The spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of
temperature to the threshold of a sultry June.
Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of
the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his
case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find
himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square. It was
hardly there that he had expected Pegasus to land him; and, like a man
returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much
smaller scale than he had imagined. Had the Dagonet boundaries really
narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider
vision?
Certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and
his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in
the next room. Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph and
his past. Concerning his son he still felt and thought, in a general
way, in the terms of the Dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant
in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that
tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession. But for himself
it was different. Since his transaction with Moffatt he had had the
sense of living under a new dispensation. He was not sure that it was
any worse than the other; but then he was no longer very sure about
anything. Perhaps this growing indifference was merely the reaction from
a long nervous strain: that his mother and sister thought it so was
shown by the way in which they mutely watched and hovered. Their
discretion was like the hushed tread about a sick-bed. They permitted
themselves no criticism of Undine; he was asked no awkward questions,
subjected to no ill-timed sympathy. They simply took him back, on his
own terms, into the life he had left them to; and their silence had none
of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more
wounding than speech.
For a while he received a weekly letter from Undine. Vague and
disappointing though they were, these missives helped him through the
days; but he looked forward to them rather as a pretext for replies than
for their actual contents. Undine was never at a loss for the spoken
word: Ralph had often wondered at her verbal range and her fluent use of
terms outside the current vocabulary. She had certainly not picked these
up in books, since she never opened one: they seemed rather like some
odd transmission of her preaching grandparent's oratory. But in her
brief and colourless letters she repeated the same bald statements in
the same few terms. She was well, she had been "round" with Bertha
Shallum, she had dined with the Jim Driscolls or May Beringer or Dicky
Bowles, the weather was too lovely or too awful; such was the gist of
her news. On the last page she hoped Paul was well and sent him a kiss;
but she never made a suggestion concerning his care or asked a question
about his pursuits. One could only infer that, knowing in what good
hands he was, she judged such solicitude superfluous; and it was thus
that Ralph put the matter to his mother.
"Of course she's not worrying about the boy--why should she? She knows
that with you and Laura he's as happy as a king."
To which Mrs. Marvell would answer gravely: "When you write, be sure
to say I shan't put on his thinner flannels as long as this east wind
lasts."
As for her husband's welfare. Undine's sole allusion to it consisted
in the invariable expression of the hope that he was getting along all
right: the phrase was always the same, and Ralph learned to know
just how far down the third page to look for it. In a postscript she
sometimes asked him to tell her mother about a new way of doing hair or
cutting a skirt; and this was usually the most eloquent passage of the
letter. What satisfaction he extracted from these communications he
would have found it hard to say; yet when they did not come he missed
them hardly less than if they had given him all he craved. Sometimes the
mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet and breathing its scent was
like holding his wife's hand and being enveloped in her fresh young
fragrance: the sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating
physical sensation. In other moods it was enough to trace the letters
of the first line and the last for the desert of perfunctory phrases
between the two to vanish, leaving him only the vision of their
interlaced names, as of a mystic bond which her own hand had tied.
Or else he saw her, closely, palpably before him, as she sat at her
writing-table, frowning and a little flushed, her bent nape showing the
light on her hair, her short lip pulled up by the effort of composition;
and this picture had the violent reality of dream-images on the verge of
waking. At other times, as he read her letter, he felt simply that at
least in the moment of writing it she had been with him. But in one of
the last she had said (to excuse a bad blot and an incoherent sentence):
"Everybody's talking to me at once, and I don't know what I'm writing."
That letter he had thrown into the fire....
After the first few weeks, the letters came less and less regularly:
at the end of two months they ceased. Ralph had got into the habit of
watching for them on the days when a foreign post was due, and as the
weeks went by without a sign he began to invent excuses for leaving the
office earlier and hurrying back to Washington Square to search
the letter-box for a big tinted envelope with a straggling blotted
superscription.
