The Pastor's Wife
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 29
In Redchester nobody 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 amusement 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 passive. She would let go of persisting that he was a demi-god 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 nobody 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 gratitude 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?”
She was looking at him in a kind of alarm. This was the longest speech by far he had made, and she could not imagine what was coming at the end. He was busy as usual flinging her on to paper—the number of his studies of her was by this time something monstrous—and was glancing at her swiftly and professionally at every sentence.
“About husbands. Tell me what you think about husbands.”
“About husbands? But they’re not bad taste,” she said.
“Tell me what you think about them.”
“Well, they’re people one is very fond of,” she said, with her hands clasped round her knees.
“Oh. You find that?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I never had one.”
“The advantages of being a woman! They’re people one is fond of once and for all. They rescue one from Redchester. They’re good and kind. They help one roll up great balls of common memories, and all the memories grow somehow into tender things at last. And they’re patient. Even when they’ve found out how tiresome one is they still go on being patient. And—one loves them.”
“And—they love you?”
She flushed. “Of course,” she said.
“You’re amusing with your of courses and once for alls. Really you know there are no such things. Nothing necessarily follows. I mean, not when you get to human beings.”
Ingeborg fidgeted. Too well did she know the dishonesty of her Of course; too well did she remember the sudden switching off, after Zoppot, of Robert’s love. But the rest was strictly true anyhow, she thought. She did love him—dear Robert. The difference between him and an amazing friend like Ingram was, she explained to herself, that she was interested in Ingram, profoundly interested, and she was not interested in Robert. That, she supposed, was because she loved Robert. Perfect love, she said to herself, watching with careful attention the approach of a hairy and rather awful caterpillar across the path towards her shoes, perfect love cast out a lot of things besides fear. It cast out, for instance, conversation. And interest, which one couldn’t very well have without conversation. Interest, of course, was an altogether second-rate feeling compared to love, and because it was second-rate it was noisier, expressing itself with a copiousness unnecessary when one got to the higher stages of feeling. One loved one’s Robert, and one kept quiet. Far the highest thing was to love; but—she drew her feet up quickly under her—how very interesting it was being interested!
“Well?” he said, looking at her, “go on.”
“Well, but I can’t go on because I’ve finished. There isn’t any more.”
“It’s a soon exhausted subject.”
“That’s because it’s so simple and so—so dear. You know where you are with husbands.”
“You mean you know you’re not anywhere.”
“Oh,” she said, throwing back her head and facing him courageously, “how you don’t realise! And anyhow,” she added, “if that were true it would be a very placid and restful state to be in.”
“Negation. Death. Do you find it placid and restful with me?”
“No,” she said quickly.
He put down his brushes and stared at her. “What a mercy!” he said. “What a mercy! I was beginning to be afraid you did.”
By the end of the third week an odd thing had happened. He was no nearer piercing through her outer husk to any emotions she might possess than before, but she, astonishingly, had pierced through his.
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