Her eyes grew very wide at this dreadful picture. Now was the moment, she thought, turning away from it quickly, now that there had come this pause in her life, to go over to England for a visit and see her relations and talk and come back refreshed to a new chapter of existence in Kökensee. She had not been out of Kökensee, except to Zoppot, since her marriage, and her throat tightened at the thought of England. But the Bishop had never forgiven her marriage; and her having had six children had also, it seemed from her mother's letters when there used to be letters, made an unfavourable impression on him. It had, in fact, upset him. He had considered such conduct too distinctively German to be passed over; and when she added to the error in taste of having had them the further error or rather negligence—it must have been criminal, thought the Bishop—of not being able to keep them alive, the Palace, after having four times with an increasing severity condoled, withdrew into a disapproval so profound that it could only express itself adequately by silence.
And a stay with Judith was out of the question. One had for a stay with Judith to have clothes, and she had no clothes; at least, none newer than eight years old—her immense unworn trousseau dogged her through the years—for Judith gave many parties at the Master's Lodge, brilliant gatherings, her mother called them in her rare letters, where London, come down on purpose and expressed in Prime and other ministers as well as in the fine flower of the aristocracy and a few selected fragrances from the world of literature and art—once her mother wrote that Ingram, the great painter, had been at the last party, and was so much enslaved by Judith's loveliness that he had asked as a favour to be allowed to paint her—sat at Judith's feet.
No; England was not for her. Her place was in Kökensee, and her business now was to do what her governesses used to call improve her mind. Perhaps if she improved it enough Robert would talk to her again sometimes, and this time not on the Little Treasure basis but on the solid one of intellectual companionship. Might she not end by being a real helpmeet to him? Somebody who would gradually learn to be quiet and analytical and artful with grains?
She went indoors and wrote then and there to London, renewing the long-ended subscriptions to the Times, Spectator, Clarion, Hibbert's Journal, and the rest. She asked for a catalogue of the newest publications that were not novels—her determination was too serious just then for novels—ordered Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," for she felt she would like to have some principles, especially first ones, and said she would be glad of any little hint the news-agent could give her as to what he thought a married lady ought to know; and she spent the rest of the evening and the two following days laying the foundations of intellectual companionship by looking up the article Manure in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" and paraphrasing it into conversational observations that sounded to her so clever when she tried them on Herr Dremmel three days later at tea-time that she was astonished herself.
She was still more astonished when Herr Dremmel, having listened, remarked that her facts were wrong.
"But they can't possibly—" she began; then broke off, feeling the awkwardness of a position in which one was unable to argue without at once revealing the "Encyclopædia."
CHAPTER XXVII
This was in May. By the end of the following May Ingeborg had read so much that she felt quite uncomfortable.
It had been a fine confused reading, in which Ruskin jostled Mr. Roger Fry and Shelley lingered, as it were, in the lap of Mr. Masefield. The news-agent, who must have lived chiefly a great many years before, steadily sent her mid, early, and pre-Victorian literature; and she, ordering on her own account books advertised in the weekly papers, found herself as a result one day in the placid arms of the Lake Poets, and the next being disciplined by Mr. Marinetti, one day ambling unconcernedly with Lamb, and the next caught in the exquisite intricacies of Mr. Henry James. She read books of travel, she learned poetry by heart, she grew skilful at combining her studies with her cooking; and propping up Keats on the dresser could run to him for a fresh line in the very middle of the pudding almost without the pudding minding. And since she loved to hear the beautiful words she learned aloud, and the kitchen was full of a pleasant buzzing, a murmurous sound of sonnets as well as flies, to which the servant got used in time.