The Pastor's Wife Part 56

And he had been supposing, from her silence as she walked beside him, that she was finding Milan dull. Hastily he led her away from the streets into an English tea-room and made her sit with her back to the window and gave her rusks.

But though her childhood had been spent among these objects, which were esteemed at the Palace because falling just short at the last moment of quite sweetness and quite niceness they discouraged sinful gorging, they had none of their ancient sobering effect on her there in Milan. She ate them and ate them, and remained as brightly detached from them as before. Their dryness choked out none of her lively interest, their reminiscent flavour did not quiet her, not even when combined, as it presently was, with the sound of church bells floating across the roofs.

She might have been in Redchester with those Sunday bells ringing and all the rusks. Sitting opposite to her at the marble-topped table in the deserted shop Ingram decided he would give her no meals more amusing than this in Milan. So long as she kept him there she should, except breakfast, have all her meals in that one place: modest meals, meals damping to the spirits and surely in the long run lowering, the most inflaming dish provided by the tea-room being--it announced it on its wall--poached eggs.

He kept her there as long as he could, long after the tea was cold, and tried, so deeply upset was he becoming by the delays her curious immaturity was causing in the normal development of running away, actually in that place of buns to make love to her. But how difficult it was! He, too, had eaten rusks. He wanted to tell her he adored her, and it reached her across the teapot in the form of comments on the uncertainties of her behaviour. He wanted to tell her her body was as delicate as flowers and delightful as dawn, and it came out a criticism of the quality--also the quant.i.ty--of her enthusiasms. He endeavoured to sing the praise of the inmost core of her, the inexpressible, illuminating, understanding, and wholly sweet core, and instead he found himself acidly deprecating her clothes.

Ingeborg sat listening with half an ear and eyes bright with longing to be out in the streets again. She was fidgeting to get away from the shop, and was sorry he should choose just that moment to smoke so great a number of cigarettes. Even the young lady who guarded the cakes appeared to think the visit for one based only on tea and rusks had lasted long enough, and came and cleared away and inquired in English, it being her native tongue, whether she could not, now, get them anything else.

"The curious admixture in you," said Ingram, starting out with the intention of comparing her to light in the darkness and immediately getting off the rails, "the curious admixture in you of streaks of childishness and spasmodic maturity! You are at one moment so entirely impulsive and irresponsible, and a moment before you were quite intelligent and reasonable, and a moment afterwards you are splendid in courage and recklessness."

"When was I splendid in courage and recklessness?" she asked, bringing more attention to bear on him.

"When you left your home to come to me. The start off was splendid. Who could dream it would fizzle out into--well, into this?"

"But has it fizzled out? You're not"--she leaned across the table a little anxiously--"you're not scolding me?"

"On the contrary, I'm trying to tell you all you are to me."

"Oh," said Ingeborg.

"I intend somehow to isolate my consciousness of your streaks--"

"Streaks?"

"As bees wax up a dead invader."

"Oh--a dead invader?"

"I don't, you see, believe in the d.a.m.ning effect of one specific outbreak, nor of one or two--"

"You're not--you're not _really_ scolding me?" she asked, again a little anxiously.

"On the contrary, I'm believing in and clinging to your dear innermost."

"Oh," said Ingeborg.

"I believe these streaks and patches and spots your superficial self has may be good in their ultimate effect, may save us, by interrupting, from those too serene spells that dogs'-ear love with usage and carelessness."

She gazed at him, her mouth a little open. He lit yet another cigarette.

"But it's rather like," he said, flinging the match away into a corner whither the young lady followed it and with a pursed reproachfulness trod it out, "it's rather like finding a crock of gold in one's garden and only being able to peep at it sometimes, and having to go away and work very hard for eleven shillings a week."

She went on gazing at him in silence.

"And not even for eleven shillings," said Ingram, reflecting on all he had already endured. "Work very hard for nothing."

She leant across the table again. "I never _mean_ to be tiresome," she said.

"Little star," he said stoutly.

"It's always involuntary, my tiresomeness," she said, addressing him earnestly. "Oh, but it's so involuntary--and the dull surfaces I know I have, and the scaly imperfections--"

He knocked the ashes off his cigarette with unnecessary vigour, almost as though they were bits of an annoying relative's body.

