They stood facing each other in the middle of the room, his light eyes blazing down into hers.

"You--you're sure I'd be back in ten days?" she said.

And he had the presence of mind not to catch her to his heart.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

From the moment she said she would go Ingram was a changed creature. He became brisk, business-like, cheerful. Not a trace was left of the exasperated wet man who had come round through the rain, and there were no more poetic images. He was rea.s.suringly like a pleased elder brother, a brother all alert contentment. The table was cleared by his swift hands of the litter of her English studies, and the map out of the _Reichskursbuch_ spread on it; and with the help of an old Baedeker his sharp eyes had noticed lurking in a corner he expounded to her what she was to do. He wrote down her train from Meuk to Allenstein and her train from Allenstein to Berlin; he told her where she was to stay the night in Berlin, a city he appeared to know intimately; and he made a drawing in pencil of the streets that led to it from the station.

"The dotted line," he said, explaining his drawing, "is Ingeborg's little footsteps."

She was to stay at one of those refuges for timid ladies with connections in the Church which are scattered about Berlin and called _Christliche Hospiz_, places where, besides coffee and rolls, there are prayers and a harmonium for breakfast. She was to meet him next day at the Anhalter station, that happy jump-off for the south, and he would leave Kokensee at once, perhaps that evening, and wait for her in Berlin. They would proceed to Venice intermittently, getting out of the train at various points in order to see certain things--there was a walk he wanted to take her across the hills of Lake Maggiore, for instance--

"But I've only ten days," she reminded him.

"Oh, you'll see. One can do a lot--" And there was Bergamo he wanted to show her; she would, he a.s.sured her, greatly love Bergamo; and certainly they would go to Pavia if only to see if the wistaria were still in flower.

Her eyes danced. The sight of the map and the time-table was enough. She hung over him eagerly, following his pointing finger as it moved over mountains and lakes. She was like a schoolboy watching the planning out of his first trip abroad. There was no room in her for any thoughts but thoughts of glee. The names were music to her--Locarno, Cann.o.bio, Luino, Varese, Bergamo, Brescia, Venice. She lost sight of the higher aspect of the adventure, the picture, her position as indispensable a.s.sistant in the production of a great work; her brain was buzzing with just the idea of trains and places and new countries and utter fun. After the years of inaction in Kokensee, just to go in a train to Berlin would have been tremendous enough to set her blood pulsing; and here she was going on and on, farther and farther, into more and more light, more and more colour and heat and splendour and all new things, till actually at last she would reach it, the heart of the world, and be in Italy.

"Oh," she murmured, "but it's too _good_ to be true--"

And the Rigi, which up to then had been the high-water mark of her experience, collapsed into a little lump of pale indifferent mould.

When the tea began to b.u.mp against the door and she went out to help the servant, Ingram put every sign of intending travel neatly away, and by the time Herr Dremmel joined them there was no hint of anything anywhere in the room but sobriety except in Ingeborg's eyes. They danced and danced. She longed to jump up and fling her arms round Robert's neck and tell him she was off to Italy. She wanted him to share her joy, to know how happy she was. She felt all lit up and bright inside, while Ingram, on the contrary, looked forbiddingly solemn. He presently began to make solemn comments on the change in the weather, and after hearing Herr Dremmel's view and sympathising with his gratification, said that as regarded himself it put an end to his work of preparation for the painting of Frau Dremmel's portrait, and therefore he was leaving the next morning and would take the opportunity, when Herr Dremmel presently retired to his laboratory, of making his farewells.

Herr Dremmel expressed polite regrets. Ingram politely thanked him.

Ingeborg felt suddenly less lit up, and her eyes left off dancing. She wanted, for some odd reason, to slip her hand into Robert's. It grew and grew on her, the desire to go and sit very close to Robert. If only he would come, too, if only he would for once take a holiday and come and see these beautiful things with her, how happy they would all be! It seemed a forlorn thing to leave him there alone in the rain while she went jaunting off to Italy. Well, but he wouldn't come; he liked rain; and he wouldn't let her go, either, if she were frankly to ask him to.

The example of Lady Missenden or of any of those well-known persons would not, she knew, move him. Nor would anything she could say on the shameful absurdity of supposing evil. Liberal though he was and large as were his scoffings at convention, he was not as liberal and large, she felt sure, as Ingram, and she suspected that the conventions he scoffed at were those which did not touch himself. She could not risk asking.

She must go. She must, must go. Yet--

She got up impulsively, and on the pretext of taking his cup from him went to him and put her hand with a little stroking movement on his hair. Herr Dremmel did not observe it, but Ingram did; and after tea and until he left that evening not to see her again till they met at the Anhalter station in Berlin, he was amazingly natural and ordinary and cheery, more exactly like a brother than any brother that had ever been seen or imagined.