Undine's departure had given him a momentary sense of liberation: at
that stage in their relations any change would have brought relief. But
now that she was gone he knew she could never really go. Though his
feeling for her had changed, it still ruled his life. If he saw her in
her weakness he felt her in her power: the power of youth and physical
radiance that clung to his disenchanted memories as the scent she used
clung to her letters. Looking back at their four years of marriage he
began to ask himself if he had done all he could to draw her
half-formed spirit from its sleep. Had he not expected too much at
first, and grown too indifferent in the sequel? After all, she was still
in the toy age; and perhaps the very extravagance of his love had
retarded her growth, helped to imprison her in a little circle of
frivolous illusions. But the last months had made a man of him, and when
she came back he would know how to lift her to the height of his
experience.
So he would reason, day by day, as he hastened back to Washington
Square; but when he opened the door, and his first glance at the hall
table showed him there was no letter there, his illusions shrivelled
down to their weak roots. She had not written: she did not mean to
write. He and the boy were no longer a part of her life. When she
came back everything would be as it had been before, with the dreary
difference that she had tasted new pleasures and that their absence
would take the savour from all he had to give her. Then the coming of
another foreign mail would lift his hopes, and as he hurried home he
would imagine new reasons for expecting a letter....
Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection,
and at last, when the strain had become unbearable, he cabled her. The
answer ran: "Very well best love writing"; but the promised letter never
came....
He went on steadily with his work: he even passed through a phase of
exaggerated energy. But his baffled youth fought in him for air. Was
this to be the end? Was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery? The
plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained
unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working
for his wife and child. But at any rate, as it was mainly for Paul that
he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to
his inherited notions of "straightness." He would never again engage in
any transaction resembling his compact with Moffatt. Even now he was not
sure there had been anything crooked in that; but the fact of his having
instinctively referred the point to Mr. Spragg rather than to his
grandfather implied a presumption against it.
His partners were quick to profit by his sudden spurt of energy, and
his work grew no lighter. He was not only the youngest and most recent
member of the firm, but the one who had so far added least to the volume
of its business. His hours were the longest, his absences, as summer
approached, the least frequent and the most grudgingly accorded. No
doubt his associates knew that he was pressed for money and could not
risk a break. They "worked" him, and he was aware of it, and submitted
because he dared not lose his job. But the long hours of mechanical
drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. He
had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of
spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and
after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather's
whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.
Almost every one had gone out of town; but now and then Miss Ray came to
dine, and Ralph, seated beneath the family portraits and opposite the
desiccated Harriet, who had already faded to the semblance of one of
her own great-aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the
originals might have exchanged about the same table when New York
gentility centred in the Battery and the Bowling Green. Mr. Dagonet was
always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint
and recondite: they had as little bearing on life as the humours of a
Restoration comedy. As for Mrs. Marvell and Miss Ray, they seemed to the
young man even more spectrally remote: hardly anything that mattered to
him existed for them, and their prejudices reminded him of sign-posts
warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude.
Now and then he dined at his club and went on to the theatre with some
young men of his own age; but he left them afterward, half vexed with
himself for not being in the humour to prolong the adventure. There
were moments when he would have liked to affirm his freedom in however
commonplace a way: moments when the vulgarest way would have seemed
the most satisfying. But he always ended by walking home alone and
tip-toeing upstairs through the sleeping house lest he should wake his
boy....
On Saturday afternoons, when the business world was hurrying to the
country for golf and tennis, he stayed in town and took Paul to see the
Spraggs. Several times since his wife's departure he had tried to bring
about closer relations between his own family and Undine's; and the
ladies of Washington Square, in their eagerness to meet his wishes, had
made various friendly advances to Mrs. Spragg. But they were met by a
mute resistance which made Ralph suspect that Undine's strictures on his
family had taken root in her mother's brooding mind; and he gave up the
struggle to bring together what had been so effectually put asunder.
If he regretted his lack of success it was chiefly because he was so
sorry for the Spraggs. Soon after Undine's marriage they had abandoned
their polychrome suite at the Stentorian, and since then their
peregrinations had carried them through half the hotels of the
metropolis. Undine, who had early discovered her mistake in thinking
hotel life fashionable, had tried to persuade her parents to take a
house of their own; but though they refrained from taxing her with
inconsistency they did not act on her suggestion. Mrs. Spragg seemed
to shrink from the thought of "going back to house-keeping," and Ralph
suspected that she depended on the transit from hotel to hotel as the
one element of variety in her life. As for Mr. Spragg, it was impossible
to imagine any one in whom the domestic sentiments were more completely
unlocalized and disconnected from any fixed habits; and he was probably
aware of his changes of abode chiefly as they obliged him to ascend from
the Subway, or descend from the "Elevated," a few blocks higher up or
lower down.
