"I wish Robert were here," said Ingeborg, gazing round her out of the windows with immense contentment. "If only he could have got away I believe he'd have loved it."
Ingram pushed back his chair with a jerk. "I don't think he'd have loved it at all," he said; and going back through the length of the train to their compartment though he helped her at the difficult places, it was by putting out his hand behind him for her to clutch, he did not this time turn round and look into her eyes and laugh.
It grew very hot as the day wore on, and extremely dusty. The thunderstorm that had deluged East Prussia had not come that way, and there had been no rain from the look of things for a long while. The dust came in in clouds, and they were obliged to shut the windows, but it still came in through chinks and settled all over them and choked them, and even lay in the delicate details of Ingeborg's nose. He had made her take off her hat and veil, so she had nothing to protect her, and he watched her with a singular annoyance turning gradually drab-coloured. He wanted to lean forward and dust her, he hated to see her whiteness being soiled, it fidgeted him intolerably. He himself stood long train journeys badly; but though it was so hot, so insufferably hot, she was as active and restless as a child, continually jumping up and running out into the dreadful blazing corridor to see what there was to see that side.
They passed Weimar; and she was of an intemperate zeal on the subject of Goethe, putting down the window and craning out to look and quoting Kennst Du das Land wo die Citrone blüht—quoting to him, who loathed quotations even in cool weather. They passed Eisenach; and again she displayed zeal, talking eagerly of Luther and the Wartburg and the inkpot and the devil—and of St. Elizabeth, of course: he knew she would get to St. Elizabeth. She told him the legends—told him who knew all legends, told him who had a headache and could only keep alive by going into the lavatory and plunging his head every few minutes into cold water, and she did not in the least mind when she craned out of the window to look at things that she should come back into the carriage again with her hair in every sort of direction and her face not only dusty but with smuts.
At the hottest moment of the day he felt for a lurid instant as if it were not one choir-boy he was with but the entire choir having its summer treat and being taken by him single-handed for a long dog-day to the Crystal Palace; but that was after luncheon in the restaurant car, a luncheon that seemed to his fevered imagination to consist of bits of live cinder served in sulphur and eaten in a heaving, swaying lake of brimstone. Even the waiter who attended to their table was, in the teeth of regulations, a melted man; and when the inspector passed through, looking about him with the eye of a Prussian eagle to see that all was in order and the standard set by law was being reached of cool waiters and hot food and tepid passengers, he instantly pounced on the manifestly melted waiter who, unable to deny the obvious fact that he was beaded, put his heels together and endeavoured to escape a fine by anxious explanation that he knew he was in a perspiration but that it was a cold one.
They were having tea when they passed Frankfurt, and dinner when they passed Heidelberg. A great full moon was rising behind the castle at Heidelberg, and the Neckar was a streak of light. The summer day was coming to an end in perfect calm. The quiet roads leading away into woods and through orchards were starred on either side with white flowers. In the dusk it was only the white flowers that still shone, the stitchworts, the clusters of Star of Bethlehem, the spikes of white helleborine; and all the colours of the day, the blue of the chickory and delicate lilac of dwarf mallows, the bright yellow of wood loosestrife and rose-colour of campions, were already put out for the night.
Ingeborg gazed through the window with the face of a happy goblin. Her eyes looked brighter than ever out of their surrounding smuts, and her hair was all ends, little upright ends that stirred in the draught. The dreadful day, the hours and hours of heat and choking airlessness, had made no impression on her apparently, except to turn her from clean to dirty, while Ingram lay back in his corner a thing hardly human, wanting nothing now in the world but cold water poured over him and he to lie while it was poured on a slab of iced marble. But the sun was down at last, dew was falling and quieting the dust, and the final journey to the restaurant car had been made, a journey on which it was Ingeborg who opened the doors and nobody helped anybody at the crossings. He had walked behind her, and had fretfully observed her dress and how odd it was, like old back numbers of illustrated papers, the sleeves wrong, the skirt wrong, too much of it in places, too little in others, but mostly there was too much, for it was the year when women were skimpy.
"You'll have to get some clothes in Italy," he said to her at dinner.
"What for?" she asked, surprised.
"What for? To put on," he said with a limp acerbity.