"I'm warped, and encrusted, and blundering," went on Ingeborg, who was always thorough when it came to adjectives.

In his irritable state, to have her abjectly cheapening herself vexed him as much as everything else she had done that day had vexed him. He might, under provocation, point out her weaknesses, but she must not point them out to him. He wanted to worship her, and she persisted in preventing him. Distressing to have a G.o.d who refuses to sit quiet on its pedestal, who insists on skipping off it to show you its shortcomings and beg your pardon. How could he make love to her if she talked like this? It would be like trying to make love to a Prayer-book.

"Is it because it is Sunday," he said, "that you are impelled to acknowledge and confess your faults? You make me feel as if a verger had pa.s.sed by and pushed me into a pew."

"Well, but I _am_ warped and encrusted and blundering," she persisted.

"You are not!" he said irritably. "Haven't I told you you are my star and my miracle?"

"Yes, but--"

"I tell you," he said, determined to believe it, "that you are the very bath of my tired spirit."

"How kind you are!" she said. "You're as kind to me as if you were my brother. Sometimes I think you are rather like my brother. I never _had_ a brother, but you're very like, I think, the one I would have had if I had had one." She warmed to the idea. "I feel as if my brother--" she said, preparing to launch into enthusiasm; but he interrupted her by getting up.

"It seems waste," he said, reaching for his hat, "to talk about your brother, as you've never had him. Shall we go?"

She jumped up at once with the air of one released. He himself could not any longer endure the tea-room or he would have stayed in it. Gloomily he went out with her into the streets again and noted that if anything she seemed more active and eager than before--thoroughly, indeed, rested and refreshed. Gloomily he realised during the next hour or two that she had an eye for buildings, and that they were always the wrong ones.

Gloomily he discovered an odd liking in her for anything, however bad, that was wrought in iron. He could not get her past some of the iron gates of the palaces. He hated bad gates. Without experience she could not compare and did not select, and her interest was all-embracing, indiscriminating as a child's. He took pains to avoid the Piazza del Duomo, but by some accident of a twisting street and a momentary inattentiveness he did find himself at last, after much walking as he had thought away from it, all of a sudden facing it. Urging her on by her elbow he hurried her nervously across it, hoping she would not see the Cathedral; but the Cathedral being difficult not to see she did see it, and remained, as he had feared she would, rooted.

"Ingeborg," he exclaimed, "if you tell me you like that--"

"Oh, let me look, let me look," she cried, holding his sleeve while he tried to get her away. "It's so funny--it's so _different_--"

"Ingeborg--" he almost begged; but from its outside to its inside was an inevitable step, and that she should gasp on first getting in seemed also, after she had done it, inevitable.

Ingram found himself sight-seeing; looking at windows; following her down vaults; towed by beadles. He rubbed his hand violently over his hair.

"But this is intolerable!" he cried aloud to himself. "I shall go mad--"

And he strode after her and caught her arm just as she was disappearing over the brim of the crypt.

"Ingeborg," he said, his eyes blazing at her in a bright astonishment, "do you mean to tell me that I shall not reach _you_, that I'm not going to get ever at _you_ till I paint you?"

She turned in the gloom and looked up at him.

"Oh, I know I'll get you then," he went on excitedly, while the interrupted beadle impatiently rattled his keys. "Nothing can hide you away from me then. I don't paint, you see, by myself--"

She stared up at him.

"And all this you're doing, all this waste of running about--have you then forgotten the picture?"

It was as though he had shaken her suddenly awake. She stared at him in a shock of recollection. Why, of course--the picture. Why--incredible, but she had forgotten it. Actually forgotten it in the wild excitement of travelling; actually she had been wanting to linger at each new place, she who had only ten days altogether, she who had come only after all because of the picture, the great picture, the first really great thing that had touched her life. And here she was with him, its waiting creator, dragging him about who held future beauty in his cunning guided hand among all the mixed stuff left as a burden on the generations by the past, curious about the stuff with an uneducated stupid curiosity, wasting time, ridiculously blocking the way to something great, to the greatest of the achievements of a great artist.