Neither husband nor wife complained to Ralph of their frequent
displacements, or assigned to them any cause save the vague one of
"guessing they could do better"; but Ralph noticed that the decreasing
luxury of their life synchronized with Undine's growing demands for
money. During the last few months they had transferred themselves to the
"Malibran," a tall narrow structure resembling a grain-elevator divided
into cells, where linoleum and lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble
of the Stentorian, and fagged business men and their families consumed
the watery stews dispensed by "coloured help" in the grey twilight of a
basement dining-room.
Mrs. Spragg had no sitting-room, and Paul and his father had to be
received in one of the long public parlours, between ladies seated at
rickety desks in the throes of correspondence and groups of listlessly
conversing residents and callers.
The Spraggs were intensely proud of their grandson, and Ralph perceived
that they would have liked to see Paul charging uproariously from group
to group, and thrusting his bright curls and cherubic smile upon the
general attention. The fact that the boy preferred to stand between his
grandfather's knees and play with Mr. Spragg's Masonic emblem, or dangle
his legs from the arm of Mrs. Spragg's chair, seemed to his grandparents
evidence of ill-health or undue repression, and he was subjected by Mrs.
Spragg to searching enquiries as to how his food set, and whether he
didn't think his Popper was too strict with him. A more embarrassing
problem was raised by the "surprise" (in the shape of peanut candy or
chocolate creams) which he was invited to hunt for in Gran'ma's pockets,
and which Ralph had to confiscate on the way home lest the dietary rules
of Washington Square should be too visibly infringed.
Sometimes Ralph found Mrs. Heeny, ruddy and jovial, seated in the
arm-chair opposite Mrs. Spragg, and regaling her with selections from a
new batch of clippings. During Undine's illness of the previous winter
Mrs. Heeny had become a familiar figure to Paul, who had learned to
expect almost as much from her bag as from his grandmother's pockets; so
that the intemperate Saturdays at the Malibran were usually followed by
languid and abstemious Sundays in Washington Square. Mrs. Heeny, being
unaware of this sequel to her bounties, formed the habit of appearing
regularly on Saturdays, and while she chatted with his grandmother the
little boy was encouraged to scatter the grimy carpet with face-creams
and bunches of clippings in his thrilling quest for the sweets at the
bottom of her bag.
"I declare, if he ain't in just as much of a hurry f'r everything as his
mother!" she exclaimed one day in her rich rolling voice; and stooping
to pick up a long strip of newspaper which Paul had flung aside she
added, as she smoothed it out: "I guess 'f he was a little mite older
he'd be better pleased with this 'n with the candy. It's the very thing
I was trying to find for you the other day, Mrs. Spragg," she went on,
holding the bit of paper at arm's length; and she began to read out,
with a loudness proportioned to the distance between her eyes and the
text:
"With two such sprinters as 'Pete' Van Degen and Dicky Bowles to set the
pace, it's no wonder the New York set in Paris has struck a livelier
gait than ever this spring. It's a high-pressure season and no mistake,
and no one lags behind less than the fascinating Mrs. Ralph Marvell,
who is to be seen daily and nightly in all the smartest restaurants and
naughtiest theatres, with so many devoted swains in attendance that the
rival beauties of both worlds are said to be making catty comments. But
then Mrs. Marvell's gowns are almost as good as her looks--and how can
you expect the other women to stand for such a monopoly?"
To escape the strain of these visits, Ralph once or twice tried the
experiment of leaving Paul with his grand-parents and calling for him in
the late afternoon; but one day, on re-entering the Malibran, he was met
by a small abashed figure clad in a kaleidoscopic tartan and a green
velvet cap with a silver thistle. After this experience of the
"surprises" of which Gran'ma was capable when she had a chance to take
Paul shopping Ralph did not again venture to leave his son, and their
subsequent Saturdays were passed together in the sultry gloom of the
Malibran. Conversation with the Spraggs was almost impossible. Ralph
could talk with his father-in-law in his office, but in the hotel
parlour Mr. Spragg sat in a ruminating silence broken only by the
emission of an occasional "Well--well" addressed to his grandson. As for
Mrs. Spragg, her son-in-law could not remember having had a sustained
conversation with her since the distant day when he had first called at
the Stentorian, and had been "entertained," in Undine's absence, by her
astonished mother. The shock of that encounter had moved Mrs. Spragg to
eloquence; but Ralph's entrance into the family, without making him seem
less of a stranger, appeared once for all to have relieved her of the
obligation of finding something to say to him.
