Upstairs, in his brown firelit room, he threw himself into an armchair,
and remembered... Harvard first--then Oxford; then a year of wandering
and rich initiation. Returning to New York, he had read law, and now
had his desk in the office of the respectable firm in whose charge the
Dagonet estate had mouldered for several generations. But his profession
was the least real thing in his life. The realities lay about him now:
the books jamming his old college bookcases and overflowing on chairs
and tables; sketches too--he could do charming things, if only he had
known how to finish them!--and, on the writing-table at his elbow,
scattered sheets of prose and verse; charming things also, but, like the
sketches, unfinished.
Nothing in the Dagonet and Marvell tradition was opposed to this
desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been
the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or
Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.
The only essential was that he should live "like a gentleman"--that is,
with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to
the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of
wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish
between private and "business" honour.
No equipment could more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for
getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete
the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell's case. He had accepted the fact with
a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of
the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants--enough
to buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash
to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world
of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides,
had once come on a cave--a secret inaccessible place with glaucous
lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the
sky. He had kept his find from the other boys, not churlishly, for he
was always an outspoken lad, but because he felt there were things about
the cave that the others, good fellows as they all were, couldn't be
expected to understand, and that, anyhow, it would never be quite his
cave again after he had let his thick-set freckled cousins play smuggler
and pirate in it.
And so with his inner world. Though so coloured by outer impressions,
it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with
the same joy of furtive possession. One day, of course, some one would
discover it and reign there with him--no, reign over it and him. Once or
twice already a light foot had reached the threshold. His cousin Clare
Dagonet, for instance: there had been a summer when her voice had
sounded far down the windings... but he had run over to Spain for the
autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to Peter Van Degen, and
for a while it looked black in the cave. That was long ago, as time is
reckoned under thirty; and for three years now he had felt for her only
a half-contemptuous pity. To have stood at the mouth of his cave, and
have turned from it to the Van Degen lair--!
Poor Clare repented, indeed--she wanted it clearly but she repented in
the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her broken heart
from opera to ball. She had been subdued to what she worked in, and she
could never again find her way to the enchanted cave... Ralph, since
then, had reached the point of deciding that he would never marry;
reached it not suddenly or dramatically, but with such sober advisedness
as is urged on those about to take the opposite step. What he most
wanted, now that the first flutter of being was over, was to learn and
to do--to know what the great people had thought, think about their
thinking, and then launch his own boat: write some good verse if
possible; if not, then critical prose. A dramatic poem lay among the
stuff at his elbow; but the prose critic was at his elbow too, and not
to be satisfied about the poem; and poet and critic passed the nights
in hot if unproductive debate. On the whole, it seemed likely that the
critic would win the day, and the essay on "The Rhythmical Structures of
Walt Whitman" take shape before "The Banished God." Yet if the light in
the cave was less supernaturally blue, the chant of its tides less laden
with unimaginable music, it was still a thronged and echoing place when
Undine Spragg appeared on its threshold...
His mother and sister of course wanted him to marry. They had the usual
theory that he was "made" for conjugal bliss: women always thought that
of a fellow who didn't get drunk and have low tastes. Ralph smiled at
the idea as he sat crouched among his secret treasures. Marry--but whom,
in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold
themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought
their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been
transacted on the Stock Exchange. His mother, he knew, had no such
ambitions for him: she would have liked him to fancy a "nice girl" like
Harriet Ray.
Harriet Ray was neither vulgar nor ambitious. She regarded Washington
Square as the birthplace of Society, knew by heart all the cousinships
of early New York, hated motor-cars, could not make herself understood
on the telephone, and was determined, if she married, never to receive a
divorced woman. As Mrs. Marvell often said, such girls as Harriet were
growing rare. Ralph was not sure about this. He was inclined to think
that, certain modifications allowed for, there would always be plenty of
Harriet Rays for unworldly mothers to commend to their sons; and he had
no desire to diminish their number by removing one from the ranks of the
marriageable. He had no desire to marry at all--that had been the whole
truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now--? He lit a cigar, and
began to recall his hour's conversation with Mrs. Spragg.
Ralph had never taken his mother's social faiths very seriously.
Surveying the march of civilization from a loftier angle, he had early
mingled with the Invaders, and curiously observed their rites and
customs. But most of those he had met had already been modified by
contact with the indigenous: they spoke the same language as his, though
on their lips it had often so different a meaning. Ralph had never seen
them actually in the making, before they had acquired the speech of the
conquered race. But Mrs. Spragg still used the dialect of her people,
and before the end of the visit Ralph had ceased to regret that her
daughter was out. He felt obscurely that in the girl's presence--frank
and simple as he thought her--he should have learned less of life in
early Apex.
