Undine did not fulfil her threat. The month of May saw her back in the
rooms she had declared she would never set foot in, and after her long
sojourn among the echoing vistas of Saint Desert the exiguity of her
Paris quarters seemed like cosiness.
In the interval many things had happened. Hubert, permitted by his
anxious relatives to anticipate the term of the family mourning, had
been showily and expensively united to his heiress; the Hotel de Chelles
had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance with the bride's
requirements; and the young couple, not content with these utilitarian
changes had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions, and given
over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room to a decorative
painter with a new theory of the human anatomy. Undine had silently
assisted at this spectacle, and at the sight of the old Marquise's
abject acquiescence; she had seen the Duchesse de Dordogne and the
Princesse Estradina go past her door to visit Hubert's premier and
marvel at the American bath-tubs and the Annamite bric-a-brac; and she
had been present, with her husband, at the banquet at which Hubert had
revealed to the astonished Faubourg the prehistoric episodes depicted on
his dining-room walls. She had accepted all these necessities with the
stoicism which the last months had developed in her; for more and more,
as the days passed, she felt herself in the grasp of circumstances
stronger than any effort she could oppose to them. The very absence
of external pressure, of any tactless assertion of authority on her
husband's part, intensified the sense of her helplessness. He simply
left it to her to infer that, important as she might be to him in
certain ways, there were others in which she did not weigh a feather.
Their outward relations had not changed since her outburst on the
subject of Hubert's marriage. That incident had left her half-ashamed,
half-frightened at her behaviour, and she had tried to atone for it
by the indirect arts that were her nearest approach to acknowledging
herself in the wrong. Raymond met her advances with a good grace,
and they lived through the rest of the winter on terms of apparent
understanding. When the spring approached it was he who suggested that,
since his mother had consented to Hubert's marrying before the year of
mourning was over, there was really no reason why they should not go up
to Paris as usual; and she was surprised at the readiness with which he
prepared to accompany her.
A year earlier she would have regarded this as another proof of her
power; but she now drew her inferences less quickly. Raymond was as
"lovely" to her as ever; but more than once, during their months in the
country, she had had a startled sense of not giving him all he expected
of her. She had admired him, before their marriage, as a model of social
distinction; during the honeymoon he had been the most ardent of lovers;
and with their settling down at Saint Desert she had prepared to resign
herself to the society of a country gentleman absorbed in sport and
agriculture. But Raymond, to her surprise, had again developed a
disturbing resemblance to his predecessor. During the long winter
afternoons, after he had gone over his accounts with the bailiff, or
written his business letters, he took to dabbling with a paint-box, or
picking out new scores at the piano; after dinner, when they went to the
library, he seemed to expect to read aloud to her from the reviews and
papers he was always receiving; and when he had discovered her inability
to fix her attention he fell into the way of absorbing himself in one of
the old brown books with which the room was lined. At first he tried--as
Ralph had done--to tell her about what he was reading or what was
happening in the world; but her sense of inadequacy made her slip
away to other subjects, and little by little their talk died down to
monosyllables. Was it possible that, in spite of his books, the evenings
seemed as long to Raymond as to her, and that he had suggested going
back to Paris because he was bored at Saint Desert? Bored as she was
herself, she resented his not finding her company all-sufficient, and
was mortified by the discovery that there were regions of his life she
could not enter.
But once back in Paris she had less time for introspection, and Raymond
less for books. They resumed their dispersed and busy life, and in spite
of Hubert's ostentatious vicinity, of the perpetual lack of money, and
of Paul's innocent encroachments on her freedom, Undine, once more in
her element, ceased to brood upon her grievances. She enjoyed going
about with her husband, whose presence at her side was distinctly
ornamental. He seemed to have grown suddenly younger and more animated,
and when she saw other women looking at him she remembered how
distinguished he was. It amused her to have him in her train, and
driving about with him to dinners and dances, waiting for him on
flower-decked landings, or pushing at his side through blazing
theatre-lobbies, answered to her inmost ideal of domestic intimacy.
He seemed disposed to allow her more liberty than before, and it was
only now and then that he let drop a brief reminder of the conditions on
which it was accorded. She was to keep certain people at a distance,
she was not to cheapen herself by being seen at vulgar restaurants
and tea-rooms, she was to join with him in fulfilling certain family
obligations (going to a good many dull dinners among the number); but in
other respects she was free to fill her days as she pleased.
"Not that it leaves me much time," she admitted to Madame de Trezac;
"what with going to see his mother every day, and never missing one of
his sisters' jours, and showing myself at the Hotel de Dordogne whenever
the Duchess gives a pay-up party to the stuffy people Lili Estradina
won't be bothered with, there are days when I never lay eyes on Paul,
and barely have time to be waved and manicured; but, apart from that,
Raymond's really much nicer and less fussy than he was."
