The Pastor's Wife
Copyright© 2024 by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 33
At Bâle there was hurry and bustle, the half hour they ought to have had there wasted away by some unaccountable loosening of the bandages of discipline on the German side to four minutes—the conductor when questioned said the engine had gone wrong, and explained, with a shrug that was to help hide his shame in this failure of the infallible, that engines were but human—and again there was an undignified scamper down steps and up steps and along platforms, and they arrived panting, pushed in by porters, only just in time into a compartment studded round with sleeping Swiss.
Ingram left Ingeborg sitting temporarily on the edge of the seat clasping her umbrella and coat and little bag, while he walked through the train in search of more space, refusing to believe such a repulsive thing could happen to him as that he should be obliged to travel to Bellinzona with four sleeping Swiss; but the train seemed to be a popular one, else a national festival was preparing or some other upheaval that caused people to move about that night in numbers, and all the compartments were full.
He went back to Ingeborg in a condition of resentful gloom. The four Swiss were sleeping in the four corners, and the carriage smelt of crumbs. He opened the window, and there was an immediate simultaneous resurrection of the four Swiss into angry life. Ingram, fluent in French, met them with an equal volubility, standing with his back to the open window protecting it from their assaults, while Ingeborg looked on in alarm; but the conductor when he came pronounced in favour of the four Swiss. Pacified, they instantly fell asleep again; and Ingram, at least not taking care of their legs, strode out into the corridor, where he stood staring through the open window at midnight nature and cursing himself for not having broken the journey at Bâle, while Ingeborg peeped anxiously at his back round her coat and her umbrella.
From Bâle to Lucerne he was as unaware of her as if he had never met her, so very angry was he and so very tired. Then at Lucerne two of the Swiss got out, and turning round he saw her asleep in the compartment, tumbled over a little to one side, still holding her things, and once again she filled his heart. She was utterly asleep, in the most uncomfortable position, dropped away in the middle of how she happened to be sitting like a child does or a puppy; and he went in and sat down beside her and lifted her head very cautiously and gently on to his arm.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him along his sleeve without moving, in a sort of surprise.
“This is Lucerne,” he whispered, bending down; how soft she was, and how little!
“Is it? Why, that’s where Robert and I—”
But she was asleep again.
She slept till he woke her up before Bellinzona, and so she never knew the moment she had thrilled to think of when they would in the dawn of the summer morning come out on the other side of the St. Gothard into what, in spite of anything the Swiss might say, was Italy; and still half asleep, mechanically putting on her hat and pausing to rub her eyes while he urged her to be quick, she did not realise where she was. When she did, and looked eagerly at the window, it was to turn to him immediately in consternation.
“Oh!” she said.
“Yes,” said Ingram, passing his hand quickly over his hair, a gesture of his when annoyed.
It was raining.
They got out on to what seemed the most melancholy platform in the world, a grey wet junction with a grey level sky low down over it and over all the country round it. The Locarno train was waiting, and they went to it in silence. It was a quarter to six, a difficult time of day. The train, almost empty, jogged slowly through the valley of the Ticino. Down the windows raindrops chased each other. On the road alongside the railway, a road bound also for Locarno and dreary with brown puddles, an occasional high cart crawled drawn by a mule and driven by a huddled human being beneath a vast umbrella. The lake when they came in sight of it was a yawn of mist.
Ingeborg stared out at these things in silence. It was incredible that this should be Italy—again in spite of anything the Swiss might say—while on the other side of the Alps all Germany, including Kökensee, lay shimmering in light and colour. Ingram sat in the farthest corner of the carriage, his hands thrust in his pockets, his hat pulled over his eyes, looking straight in front of him. He was a mass of varied and profound exasperations. Everything exasperated him, even to the long trickle slowly creeping towards him down the floor from Ingeborg’s wet umbrella. There was nothing she could have said or done at that moment that would not have rubbed his exasperation into a flame of swift and devastating speech. Luckily she said and did nothing, but sat quite silent with her face turned away towards the blurred window panes. But if she did not speak or do she yet was; and he was acutely conscious, though he never took his eyes off the cushions opposite, of every detail of her in that grey and horrible light, of her crumpled clothes, her drooping smudgedness, her hat grown careless, and her hair in wisps. He had wanted to show her Italy, he had extraordinarily wanted to show her Italy in its summer magnificence, and there was—this. As a result what he now extraordinarily wanted was to upbraid her. He did not stop to analyse why.
At the hôtel in Locarno where they went for baths and breakfast—he had planned originally to show her the beautiful walk from there along the side of the lake to Cannobio, but now beyond baths and breakfast he had no plan—a person in shirt sleeves and a green apron who inadequately represented the hall-porter, for it was not yet seven and the hall-porter was still in bed, unintelligently and unfortunately spoke to Ingeborg of Ingram in his hearing as Monsieur votre père.
