with, simultaneously, Shakespeare, Sophocles. Homer, and the entire Renaissance. Weak a thing though her paddle was she pressed it tightly in her arms.

"It's--a great responsibility," she said lamely.

"Of course it is," he said, still in that clenched voice. "And it has to be met greatly."

"But what have _I_--"

"Here's this picture--I feel it in me, I tell you I feel it and know it--going to be the crowning work of my life, going to be a thing of living beauty throughout the generations, going to be the Portrait of a Lady that draws the world to look at it during all the ages after we are dead--"

He broke off. He left off hurling the sentences at her. He began to beg.

"Ingeborg," he said, "you've cleaned me up and glorified me like the sunshine during this stay here, without meaning to clean or bothering to clean a bit. You've become the eyes of the universe to me, and if it weren't for you now the whole thing would be an eyeless monster and a mask and a horror. Without you--why, even during the mornings here when I mayn't come to you I'm like a ship laid up in an out-of-the-way port, an aeroplane without an engine, a book with the first and last pages lost. The mornings are like a realistic novel of Gissing's after a fairy tale. The afternoons are like a bright vision in a crystal, like a dream, like one of the drops into fairyland quite common people sometimes take. You're the littlest thing, and you leave the most enormous blank. It's extraordinary the _goneness_ of things directly I'm away from you. I did poor work before I found you, poor I mean compared to what I know it might be, and I'll do none at all or mere ruins if I have to work without you now. Work is everything to me, and I'm not going to be able to do it if you're not there. Jeer at me if you like.

Jeer at me for a parasite. I've been an empty thing without you all these years. You can't let me go again. You can't let me drop back into the old angers, into the old falling short of the highest. You're the spirit of my inmost. You're my response, my reality, my glorification, my trans.m.u.ter into a G.o.d. And the picture I'm going to do of you will be the Portrait of a Lady who gave him back his Soul."

CHAPTER x.x.x

She stared at his black outline helplessly. She was overwhelmed. What could a respectable pastor's wife say to such a speech? It had the genuine ring. She did not believe it all--not, that is, the portions of it which that back part of her mind, the part that leapt about with disconcerting agility of irrelevant questioning when it most oughtn't to, called the decorations, for how could any one like Ingram really think those wonderful things of any one like her?--but she no longer suspected him of making fun. He meant some of it. What was underneath it he meant, she felt. She was scared, and at the same time caught up into rapture. Was it possible that at last she was wanted, at last she could help some one? He wanted her, he, Ingram, of all people in the world; and only a few weeks ago she had been going about Kokensee so completely unwanted that if a dog wagged its tail at her she had been glad.

"It--it's a great responsibility," she murmured a second time, while her face was transfigured with more than just the sunset.

It was. For there was Robert.

Robert, she felt even at this moment in the uplifted state when everything seems easy and possible, would not understand. Robert had no need of her himself, but he would not let her go for all that to Venice.

Robert had altogether not grasped Ingram's importance in the world; he could not, perhaps, be expected to, for he did not like art. Robert, she was deadly certain, would not leave his work for an hour to take her anywhere for any purpose however high; and without him how could she go to Venice? People didn't go to Venice with somebody who wasn't their husband. They might go there with a whole trainful of indifferent persons if they were indifferent. Directly you liked somebody, directly it became wonderful to be taken there, to be shown the way, looked after, prevented from getting lost, you didn't go. It simply, as with kissing, was a matter of liking. Society seemed based on hate. You might kiss the people you didn't want to kiss; you might go to Venice with any amount of strangers because you didn't like strangers. And in a case like this--"Oh, in a case like this," she suddenly cried out aloud, flinging the paddle into the punt and twisting her hands together, overcome by the vision of the glories that were going to be missed, "when it's so important, when it so tremendously matters--to be caught by convention!"

He had got her. The swift conviction flashed through him as he jerked his feet out of the way of the paddle. Got her differently from what he had first aimed at perhaps, still incredibly without s.e.x-consciousness, but she would come to Venice, she would come and sit to him, he was going to do his masterpiece, and the rest was inevitable.

"How do you mean?" he said, his eyes on her.

"To think the great picture's never going to be painted!"

"And why?"

"Because of convention, because of all these mad rules--"

She was twisting her fingers about in the way she did when much stirred.

"It's doomed," she said, "doomed." And she looked at him with eyes full of amazement, of aggrievedness, of, actually, tears.

"Ingeborg--" he began.

"Do you know how I've longed to go just to Italy?" she interrupted with just the same headlong impulsiveness that had swept her into Dent's Travel Bureau years before. "How I've read about it and thought about it till I'm sick with longing? Why, I've looked out trains. And the things I've read! I know all about its treasures--oh, not only its treasures of art and old histories, but other treasures, light and colour and scent, the things I love now, the things I know now in pale mean little visions. I know all sorts of things. I know there's a great rush of wistaria along the wall as you go up to the Certosa, covering its whole length with bunch upon bunch of flowers--"

"Which Certosa?"

