The Custom of the Country Part 36

"Oh, my dear, I've been meaning to tell you--it's off, I'm afraid. The dinner is, I mean. You see, Mr. Van Degen has seen you 'round with me, and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed--"

"He guessed--and he wouldn't?"

"Well, no. He wouldn't. I hate to tell you."

"Oh--" Undine threw off a vague laugh. "Since you're intimate enough for him to tell you THAT he must, have told you more--told you something to justify his behaviour. He couldn't--even Peter Van Degen couldn't--just simply have said to you: 'I wont see her.'"

Mrs. Rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention.

"He DID say more?" Undine insisted. "He gave you a reason?

"He said you'd know."

"Oh how base--how base!" Undine was trembling with one of her little-girl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which Mr. and Mrs. Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub.

But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. "Of course he's been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York behind her, and I've no one; but I know it would be all right if I could only see him."

Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: "Indiana Rolliver, if you won't do it for me I'll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I'll wait there in the hall till he sees me!"

Indiana lifted a protesting hand. "Don't, Undine--not that!"

"Why not?"

"Well--I wouldn't, that's all."

"You wouldn't? Why wouldn't you? You must have a reason." Undine faced her with levelled brows. "Without a reason you can't have changed so utterly since our last talk. You were positive enough then that I had a right to make him see me."

Somewhat to her surprise, Indiana made no effort to elude the challenge.

"Yes, I did think so then. But I know now that it wouldn't do you the least bit of good."

"Have they turned him so completely against me? I don't care if they have! I know him--I can get him back."

"That's the trouble." Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compa.s.sion.

"It's not that any one has turned him against you. It's worse than that--"

"What can be?"

"You'll hate me if I tell you."

"Then you'd better make him tell me himself!"

"I can't. I tried to. The trouble is that it was YOU--something you did, I mean. Something he found out about you--"

Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. "About me? How fearfully false! Why, I've never even LOOKED at anybody--!"

"It's nothing of that kind." Indiana's mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. "It's the way you acted to your own husband."

"I--my--to Ralph? HE reproaches me for that? Peter Van Degen does?"

"Well, for one particular thing. He says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr. Marvell, who was desperately ill."

"How on earth did he know?" The cry escaped Undine before she could repress it.

"It's true, then?" Indiana exclaimed. "Oh, Undine--"

Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips.

Mrs. Rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress. "I didn't believe it when he told me; I'd never have thought it of you. Before you'd even applied for your divorce!"

Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself. For a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue--the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate. Suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face.

"The Marvells must have told him--the beasts!" It relieved her to be able to cry it out.

"It was your husband's sister--what did you say her name was? When you didn't answer her cable, she cabled Mr. Van Degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back."

Undine stared. "He never did!"

"No."

"Doesn't that show you the story's all trumped up?"

Indiana shook her head. "He said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable, and you told him it was from your sister-in-law, just worrying you as usual to go home; and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn't another thing."

Undine, intently following her, caught at this with a spring. "Then he knew it all along--he admits that? And it made no earthly difference to him at the time?" She turned almost victoriously on her friend. "Did he happen to explain THAT, I wonder?"

"Yes." Indiana's longanimity grew almost solemn. "It came over him gradually, he said. One day when he wasn't feeling very well he thought to himself: 'Would she act like that to ME if I was dying?' And after that he never felt the same to you." Indiana lowered her empurpled lids. "Men have their feelings too--even when they're carried away by pa.s.sion." After a pause she added: "I don't know as I can blame him.

Undine. You see, you were his ideal."

XXV

Undine Marvell, for the next few months, tasted all the acc.u.mulated bitterness of failure. After January the drifting hordes of her compatriots had scattered to the four quarters of the globe, leaving Paris to resume, under its low grey sky, its compacter winter personality. Noting, from her more and more deserted corner, each least sign of the social revival, Undine felt herself as stranded and baffled as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood. She was not without possible alternatives; but the sense of what she had lost took the savour from all that was left. She might have attached herself to some migratory group winged for Italy or Egypt; but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal to her, and she was doubtful of its social benefit. She lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its occasion in the unknown; and though she could work doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome had to be as distinct as the prize. Her one desire was to get back an equivalent of the precise value she had lost in ceasing to be Ralph Marvell's wife. Her new visiting-card, bearing her Christian name in place of her husband's, was like the coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity. Her restricted means, her vacant days, all the minor irritations of her life, were as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage. Even in the narrowed field of a Parisian winter she might have made herself a place in some more or less extra-social world; but her experiments in this line gave her no pleasure proportioned to the possible derogation.

She feared to be a.s.sociated with "the wrong people," and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable advance. The more pressing attentions of one or two men she had formerly known filled her with a glow of outraged pride, and for the first time in her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable to certain kinds of society. Since ill health was the most plausible pretext for seclusion, it was almost a relief to find that she was really growing "nervous" and sleeping badly. The doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the Riviera, not too near the sea; and thither in the early days of December, she transported herself with her maid and an omnibus-load of luggage.

The place disconcerted her by being really small and quiet, and for a few days she struggled against the desire for flight. She had never before known a world as colourless and negative as that of the large white hotel where everybody went to bed at nine, and donkey-rides over stony hills were the only alternative to slow drives along dusty roads.

Many of the dwellers in this temple of repose found even these exercises too stimulating, and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in the garden, playing Patience, embroidering, or reading odd volumes of Tauchnitz. Undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel book-shelves, discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and pa.s.s-words of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.