"Of course," he said quite at the last, turning back from the doorstep before finally committing himself to the liquid ma.s.ses of the dissolved farmyard--"of course I can _depend_ on you?"

She laughed. She stood on the top step with the light of the lamp in the pa.s.sage behind her, a little torch of resolution and adventure and imagination well let loose.

"I'm going to Italy," she said, flinging out both her arms as though she would put them round that land of dreams; and so complex is man and so simple in his complexity that Ingram went away in the wet twilight quite sincerely offering thanks to G.o.d.

But when it came to the moment of telling Robert about Berlin and shopping, her heart beat very uncomfortably. It was at tea-time the next afternoon. All day she had been trying to do it, but her tongue refused.

At breakfast she tried, and at dinner she tried, and in between she went twice to the laboratory door and stood on the mat, and instead of going in went away again on the carefullest toe-tips. And there was Ingram getting to Berlin, got to Berlin, kicking his heels there waiting....

At tea-time, after a tempestuous walk in the wet during which, as she splashed through sodden miles of sad-coloured wilderness, she took her G.o.ds to witness that the thing should be done that afternoon, she did finally bring it out. She had meant to say with an immense naturalness that she wished to go to Berlin in order to buy boots. She had thought of boots as simple objects, quickly bought and resembling each other; not like hats or dresses which might lead later on to explanations. And she needed boots. She really would buy them. It would, she felt, help her to be natural if what she said so far as it went were true.

But so greatly was she chagrined in her soul that she should have to talk of boots at all instead of telling him, her Robert, her after all _hind_ Robert, with delight of Italy and of her discoveries in beautiful new feelings, that when she had gulped and cleared her throat and gulped again and opened her mouth she found herself not talking of boots nor yet of Berlin, but addressing him with something of the indignant irrelevance of a suffragette who because she has been forcibly fed demands the vote.

He had, as his custom was, brought literature with him, and was sitting bent over his cup with the book propped against the hot-water jug. It was called _Eliminierung der Minusvarianten_, and was apparently, as all the books he brought to meals also were apparently, absorbing. The sound of the dripping of the rain on the ivy was unbroken at first except by the sound of Herr Dremmel drinking his tea, and the room was so gloomy under the pall of heavy sky that almost one needed a lamp.

"You see," said Ingeborg, most of the blood in her body surging up into her face as she suddenly, after ten minutes' silent struggle, leaned across the table and plunged into the inevitable, "my feeling so uncomfortable about a simple thing like this is really the measure of the subjection of women."

Herr Dremmel raised his head but not his eyes from his book, expressing thereby both a civilised attentiveness to anything she might wish to say and a continued interest in the sentence he was at. When he had finished it he looked at her over his spectacles, and inquired if she had spoken.

"Why should I not go and come unquestioned?" she asked, flushed with indignation that his prejudices should be forcing her to the low cunning that subst.i.tuted boots for Italy. "_You_ do."

He examined her impartially. "What do I do, Ingeborg?" he asked with patience.

"Go away when you want to and come back when you choose. You've been quite far. You went once to a place the other side of Berlin. Oh, I know it's business you go on, but I don't think that makes it any better--on the contrary, it isn't half as good a reason as going because it's beautiful to go, and fine and splendid. And it isn't as though I even had to ask you to give me money for it. I simply roll in that hundred a year you allow me. I haven't spent a quarter of it for years. My cupboard upstairs is stuffed with notes."

He looked at her, but finding it impossible to discover any meaning in her remarks began to read again.

"Robert--"

With patience he again removed his eyes from his book and looked at her.

Beneath the table she was pressing her hands together, twisting them about in her lap.

"Well, Ingeborg?" he said.

"Don't you think it's unworthy, the way women have to ask permission to do things?"

"No," said Herr Dremmel; but he was thinking of the _Minusvarianten_, and it was mere chance that he did not say Yes.

"When husbands go away they don't ask their wives' permission, and it never would occur to the wives that they ought to. So why should the wives have to ask the husbands'?"

Herr Dremmel gazed at her a moment, and then made a stately, excluding, but entirely kindly movement with his right hand. "Ingeborg," he said, "I am not interested." And he began to read again.

She poured herself out some more tea, drank it hastily and hot, and said with a great effort, "It's nonsense about permissions. I--I'm going to Berlin."

Then she waited with her heart in her mouth and both hands clutching the edge of the table.

But nothing happened. He read on.

"Robert--" she said.

Once more he endeavoured to place his attention at her disposal, dragging it away reluctantly from his book. "Yes, Ingeborg?" he said.

"Robert--I'm going to Berlin."

"Are you, Ingeborg?" he inquired with perfect mildness.

"Why?"

"I've got to get things. Shop."

"And why Berlin, Ingeborg? Is not Meuk nearer?"

"Boots," she said. "There aren't any in Meuk. I never _saw_ any in Meuk."