The one question she invariably asked: "You heard from Undie?" had been
relatively easy to answer while his wife's infrequent letters continued
to arrive; but a Saturday came when he felt the blood rise to his
temples as, for the fourth consecutive week, he stammered out, under the
snapping eyes of Mrs. Heeny: "No, not by this post either--I begin to
think I must have lost a letter"; and it was then that Mr. Spragg,
who had sat silently looking up at the ceiling, cut short his wife's
exclamation by an enquiry about real estate in the Bronx. After that,
Ralph noticed, Mrs. Spragg never again renewed her question; and he
understood that his father-in-law had guessed his embarrassment and
wished to spare it.
Ralph had never thought of looking for any delicacy of feeling under
Mr. Spragg's large lazy irony, and the incident drew the two men nearer
together. Mrs. Spragg, for her part, was certainly not delicate; but
she was simple and without malice, and Ralph liked her for her silent
acceptance of her diminished state. Sometimes, as he sat between the
lonely primitive old couple, he wondered from what source Undine's
voracious ambitions had been drawn: all she cared for, and attached
importance to, was as remote from her parents' conception of life as her
impatient greed from their passive stoicism.
One hot afternoon toward the end of June Ralph suddenly wondered if
Clare Van Degen were still in town. She had dined in Washington Square
some ten days earlier, and he remembered her saying that she had sent
the children down to Long Island, but that she herself meant to stay on
in town till the heat grew unbearable. She hated her big showy place on
Long Island, she was tired of the spring trip to London and Paris, where
one met at every turn the faces one had grown sick of seeing all winter,
and she declared that in the early summer New York was the only place in
which one could escape from New Yorkers... She put the case amusingly,
and it was like her to take up any attitude that went against the habits
of her set; but she lived at the mercy of her moods, and one could never
tell how long any one of them would rule her.
As he sat in his office, with the noise and glare of the endless
afternoon rising up in hot waves from the street, there wandered into
Ralph's mind a vision of her shady drawing-room. All day it hung before
him like the mirage of a spring before a dusty traveller: he felt a
positive thirst for her presence, for the sound of her voice, the wide
spaces and luxurious silences surrounding her.
It was perhaps because, on that particular day, a spiral pain was
twisting around in the back of his head, and digging in a little deeper
with each twist, and because the figures on the balance sheet before him
were hopping about like black imps in an infernal forward-and-back,
that the picture hung there so persistently. It was a long time since he
had wanted anything as much as, at that particular moment, he wanted to
be with Clare and hear her voice; and as soon as he had ground out the
day's measure of work he rang up the Van Degen palace and learned that
she was still in town.
The lowered awnings of her inner drawing-room cast a luminous shadow on
old cabinets and consoles, and on the pale flowers scattered here and
there in vases of bronze and porcelain. Clare's taste was as capricious
as her moods, and the rest of the house was not in harmony with this
room. There was, in particular, another drawing-room, which she now
described as Peter's creation, but which Ralph knew to be partly hers: a
heavily decorated apartment, where Popple's portrait of her throned over
a waste of gilt furniture. It was characteristic that to-day she had
had Ralph shown in by another way; and that, as she had spared him the
polyphonic drawing-room, so she had skilfully adapted her own appearance
to her soberer background. She sat near the window, reading, in a clear
cool dress: and at his entrance she merely slipped a finger between the
pages and looked up at him.
Her way of receiving him made him feel that restlessness and stridency
were as unlike her genuine self as the gilded drawing-room, and that
this quiet creature was the only real Clare, the Clare who had once been
so nearly his, and who seemed to want him to know that she had never
wholly been any one else's.
"Why didn't you let me know you were still in town?" he asked, as he sat
down in the sofa-corner near her chair.