The Custom of the Country (15 page)

He would have stayed on, heedless of time, to trace the ramifications of his idea in the complex beauty of the scene, but for the longing to share his mood with Undine. For the last few months every thought and sensation had been instantly transmuted into such emotional impulses and, though the currents of communication between himself and Undine were neither deep nor numerous, each fresh rush of feeling seemed strong enough to clear a way to her heart. He hurried back, almost breathlessly, to the inn; but even as he knocked at her door the subtle emanation of other influences seemed to arrest and chill him.

She had put out the lamp, and sat by the window in the moonlight, her head propped on a listless hand. As Marvell entered she turned; then, without speaking, she looked away again.

He was used to this mute reception, and had learned that it had no personal motive, but was the result of an extremely simplified social code. Mr and Mrs Spragg seldom spoke to each other when they met, and words of greeting seemed almost unknown to their domestic vocabulary. Marvell, at first, had fancied that his own warmth would call forth a response from his wife, who had been so quick to learn the forms of worldly intercourse; but he soon saw that she regarded intimacy as a pretext for escaping from such forms into a total absence of expression.

Tonight, however, he felt another meaning in her silence, and perceived that she intended him to feel it. He met it by silence, but of a different kind; letting his nearness speak for him as he knelt beside her and laid his cheek against hers. She
seemed hardly aware of the gesture; but to that he was also used. She had never shown any repugnance to his tenderness, but such response as it evoked was remote and Ariel-like, suggesting, from the first, not so much the recoil of ignorance as the coolness of the element from which she took her name.

As he pressed her to him she seemed to grow less impassive and he felt her resign herself like a tired child. He held his breath, not daring to break the spell.

At length he whispered: ‘I’ve just seen such a wonderful thing – I wish you’d been with me!’

‘What sort of a thing?’ She turned her head with a faint show of interest.

‘A – I don’t know – a vision … It came to me out there just now with the moonrise.’

‘A vision?’ Her interest flagged. ‘I never cared much about spirits. Mother used to try to drag me to séances – but they always made me sleepy.’

Ralph laughed. ‘I don’t mean a dead spirit but a living one! I saw the vision of a book I mean to do. It came to me suddenly, magnificently, swooped down on me as that big white moon swooped down on the black landscape, tore at me like a great white eagle – like the bird of Jove! After all, imagination
was
the eagle that devoured Prometheus!’

She drew away abruptly, and the bright moonlight showed him the apprehension in her face. ‘You’re not going to write a book
here
?’

He stood up and wandered away a step or two; then he turned and came back. ‘Of course not here. Wherever you want. The main point is that it’s come to me – no, that it’s come
back
to me! For it’s all these months together, it’s all our happiness – it’s the meaning of life that I’ve found, and it’s you, dearest, you who’ve given it to me!’

He dropped down beside her again; but she disengaged herself and he heard a little sob in her throat.

‘Undine – what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing … I don’t know … I suppose I’m homesick …’

‘Homesick? You poor darling! You’re tired of travelling? What is it?’

‘I don’t know … I don’t like Europe … it’s not what I expected, and I think it’s all too dreadfully dreary!’ The words broke from her in a long wail of rebellion.

Marvell gazed at her perplexedly. It seemed strange that such unguessed thoughts should have been stirring in the heart pressed to his. ‘It’s less interesting than you expected – or less amusing? Is that it?’

‘It’s dirty and ugly – all the towns we’ve been to are disgustingly dirty. I loathe the smells and the beggars. I’m sick and tired of the stuffy rooms in the hotels. I thought it would all be so splendid but New York’s ever so much nicer!’

‘Not New York in July?’

‘I don’t care – there are the roof-gardens, anyway; and there are always people round. All these places seem as if they were dead. It’s all like some awful cemetery.’

A sense of compunction checked Marvell’s laughter. ‘Don’t cry, dear – don’t! I see, I understand. You’re lonely and the heat has tired you out. It
is
dull here; awfully dull; I’ve been stupid not to feel it. But we’ll start at once – we’ll get out of it.’