"Pavia, Pavia--and all the open s.p.a.ce in front of it is drenched in April with that divinest smell. And I know about the little red monthly roses scrambling in and out of the Campo Santo above Genoa in January--in January! Red roses in January. While here.... And I know about the fireflies in the gardens round Florence--that's May, early May, while here we still sit up against the stoves. And I know about the chestnut woods, real chestnuts that you eat afterwards, along the steep sides of the lakes, miles and miles of them, with deep green moss underneath, and I know about the queer black grapes that sting your tongue and fill the world with a smell of strawberries in September, and what the Appian way looks like in April when it is still waving flowery gra.s.s burning in an immensity of light, and I know the honey-colour of the houses in the old parts of Rome, and that the irises they sell there in the streets are like pale pink coral--and all one needs to do to see these things for oneself is to catch a train at Meuk. _Any_ day one could catch that train at Meuk. Every day it starts and one is never there. And Kokensee would roll back like a curtain, and the world be changed like a garment, like an old stiff clayey garment, like an old shroud, into all _that_. Think of it! What a background, what a background for the painting of the greatest picture in the world!"

She stopped and took up the paddle again. "I wonder," she said, with sudden listlessness "why I say all this to you?"

"Because," said Ingram, in a low voice, "you're my sister and my mate."

She dipped the paddle into the water and turned the punt towards home.

"Oh, well," she said, the enthusiasm gone out of her.

The water and the sky and the forests along the banks and the spire of the Kokensee church at the end of the lake looked dark and sad going this way. At first she could see nothing after the blinding light of the other direction, then everything cleared into dun colour and bleakness.

"How one talks," she said. "I say things--enthusiastic things, and you say things--beautiful kind things, and it's all no good."

"Isn't it? Not only do we say them but we're going to do them. You're coming with me to Venice, my dear. Haven't you read in those travel books of yours what the lagoons look like at sunset?"

She made an impatient movement.

"Ingeborg, let us reason together."

"I can't reason."

"Well, listen to me then doing it by myself."

And he proceeded to do it. All the way down the lake he did it, and up along the path through the rye, and afterwards in the garden pacing up and down in the gathering twilight beneath the lime-trees he did it.

"Wonderful," he thought in that submerged portion of the back of his mind where imps of criticism sat and scoffed, "the trouble one takes at the beginning over a woman."

She let him talk, listening quite in silence, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes observing every incident of the pale summer path, the broken twigs scattered on it, some withered sweet-peas she had worn that afternoon, a column of ants over which she stepped carefully each time.

Till the stars came out and the owls appeared he eagerly reasoned. He talked of the folly of conventions, of the ridiculous way people deliberately chain themselves up, padlock themselves to some bogey of a theory of right and wrong, are so deeply in their souls improper that they dare not loose their chain one inch or unlock themselves an instant to go on the simplest of adventures. Such people, he explained, were in their essence profoundly and incurably immoral. They needed the straight waistcoat and padded room of principles. Their only hope lay in chains.

"With them," he said, "sane human beings such as you and I have nothing to do." But what about the others, the free spirits increasing daily in number, the fundamentally fine and clean, who wanted no safeguards and were engaged in demonstrating continually to the world that two friends, man and woman, could very well, say, travel together, be away seeing beautiful things together, with the simplicity of children or of a brother and sister, and return safe after the longest absence with not a memory between them that they need regret?

Why, there were--he instanced names, well-known ones, of people who, he said, had gone and come back openly, frankly, determined demonstrators for the public good of the natural. And then there were--he instanced more names, names of people even Ingeborg had heard of; and finding this unexpectedly impressive he went on inventing with a growing recklessness, taking any people well-known enough to have been heard of by Ingeborg and sending them to Venice in twos, in haphazard juxtapositions that presently began to amuse him tremendously. No doubt they had gone, or would go sooner or later, he thought, greatly tickled by the vision of some of his couples. "There was Lilienkopf--you know, the African millionaire. _He_ went to Venice with Lady Missenden." He flung back his head and laughed. The thought of Lilienkopf and Lady Missenden.... "They, too, came back without a regret," he said; and laughed and laughed.

She watched him gravely. She knew neither Lilienkopf nor Lady Missenden, and was not in the mood for laughter.

"Even bishops go," said Ingram. "They go for walking tours."

"But not to Venice?"

"No. To shrines. Why, Cathedral cities are honey-combed with secret pilgrims."

"But why secret? You said--"

"Well, careful pilgrims. Pilgrims who make careful departures. One has to depart carefully, you know. Not because of oneself but because of offending those who are not imbued with the pilgrim spirit. For instance Robert."