Mrs. Spragg, once reconciled--or at least resigned--to the mysterious
necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of Undine's, had yielded to
the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen
Mrs. Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle
manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could
tell him things that Mrs. Heeny already knew, and Mrs. Spragg liked
to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of
permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had
lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undine's absence, and her
visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain,
had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "It's a wonderful
find--how could you tell it would be such a fit?"--it came to her quite
easily to answer: "Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on
the market the week she was born--" and then to explain, as he remained
struck and silent: "It's from UNdoolay, you know, the French for
crimping; father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a
scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I remember the
time he invented his Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the Bible to
get the name... No, father didn't start IN as a druggist," she went on,
expanding with the signs of Marvell's interest; "he was educated for an
undertaker, and built up a first-class business; but he was always
a beautiful speaker, and after a while he sorter drifted into the
ministry. Of course it didn't pay him anything like as well, so finally
he opened a drug-store, and he did first-rate at that too, though his
heart was always in the pulpit. But after he made such a success with
his hair-waver he got speculating in land out at Apex, and somehow
everything went--though Mr. Spragg did all he COULD--." Mrs. Spragg,
when she found herself embarked on a long sentence, always ballasted it
by italicizing the last word.
Her husband, she continued, could not, at the time, do much for his
father-in-law. Mr. Spragg had come to Apex as a poor boy, and their
early married life had been a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic
affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the
epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-works were built;
and this calamity, by causing Mr. Spragg to resolve that thereafter
Apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of his
fortunes.
"He had taken over some of poor father's land for a bad debt, and when
he got up the Pure Water move the company voted to buy the land and
build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began to be better
off, and it DID seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about
the children."
Mr. Spragg, thereafter, had begun to be a power in Apex, and fat years
had followed on the lean. Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs
to read between the lines of Mrs. Spragg's untutored narrative, and he
understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr. Spragg's
domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr. Spragg had "helped
out" his ruined father-in-law, and had vowed on his children's graves
that no Apex child should ever again drink poisoned water--and out
of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of
compensation, material prosperity had come. What Ralph understood and
appreciated was Mrs. Spragg's unaffected frankness in talking of her
early life. Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past,
such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but
undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been "plain people" and had not
yet learned to be ashamed of it. The fact drew them much closer to the
Dagonet ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense. Ralph felt
that his mother, who shuddered away from Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll, would
understand and esteem Mrs. Spragg.
But how long would their virgin innocence last? Popple's vulgar hands
were on it already--Popple's and the unspeakable Van Degen's! Once they
and theirs had begun the process of initiating Undine, there was no
knowing--or rather there was too easy knowing--how it would end! It was
incredible that she too should be destined to swell the ranks of the
cheaply fashionable; yet were not her very freshness, her malleability,
the mark of her fate? She was still at the age when the flexible soul
offers itself to the first grasp. That the grasp should chance to be Van
Degen's--that was what made Ralph's temples buzz, and swept away all his
plans for his own future like a beaver's dam in a spring flood. To
save her from Van Degen and Van Degenism: was that really to be his
mission--the "call" for which his life had obscurely waited? It was
not in the least what he had meant to do with the fugitive flash of
consciousness he called self; but all that he had purposed for that
transitory being sank into insignificance under the pressure of Undine's
claims.
Ralph Marvell's notion of women had been formed on the experiences
common to good-looking young men of his kind. Women were drawn to him as
much by his winning appealing quality, by the sense of a youthful warmth
behind his light ironic exterior, as by his charms of face and mind.
Except during Clare Dagonet's brief reign the depths in him had not been
stirred; but in taking what each sentimental episode had to give he had
preserved, through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great
adventure to come. It was this faith that made him so easy a victim
when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance: the
imaginative man's indestructible dream of a rounded passion.
The clearness with which he judged the girl and himself seemed the
surest proof that his feeling was more than a surface thrill. He was not
blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her
grace and her persuasion. Diverse et ondoyante--so he had seen her from
the first. But was not that merely the sign of a quicker response to the
world's manifold appeal? There was Harriet Ray, sealed up tight in the
vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could
get at her: there could be no call to rescue young ladies so
secured from the perils of reality! Undine had no such traditional
safeguards--Ralph guessed Mrs. Spragg's opinions to be as fluid as
her daughter's--and the girl's very sensitiveness to new impressions,
combined with her obvious lack of any sense of relative values, would
make her an easy prey to the powers of folly. He seemed to see her--as
he sat there, pressing his fists into his temples--he seemed to see her
like a lovely rock-bound Andromeda, with the devouring monster Society
careering up to make a mouthful of her; and himself whirling down on his
winged horse--just Pegasus turned Rosinante for the nonce--to cut her
bonds, snatch her up, and whirl her back into the blue...