She brightened instantly. ‘We’ll go up to Switzerland?’

‘We’ll go up to Switzerland.’ He had a fleeting glimpse of the quiet place with the green waterfall, where he might have made tryst with his vision; then he turned his mind from it and said: ‘We’ll go just where you want. How soon can you be ready to start?’

‘Oh, tomorrow – the first thing tomorrow! I’ll make Céleste get out of bed now and pack. Can we go right through to St Moritz? I’d rather sleep in the train than in another of these awful places.’ She was on her feet in a flash, her face alight, her hair waving and floating about her as though it rose on her happy heart-beats.

‘Oh, Ralph, it’s
sweet
of you, and I love you!’ she cried out, letting him take her to his breast.

I
N THE
quiet place with the green waterfall Ralph’s vision might have kept faith with him; but how could he hope to surprise it in the midsummer crowds of St Moritz?

Undine, at any rate, had found there what she wanted; and when he was at her side, and her radiant smile included him, every other question was in abeyance. But there were hours of solitary striding over bare grassy slopes, face to face with the ironic interrogation of sky and mountains, when his anxieties came back, more persistent and importunate. Sometimes they took the form of merely material difficulties. How, for instance, was he to meet the cost of their ruinous suite at the Engadine Palace while he awaited Mr Spragg’s next remittance? And once the hotel bills were paid, what would be left for the journey back to Paris, the looming expenses there, the price of the passage to America? These questions would fling him back on the thought of his projected book, which was, after all, to be what the masterpieces of literature had mostly been – a pot-boiler. Well! Why not? Did not the worshipper always heap the rarest essences on the altar of his divinity? Ralph still rejoiced in the thought of giving back to Undine something of the beauty of their first months together. But even on his solitary walks the vision eluded him; and he could spare so few hours to its pursuit!

Undine’s days were crowded, and it was still a matter of course that where she went he should follow. He had risen visibly in her opinion since they had been absorbed into the life of the big hotels, and she had seen that his command of foreign tongues put him at an advantage even in circles where English was generally spoken if not understood. Undine herself, hampered by her lack of languages, was soon drawn into the group of compatriots who struck the social pitch of their hotel. Their types were familiar enough to
Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness. Foremost among them was Mrs Harvey Shallum, a showy Parisianized figure, with a small wax-featured husband whose ultra-fashionable clothes seemed a tribute to his wife’s importance rather than the mark of his personal taste. Mr Shallum, in fact, could not be said to have any personal bent. Though he conversed with a colourless fluency in the principal European tongues, he seldom exercised his gift except in intercourse with hotel-managers and head-waiters; and his long silences were broken only by resigned allusions to the enormities he had suffered at the hands of this gifted but unscrupulous class.

Mrs Shallum, though in command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her lips, became irregular, managed to express a polyglot personality as vivid as her husband’s was effaced. Her only idea of intercourse with her kind was to organize it into bands and subject it to frequent displacements; and society smiled at her for these exertions like an infant vigorously rocked. She saw at once Undine’s value as a factor in her scheme, and the two formed an alliance on which Ralph refrained from shedding the cold light of depreciation. It was a point of honour with him not to seem to disdain any of Undine’s amusements: the noisy interminable picnics, the hot promiscuous balls, the concerts, bridge-parties and theatricals which helped to disguise the difference between the high Alps and Paris or New York. He told himself that there is always a Narcissus-element in youth, and that what Undine really enjoyed was the image of her own charm mirrored in the general admiration. With her quick perceptions and adaptabilities she would soon learn to care more about the quality of the reflecting surface; and meanwhile no criticism of his should mar her pleasure.

The appearance at their hotel of the cavalry-officer from Siena was a not wholly agreeable surprise; but even after the handsome Marquis had been introduced to Undine, and had whirled her through an evening’s dances, Ralph was not
seriously disturbed. Husband and wife had grown closer to each other since they had come to St Moritz, and in the brief moments she could give him Undine was now always gay and approachable. Her fitful humours had vanished, and she showed qualities of comradeship that seemed the promise of a deeper understanding. But this very hope made him more subject to her moods, more fearful of disturbing the harmony between them. Least of all could he broach the subject of money: he had too keen a memory of the way her lips could narrow, and her eyes turn from him as if he were a stranger.

