"How _nasty_!" said Ingeborg dejectedly.
Life seemed all blood. She drooped over her cup, thinking of the cruelty with which things were apparently packed. The Baroness and Hildebrand, after a pregnant silence, turned from her and began to talk of somebody they called poor Emmi. Ingeborg sat alone with her cup, wondering how she could get away before she began to cry. Dreadful how easily she cried now. She must buy some more handkerchiefs. They seemed lately to be always at the wash.
She roused herself again. She really must say something. As her way was when confused and unnerved, she caught at the first thing she found tumbling about in her mind. "Why was Emmi poor?" she asked in her small tired voice.
There was another pregnant silence.
To shorten it Ingeborg asked whether Emmi was the wife who had been shot--"The sinning one," she explained as n.o.body answered.
The silence became awful.
She looked up, startled by it. From the expression on their faces and the general feel of things she thought that perhaps they wouldn"t mind if she went home now.
She got up, dropping the spoon out of her saucer. "I--think I must be going," she said. "It"s a long way home."
"It seems hardly worth while to have come," said the Baroness with extraordinary chill.
To which Ingeborg, absorbed in the failure of her effort to find help and comfort, answered droopingly "No."
Outside the sun had just dropped behind the forest line, and she would have to walk fast if she wanted to be home before dark. The mist was already rising over the meadows beyond the trees of the garden and beginning to mix with the rose and lilac of the sky. The sandy avenue she had come along on that hot July day when first she discovered Glambeck lay at her feet in the still beauty of the last of its dresses for the year, very delicate, very transparent already, the leaves of the beeches almost all on the ground, making of the road a ribbon of light.
A November smell of dampness and of peat smoke from cottage chimneys filled the air. There was a brooding peace over the world, as though in every house, in every family, brotherly love must needs in such gentleness continue.
She went carefully down the steps, for her body was already growing c.u.mbersome, and along the golden way of the avenue. She tried not to cry, not to smudge the beautiful evening with her own disappointments.
How foolish she had been to suppose that because she wanted to talk Baroness Glambeck would want to listen! Moods did not coincide so conveniently. She walked along, diligently stopping any stray tear with her handkerchief before it could disgrace her by coming out on to her cheeks. Presently Baroness Glambeck might pa.s.sionately want to listen--it was quite conceivable--and she herself would not in the least want to talk. How foolish it all was! One had to stand on one"s own feet. It was no good going about calling out for help. It was less than no good crying. Some day, if she continued intrepidly in this career of maternity which seemed to be marked out for her, she, too, would be happily pouring out coffee for a grown-up and successful man-child, all her impatiences and pangs long since forgotten. You clearly couldn"t have a grown-up man-child to love and be proud of if you hadn"t begun him in time, he had at some period or other to be begun. And he had to be begun in time, else one might easily be too old for acute appreciation. She went as quickly as she could down the avenue, thinking on large valiant lines and underneath her thinking feeling altogether forsaken. It must be nice, a warm thing to live where one"s friends and relatives were within reach, where one could, for instance, when one felt extra lonely go and have tea with one"s mother....
A man carrying what seemed to be a great deal of something indefinite was coming down the avenue towards her. She looked at him vaguely, absorbed in her thoughts. It was not the Baron, and except for him she knew n.o.body. She was within a yard or two of him when a quant.i.ty of sheets of paper, long slender brushes, odd articles she did not recognise, suddenly seemed to burst out from his person and scatter themselves over the beech-leaves on the ground.
"Oh, d.a.m.n!" said the man, making efforts to catch them.
Ingeborg, always eager to help, began clumsily to pick up those nearest her. He had a camp-stool on one arm, and what appeared to be a mackintosh, and was altogether greatly hampered.
"Look here, don"t do that," he exclaimed, struggling with these things which also apparently were slipping from him.
"Oh, but how lovely!" said Ingeborg, holding one of the sheets of paper she had picked up at arm"s length and staring with her red eyes at a beech-tree on it, a celestial beech-tree surely, aflame with so great a glory of light that it could not possibly be earthly but only the sort of tree they have in heaven. Close, it was just splashes of colour; you had to hold it away from you to see it at all. She blew away some grains of sand that were on it and then held it once more as far from her as her arm would go. "Oh, but how lovely!" she said again. "Look--doesn"t it _shine_?"
"Of course it shines. That was what it was doing," he said, coming and looking at the sketch over her shoulder a minute, his hands full of the things he had collected from the ground. "They said they"d send a servant for all this, and they didn"t. I hate carrying things."
"I"ll carry some," said Ingeborg.
"Nonsense. And you"re not going there."
"I"ve been. But I"d go back as far as the steps if you like."
"Nonsense. I"ll leave them at the foot of this tree. He"ll see them all right."
"Not this--you mustn"t leave this," she said, still gazing at the sketch.
"No. I"ll take that. And I"m coming with you a little way, because I can"t conceive where you can be going to at this time of the day that isn"t to the Glambecks", and I"m curious. Also because it"s so funny of you to be English."
"I think it"s much funnier of you," said Ingeborg, picking up a pencil out of a rut in the sand and adding it to the pile he was making against the trunk of the nearest tree. "And I"m only going home."
"Home?"
He undid the pile and began again. He had got it wrong. The camp-stool, of course, must be the foundation, then the smaller fly-away things, then, neatly folded and tucking them all in, the mackintosh. She must be an English governess or superior nurse on a neighbouring estate since she talked of home. If so he did not want to go with her; nothing he could think of seemed to him quite so tiresome as an English governess or superior nurse.
He finished tucking in the mackintosh and turned round and took the sketch from her. He was, she perceived, a long, thin-necked man with a short red beard. She was, he perceived, somebody in a badly fitting tweed coat and skirt, a person with a used sort of nose and weak eyes.
"Now then," he said, "I"ll go with you anyhow to the end of the avenue.
Where is home?"
"Kokensee," said Ingeborg, trotting to keep up with him. "It"s the next village. I"m the pastor"s wife."
Ingram--for it was that celebrated artist, then at thirty-five, already known all over Europe as more especially and letting alone his small exquisite things a surprising, indeed a disturbingly surprising painter of portraits--glanced down at her and stepped out more vigorously.
"That"s an amusing thing to be," he said. "And quite new."
"It isn"t very new. I"ve been it eighteen months. Why do you think it"s amusing?"
"It"s different from anything else. n.o.body was ever a pastor"s wife in--what did you call it?--before."
"Kokensee."
"Kokensee. Kokensee. I like that. You"re unique to live in Kokensee.
n.o.body else has achieved that."
"It wasn"t very difficult. I just stayed pa.s.sive and was brought."
"And they didn"t mind?"
"Who didn"t?"
"Your people. Your father and mother. Or are you Melchisedec and never had any?"
"Why should they mind?"
"Coming so far. It"s rather the end of the world. You"re right up against the edge of Russia."
"I wanted to."
"Of course. I didn"t suppose you were dragged across Europe by your hair to Kokensee. I"ll come all the way with you. I want to see Kokensee."
"Don"t walk so fast, then," said Ingeborg, panting. "I _can"t_ walk like that."
He looked at her as he went slower. "Is that the effect of Kokensee?" he said. "Why can"t you walk like that? You"re only a girl."
"I"m not a girl at all. I"m a wife, I"m a mother. I"m everything really now except a mother-in-law and a grandmother. That"s all there"s still left to be. I think they"re rather dull things, both of them."
"You won"t think so when you"ve got there."
"That"s the dreadfullest part of it."