CHAPTER x.x.xVI

She sat quite still after that while he talked. After that one deplorable bald word she said no more at all; and Ingram's pa.s.sionate explanations and a.s.severations 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 pa.s.sionately 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 hotel 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 hotel, and then perhaps have food.

But the hotel, 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 a.s.severations 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 hotel near the station, just off the station square down a side street, a place frequented by middle-cla.s.s Italians and commercial travellers, noisy with pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing tops of the b.u.mping 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 s.p.a.ciousness 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 pa.s.sage 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 ba.n.a.lity of turning away into her room and shutting the door.

She heard his footsteps going down the pa.s.sage. 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 pa.s.sage 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 hotel that supplied no _concierge_ to answer questions, and whose _clientele_ was particularly restless.

n.o.body was in the hall. It was not an hour of arrival or departure; and the man in the green ap.r.o.n she had seen there before, who at odd moments became that which in better hotels 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 gla.s.s panels she could see people pa.s.sing 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 hotel door would be open. Her thoughts flew. It got to Berlin at six something of the morning after the next morning.

Suddenly the gla.s.s 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 hotel 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 pa.s.sage. 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 hotel 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 a.s.suming 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 pa.s.sage 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.