It was a different matter that one day brought the look he feared to her face. She had announced her intention of going on an excursion with Mrs Shallum and three or four of the young men who formed the nucleus of their shifting circle, and for the first time she did not ask Ralph if he were coming; but he felt no resentment at being left out. He was tired of these noisy assaults on the high solitudes, and the prospect of a quiet afternoon turned his thoughts to his book. Now if ever there seemed a chance of recapturing the moonlight vision …

From his balcony he looked down on the assembling party. Mrs Shallum was already screaming bilingually at various windows in the long façade; and Undine presently came out of the hotel with the Marchese Roviano and two young English diplomatists. Slim and tall in her trim mountain garb, she made the ornate Mrs Shallum look like a piece of ambulant upholstery. The high air brightened her cheeks and struck new lights from her hair, and Ralph had never seen her so touched with morning freshness. The party was not yet complete, and he felt a movement of annoyance when he recognized, in the last person to join it, a Russian lady of cosmopolitan notoriety whom he had run across in his unmarried days, and as to whom he had already warned Undine. Knowing what strange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world, he had foreseen that a meeting with the Baroness Adelschein
was inevitable; but he had not expected her to become one of his wife’s intimate circle.

When the excursionists had started he turned back to his writing-table and tried to take up his work; but he could not fix his thoughts: they were far away, in pursuit of Undine. He had been but five months married, and it seemed, after all, rather soon for him to be dropped out of such excursions as unquestioningly as poor Harvey Shallum. He smiled away this first twinge of jealousy, but the irritation it left found a pretext in his displeasure at Undine’s choice of companions. Mrs Shallum grated on his taste, but she was as open to inspection as a shop-window, and he was sure that time would teach his wife the cheapness of what she had to show. Roviano and the Englishmen were well enough too: frankly bent on amusement, but pleasant and well-bred. But they would naturally take their tone from the women they were with; and Madame Adelschein’s tone was notorious. He knew also that Undine’s faculty of self-defence was weakened by the instinct of adapting herself to whatever company she was in, of copying ‘the others’ in speech and gesture as closely as she reflected them in dress; and he was disturbed by the thought of what her ignorance might expose her to.

She came back late, flushed with her long walk, her face all sparkle and mystery, as he had seen it in the first days of their courtship; and the look somehow revived his irritated sense of having been intentionally left out of the party.

‘You’ve been gone forever. Was it the Adelschein who made you go such lengths?’ he asked her, trying to keep his usual joking tone.

Undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on him the light of her guileless gaze.

‘I don’t know: everybody was amusing. The Marquis is awfully bright.’

‘I’d no idea you or Bertha Shallum knew Madame Adelschein well enough to take her off with you in that way.’

Undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock’s-feathers in her hat.

‘I don’t see that you’ve got to know people particularly well to go for a walk with them. The Baroness is awfully bright too.’

She always gave her acquaintances their titles, seeming not, in this respect, to have noticed that a simpler form prevailed.

‘I don’t dispute the interest of what she says; but I’ve told you what decent people think of what she does,’ Ralph retorted, exasperated by what seemed a wilful pretence of ignorance.

She continued to scrutinize him with her clear eyes, in which there was no shadow of offence.

‘You mean they don’t want to go round with her? You’re mistaken: it’s not true. She goes round with everybody. She dined last night with the Grand Duchess; Roviano told me so.’

This was not calculated to make Ralph take a more tolerant view of the question.

‘Does he also tell you what’s said of her?’

‘What’s said of her?’ Undine’s limpid glance rebuked him. ‘Do you mean that disgusting scandal you told me about? Do you suppose I’d let him talk to me about such things? I meant you’re mistaken about her social position. He says she goes everywhere.’