Undine, as she grew older, had developed her mother's craving for a
confidante, and Madame de Trezac had succeeded in that capacity to Mabel
Lipscomb and Bertha Shallum.
"Less fussy?" Madame de Trezac's long nose lengthened thoughtfully.
"H'm--are you sure that's a good sign?"
Undine stared and laughed. "Oh, my dear, you're so quaint! Why, nobody's
jealous any more."
"No; that's the worst of it." Madame de Trezac pondered. "It's a
thousand pities you haven't got a son."
"Yes; I wish we had." Undine stood up, impatient to end the
conversation. Since she had learned that her continued childlessness
was regarded by every one about her as not only unfortunate but somehow
vaguely derogatory to her, she had genuinely begun to regret it; and any
allusion to the subject disturbed her.
"Especially," Madame de Trezac continued, "as Hubert's wife--"
"Oh, if THAT'S all they want, it's a pity Raymond didn't marry Hubert's
wife," Undine flung back; and on the stairs she murmured to herself:
"Nettie has been talking to my mother-in-law."
But this explanation did not quiet her, and that evening, as she and
Raymond drove back together from a party, she felt a sudden impulse to
speak. Sitting close to him in the darkness of the carriage, it ought to
have been easy for her to find the needed word; but the barrier of his
indifference hung between them, and street after street slipped by,
and the spangled blackness of the river unrolled itself beneath their
wheels, before she leaned over to touch his hand.
"What is it, my dear?"
She had not yet found the word, and already his tone told her she was
too late. A year ago, if she had slipped her hand in his, she would not
have had that answer.
"Your mother blames me for our not having a child. Everybody thinks it's
my fault."
He paused before answering, and she sat watching his shadowy profile
against the passing lamps.
"My mother's ideas are old-fashioned; and I don't know that it's
anybody's business but yours and mine."
"Yes, but--"
"Here we are." The brougham was turning under the archway of the hotel,
and the light of Hubert's tall windows fell across the dusky court.
Raymond helped her out, and they mounted to their door by the stairs
which Hubert had recarpeted in velvet, with a marble nymph lurking in
the azaleas on the landing.
In the antechamber Raymond paused to take her cloak from her shoulders,
and his eyes rested on her with a faint smile of approval.
"You never looked better; your dress is extremely becoming. Good-night,
my dear," he said, kissing her hand as he turned away.
Undine kept this incident to herself: her wounded pride made her shrink
from confessing it even to Madame de Trezac. She was sure Raymond would
"come back"; Ralph always had, to the last. During their remaining weeks
in Paris she reassured herself with the thought that once they were back
at Saint Desert she would easily regain her lost hold; and when Raymond
suggested their leaving Paris she acquiesced without a protest. But at
Saint Desert she seemed no nearer to him than in Paris. He continued to
treat her with unvarying amiability, but he seemed wholly absorbed in
the management of the estate, in his books, his sketching and his music.
He had begun to interest himself in politics and had been urged to stand
for his department. This necessitated frequent displacements: trips to
Beaune or Dijon and occasional absences in Paris. Undine, when he was
away, was not left alone, for the dowager Marquise had established
herself at Saint Desert for the summer, and relays of brothers
and sisters-in-law, aunts, cousins and ecclesiastical friends and
connections succeeded each other under its capacious roof. Only Hubert
and his wife were absent. They had taken a villa at Deauville, and in
the morning papers Undine followed the chronicle of Hubert's polo scores
and of the Countess Hubert's racing toilets.
The days crawled on with a benumbing sameness. The old Marquise and the
other ladies of the party sat on the terrace with their needle-work, the
cure or one of the visiting uncles read aloud the Journal des Debats and
prognosticated dark things of the Republic, Paul scoured the park and
despoiled the kitchen-garden with the other children of the family,
the inhabitants of the adjacent chateaux drove over to call, and
occasionally the ponderous pair were harnessed to a landau as lumbering
as the brougham, and the ladies of Saint Desert measured the dusty
kilometres between themselves and their neighbours.
It was the first time that Undine had seriously paused to consider
the conditions of her new life, and as the days passed she began to
understand that so they would continue to succeed each other till the
end. Every one about her took it for granted that as long as she lived
she would spend ten months of every year at Saint Desert and the
remaining two in Paris. Of course, if health required it, she might go
to les eaux with her husband; but the old Marquise was very doubtful as
to the benefit of a course of waters, and her uncle the Duke and her
cousin the Canon shared her view. In the case of young married women,
especially, the unwholesome excitement of the modern watering-place was
more than likely to do away with the possible benefit of the treatment.
As to travel--had not Raymond and his wife been to Egypt and Asia Minor
on their wedding-journey? Such reckless enterprise was unheard of in
the annals of the house! Had they not spent days and days in the saddle,
and slept in tents among the Arabs? (Who could tell, indeed, whether
these imprudences were not the cause of the disappointment which it had
pleased heaven to inflict on the young couple?) No one in the family
had ever taken so long a wedding-journey. One bride had gone to
England (even that was considered extreme), and another--the artistic
daughter--had spent a week in Venice; which certainly showed that they
were not behind the times, and had no old-fashioned prejudices. Since
wedding-journeys were the fashion, they had taken them; but who had
ever heard of travelling afterward?
