He was silent a moment. Then, determined not to be outdone, he said:
"When I"m with you I begin to feel like a star myself."
"As though you weren"t always one."
"No. It"s only you. Till I found you I was just an angry ball of mud."
"But--"
"A thirsty man in a stuffy room."
"But--"
"An emptiness, a wailing blank, an eviscerated thing."
"A what?" asked Ingeborg, who had not heard that word before.
"And you," he went on, "are the cool water that quenches me, the scent of roses come into the room, liquid light to my clay."
She drew a deep breath. "It"s wonderful, wonderful," she said. "And it sounds so real somehow--really almost as though you meant it. Oh, I don"t mind you making fun of me a bit if only you"ll go on saying lovely things like that."
"Fun of you? Have you no idea, then, positively no idea, how sweet you are?"
He bent down and looked into her face. "With little kisses in each of your eyes," he said, scrutinizing them.
CHAPTER XXIX
In Redchester n.o.body talked of kisses. They were things not mentioned.
They were things allowable only under strictly defined conditions--if you did not want to kiss, for instance, and the other person did not like it--and confined in their application to the related. Like pews in a parish church, they were reserved for families. Aunts might kiss: freely. Especially if they were bearded--Ingeborg had an aunt with a beard. Mothers might kiss; she had seen her calm mother kiss a new-born baby with a sort of devouring, a cannibalism. Bishops might kiss, within a certain restricted area. As for husbands, they did kiss, and nothing stopped them till the day when they suddenly didn"t. But no one, aunts, mothers, bishops, or husbands, regarded the practice as a suitable basis for conversation.
How refreshing, therefore, and how altogether delightful it was that Ingram should be so natural, and how she loved to know that, though of course he was pretending about the little kisses in her eyes, he thought it worth while to pretend! With glee and pride and amus.e.m.e.nt she wondered what Redchester would say if it could hear the great man it, too, honoured being so simple and at the same time so very kind. For the first time she did not answer back; she was silent, thinking amused and pleasant thoughts. And Ingram walking beside her with his hands in his pockets and a gayness about his heels felt triumphant, for he had, he thought, got through to her self-consciousness, he had got her quiet at last.
Not that he did not enjoy the incense she burned before him, the unabashed expression of her admiration, but a man wants room for his lovemaking, and once he is embarked on that pleasant exercise he does not want the words taken out of his mouth. Ingeborg was always taking the words out of his mouth and then flinging them back at him again with, as it were, a flower stuck behind their ear. He had known that if once he could pierce through to her self-consciousness she would leave off doing this, she would become aware that he was a man and she was a woman. She would become pa.s.sive. She would let go of persisting that he was a demi-G.o.d and she a sort of humble pew-opener or its equivalent in his temple. Now apparently he had pierced through, and her silence as she walked beside him with her eyes on the ground was more sweet to him than anything she had ever said.
Before, however, they had reached the gap in the lilac hedge that formed the simple entrance on that side to the Dremmel garden there she was beginning again.
"In Redchester-" she began.
"Oh," he interrupted, "are you going to give me a description of the town and its environs so as to keep me from giving you a description of yourself?"
"No," she laughed. "You know I could listen to you for ever."
The same frankness; the same shining look. Ingram wanted to kick.
"I was thinking," she went on, "how n.o.body in Redchester ever talked about kisses. Even little ones."
"So you are shocked?"
"No. What a word! I"m full of wonder at the miracle of you--_you_--being so kind to me--_me!_ Saying such beautiful things, thinking such beautiful things."
This trick of grat.i.tude was really maddening.
"Tell me about Redchester," he said shortly. "Don"t they kiss each other there?"
"Oh, yes. But they don"t have them in their eyes."
He shuddered.
"And people don"t mention them, unless it"s aunts. And then not like that. No aunt could ever possibly be of the pregnant parts needful for the invention of a phrase like that. And if she were I don"t suppose I"d want to listen."
"You do at least then want to listen?"
"Want to? Aren"t I listening always to every word you say with both my ears? What a mercy," she added with thankfulness, "what a real mercy, what an escape, that you"re _not_ an aunt!"
"You can"t call it exactly a hairbreadth escape," he said moodily. "I don"t feel even the rough beginnings of an aunt anywhere about me."
He walked with her through the darkness of the lime-tree avenue, refusing to stay to supper. Why could he not then and there in that solitary dark place catch her in his arms and force her to wake up, to leave off being a choir-boy, a pew-opener? Or shake her. One or the other. At that moment he did not much care which. But he could not. He told himself that why he could not was because she would be so limitlessly surprised, and that for all her surprise he would be no nearer, not an inch nearer to whatever it was in her he was now so eager to reach. She might even--indeed he felt certain she would--thank him profusely for such a further mark of esteem, for being, as she would say, so very kind.
"Are you tired?" she asked, peering up at his face in the scented gloom, for it was the time of the flowering of the lime-trees, on his suddenly stopping and saying good night.
"No."
"You"re feeling quite well?"
"Perfectly."
"Then," she said, "why go away?"
"I"m in slack water. I have no talk. I"d bore you. Good night."
The next day, having found the morning quite intolerably long, he approached her directly they were alone on the difficult subject of husbands.
"It"s no good, Ingeborg," he said, "yes, I"m going to call you Ingeborg--we"re fellow pilgrims you and I along this rocky ridiculousness called life, and we"ll soon be dead, and so, my dear, let us be friends for just this little while--"
"Oh, but of course, of course--"
"It"s no good, you know, barring certain very obvious subjects because of that idiotic prepossession one has for what is known as good taste.
The only really living thing is bad taste. All the preliminaries to real union, union of any sort, mind or body, consist in the chucking away of reticences and cautions and proprieties, and each single preliminary is in bad taste. If we"re going to be friends we"ll have to go in for that.
Bad taste. Execrable taste. Now--"
He stopped.
"Well?"