This strangely annoyed Ingram. “It’s your short skirt,” he said, with suppressed sulphur. “You positively must get some clothes. Dressed like that you suggest perambulators.”
“But this is my best dress,” she protested. “It’s quite new. I mean, I’ve never had it on before since it was made.”
And with the easy tactlessness of one who has not yet learned to be afraid, she looked at him and laughed.
“Why,” she said, “this morning I’m perambulators and only last night, quite late last night, I was the peace of God.”
To this, however, he did not trust himself to reply, but vanished with a kind of pounce into his bathroom.
He came to breakfast clean, but in a mood that could bear nothing, least of all good temper. Ingeborg was by nature good tempered. She sat there pleased and refreshed—after all, he remembered resentfully, she had had five hours’ sleep in the train while he had not had a wink—gaily making the best of things. She pointed out the strength of the coffee and the crispness of the rolls. She asked him if he did not think it a nice hôtel. She did not agree when he alluded to the waiter as blighted. She predicted a break in the weather at eleven, and said that it had always come true what her old nurse used to tell her, that rain at seven meant fine at eleven.
He hated her old nurse.
Until he had had some sleep, a long steady sleep, he would, he knew, be nothing but jarred nerves. When then after breakfast she inquired, with a cheerful air of being ready for anything, what they were going to do next, he briefly announced that he was going to sleep.
“Oh? Shall I have to go, too?” she asked, her face falling.
“Of course not.”
“Then,” she said eagerly, “I’ll go out and explore.”
“What, in this rain?”
“Oh, I’ve got goloshes.”
Goloshes! He retreated into his room.
It annoyed him intensely that she should be not only ready but pleased to go out for her first walk in Italy without him. He threw himself angrily on the bed, rang the bell, and bade the person who answered it, the same young man in shirt sleeves and a green apron who had welcomed them, tell Madame that if he were not awake by luncheon time she was not to wait for him, but was to have luncheon at the proper hour just the same.
The young man sought out Ingeborg in her room. She was tugging on her goloshes, one foot on a chair, her face flushed with effort and expectancy.
“Monsieur votre père—” he began.
“Ce n’est pas mon père,” said Ingeborg, turning an amused face to him as she tugged.
“Monsieur votre mari—”
“Quoi? Certainement pas,” said Ingeborg, who in spite of her prize for French was unacquainted with the refinements of that language. “Ce n’est pas mon mari,” she said, energetically repudiating.
“Ah—Monsieur n’est pas le mari de Madame,” said the young man trippingly.
“Certainement pas,” said Ingeborg. “Mon mari est à la maison.”
“Ah—tiens,” said the young man.
“C’est mon ami,” said Ingeborg.
“Ah—tiens, tiens,” said the young man; and he delivered his message with a sudden ease and comfort of manner.
But though the young man’s manner grew easy, after his report of this brief dialogue the hôtel’s manner grew stiff, for on the slip of paper presented to Ingram to be filled in with his name he had, unaware of the things Ingeborg was saying, described himself and her as Mr. and Mrs. Dobson, and the hôtel, in which English Church services were held, and which was at that moment, though the season was over, being stayed in by several representative English spinsters, and a clergyman also from England with a wife and grown-up daughters, most respectable nice ladies who all took him out every day twice, once after breakfast and once after tea, for a little walk—the hôtel decided, putting its heads together in the manager’s office, that it would, using tact, encourage the Dobsons to depart.
It could do nothing, however, for the moment, for the lady had disappeared with an umbrella into the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, was sleeping; and this condition of things continued for many hours, the lady not coming into luncheon but remaining in the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, going on sleeping. Then it became aware that they were both having tea in a distant corner of the slippery windowed wilderness of bamboo chairs and tables described in its prospectus as the Handsome Palmy Lounge, and that they had drawn up a second table to the one their tea was on and piled it with undesirably dripping branches of the yellow broom that grew high up in the hills, and that they were being noticed with suspicion by the hôtel’s authentic guests who were used to having their tea in the silent stupor of the really married, because the gentleman, contrary to the observed habits of genuine husbands, was talking to the lady instead of reading the Daily Mail.
The hôtel was nothing if not competent. It could handle any sort of situation competently, from runaway couples to that most unpleasant form of guest of all, the kind that came alive and went away dead. Full of tact, it allowed the lady and gentleman to finish their tea undisturbed; then it sent some one sleek to inform them that, most unfortunately, their rooms had been engaged for weeks beforehand for that very night, and therefore—
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