What could be the possible object of leaving one's family, one's habits,
one's friends? It was natural that the Americans, who had no homes, who
were born and died in hotels, should have contracted nomadic habits: but
the new Marquise de Chelles was no longer an American, and she had Saint
Desert and the Hotel de Chelles to live in, as generations of ladies of
her name had done before her. Thus Undine beheld her future laid out for
her, not directly and in blunt words, but obliquely and affably, in the
allusions, the assumptions, the insinuations of the amiable women among
whom her days were spent. Their interminable conversations were carried
on to the click of knitting-needles and the rise and fall of industrious
fingers above embroidery-frames; and as Undine sat staring at the
lustrous nails of her idle hands she felt that her inability to occupy
them was regarded as one of the chief causes of her restlessness. The
innumerable rooms of Saint Desert were furnished with the embroidered
hangings and tapestry chairs produced by generations of diligent
chatelaines, and the untiring needles of the old Marquise, her daughters
and dependents were still steadily increasing the provision.
It struck Undine as curious that they should be willing to go on making
chair-coverings and bed-curtains for a house that didn't really belong
to them, and that she had a right to pull about and rearrange as she
chose; but then that was only a part of their whole incomprehensible way
of regarding themselves (in spite of their acute personal and parochial
absorptions) as minor members of a powerful and indivisible whole, the
huge voracious fetish they called The Family.
Notwithstanding their very definite theories as to what Americans were
and were not, they were evidently bewildered at finding no corresponding
sense of solidarity in Undine; and little Paul's rootlessness, his lack
of all local and linear ties, made them (for all the charm he exercised)
regard him with something of the shyness of pious Christians toward
an elfin child. But though mother and child gave them a sense of
insuperable strangeness, it plainly never occurred to them that both
would not be gradually subdued to the customs of Saint Desert. Dynasties
had fallen, institutions changed, manners and morals, alas, deplorably
declined; but as far back as memory went, the ladies of the line of
Chelles had always sat at their needle-work on the terrace of Saint
Desert, while the men of the house lamented the corruption of the
government and the cure ascribed the unhappy state of the country to the
decline of religious feeling and the rise in the cost of living. It was
inevitable that, in the course of time, the new Marquise should come to
understand the fundamental necessity of these things being as they were;
and meanwhile the forbearance of her husband's family exercised itself,
with the smiling discretion of their race, through the long succession
of uneventful days.
Once, in September, this routine was broken in upon by the unannounced
descent of a flock of motors bearing the Princess Estradina and a chosen
band from one watering-place to another. Raymond was away at the time,
but family loyalty constrained the old Marquise to welcome her kinswoman
and the latter's friends; and Undine once more found herself immersed in
the world from which her marriage had removed her.
The Princess, at first, seemed totally to have forgotten their former
intimacy, and Undine was made to feel that in a life so variously
agitated the episode could hardly have left a trace. But the night
before her departure the incalculable Lili, with one of her sudden
changes of humour, drew her former friend into her bedroom and plunged
into an exchange of confidences. She naturally unfolded her own history
first, and it was so packed with incident that the courtyard clock had
struck two before she turned her attention to Undine.
"My dear, you're handsomer than ever; only perhaps a shade too stout.
Domestic bliss, I suppose? Take care! You need an emotion, a drama...
You Americans are really extraordinary. You appear to live on change and
excitement; and then suddenly a man comes along and claps a ring on your
finger, and you never look through it to see what's going on outside.
Aren't you ever the least bit bored? Why do I never see anything of you
any more? I suppose it's the fault of my venerable aunt--she's never
forgiven me for having a better time than her daughters. How can I help
it if I don't look like the cure's umbrella? I daresay she owes you the
same grudge. But why do you let her coop you up here? It's a thousand
pities you haven't had a child. They'd all treat you differently if you
had."
It was the same perpetually reiterated condolence; and Undine flushed
with anger as she listened. Why indeed had she let herself be cooped up?
She could not have answered the Princess's question: she merely felt
the impossibility of breaking through the mysterious web of traditions,
conventions, prohibitions that enclosed her in their impenetrable
net-work. But her vanity suggested the obvious pretext, and she murmured
with a laugh: "I didn't know Raymond was going to be so jealous--"
The Princess stared. "Is it Raymond who keeps you shut up here? And what
about his trips to Dijon? And what do you suppose he does with himself
when he runs up to Paris? Politics?" She shrugged ironically. "Politics
don't occupy a man after midnight. Raymond jealous of you? Ah, merci!
My dear, it's what I always say when people talk to me about fast
Americans: you're the only innocent women left in the world..."