It took Undine a long time to accustom herself to such an atmosphere, and meanwhile she fretted, fumed and flaunted, or abandoned herself to long periods of fruitless brooding. Sometimes a flame of anger shot up in her, dismally illuminating the path she had travelled and the blank wall to which it led. At other moments past and present were enveloped in a dull fog of rancour which distorted and faded even the image she presented to her morning mirror. There were days when every young face she saw left in her a taste of poison. But when she compared herself with the specimens of her s.e.x who plied their languid industries under the palms, or looked away as she pa.s.sed them in hall or staircase, her spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest. These were unprofitable triumphs, however. She never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling she had lost ground by it; and the next day she would lie in bed and send down capricious orders for food, which her maid would presently remove untouched, with instructions to transmit her complaints to the landlord.

Sometimes the events of the past year, ceaselessly revolving through her brain, became no longer a subject for criticism or justification but simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled. Hour by hour, in such moods, she re-lived the incidents of her flight with Peter Van Degen: the part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed least like herself and most difficult to justify. She had gone away with him, and had lived with him for two months: she, Undine Marvell, to whom respectability was the breath of life, to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable.--She had done this incredible thing, and she had done it from a motive that seemed, at the time, as clear, as logical, as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality, as any of her father's financial enterprises. It had been a bold move, but it had been as carefully calculated as the happiest Wall Street "stroke." She had gone away with Peter because, after the decisive scene in which she had put her power to the test, to yield to him seemed the surest means of victory. Even to her practical intelligence it was clear that an immediate dash to Dakota might look too calculated; and she had preserved her self-respect by telling herself that she was really his wife, and in no way to blame if the law delayed to ratify the bond. She was still persuaded of the justness of her reasoning; but she now saw that it had left certain risks out of account. Her life with Van Degen had taught her many things. The two had wandered from place to place, spending a great deal of money, always more and more money; for the first time in her life she had been able to buy everything she wanted. For a while this had kept her amused and busy; but presently she began to perceive that her companion's view of their relation was not the same as hers. She saw that he had always meant it to be an unavowed tie, screened by Mrs. Shallum's companionship and Clare's careless tolerance; and that on those terms he would have been ready to shed on their adventure the brightest blaze of notoriety.

But since Undine had insisted on being carried off like a sentimental school-girl he meant to shroud the affair in mystery, and was as zealous in concealing their relation as she was bent on proclaiming it. In the "powerful" novels which Popple was fond of lending her she had met with increasing frequency the type of heroine who scorns to love clandestinely, and proclaims the sanct.i.ty of pa.s.sion and the moral duty of obeying its call. Undine had been struck by these arguments as justifying and even enn.o.bling her course, and had let Peter understand that she had been actuated by the highest motives in openly a.s.sociating her life with his; but he had opposed a placid insensibility to these allusions, and had persisted in treating her as though their journey were the kind of escapade that a man of the world is bound to hide. She had expected him to take her to all the showy places where couples like themselves are relieved from a too sustained contemplation of nature by the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming-table; but he had carried her from one obscure corner of Europe to another, shunning fashionable hotels and crowded watering-places, and displaying an ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out-of-season that gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding-tour.

She had never for a moment ceased to remember that the Dakota divorce-court was the objective point of this later honeymoon, and her allusions to the fact were as frequent as prudence permitted. Peter seemed in no way disturbed by them. He responded with expressions of increasing tenderness, or the purchase of another piece of jewelry; and though Undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing the subject of their marriage he did not shrink from her recurring mention of it. He seemed merely too steeped in present well-being to think of the future, and she ascribed this to the fact that his faculty of enjoyment could not project itself beyond the moment. Her business was to make each of their days so agreeable that when the last came he should be conscious of a void to be bridged over as rapidly as possible and when she thought this point had been reached she packed her trunks and started for Dakota.

The next picture to follow was that of the dull months in the western divorce-town, where, to escape loneliness and avoid comment, she had cast in her lot with Mabel Lips...o...b.. who had lately arrived there on the same errand.

Undine, at the outset, had been sorry for the friend whose new venture seemed likely to result so much less brilliantly than her own; but compa.s.sion had been replaced by irritation as Mabel's unpruned vulgarities, her enormous encroaching satisfaction with herself and her surroundings, began to pervade every corner of their provisional household. Undine, during the first months of her exile, had been sustained by the fullest confidence in her future. When she had parted from Van Degen she had felt sure he meant to marry her, and the fact that Mrs. Lips...o...b..was fortified by no similar hope made her easier to bear with. Undine was almost ashamed that the unwooed Mabel should be the witness of her own felicity, and planned to send her off on a trip to Denver when Peter should announce his arrival; but the weeks pa.s.sed, and Peter did not come. Mabel, on the whole, behaved well in this contingency. Undine, in her first exultation, had confided all her hopes and plans to her friend, but Mabel took no undue advantage of the confidence. She was even tactful in her loud fond clumsy way, with a tact that insistently boomed and buzzed about its victim's head. But one day she mentioned that she had asked to dinner a gentleman from Little Rock who had come to Dakota with the same object as themselves, and whose acquaintance she had made through her lawyer.

The gentleman from Little Rock came to dine, and within a week Undine understood that Mabel's future was a.s.sured. If Van Degen had been at hand Undine would have smiled with him at poor Mabel's infatuation and her suitor's crudeness. But Van Degen was not there. He made no sign, he sent no excuse; he simply continued to absent himself; and it was Undine who, in due course, had to make way for Mrs. Lips...o...b..s caller, and sit upstairs with a novel while the drawing-room below was given up to the enacting of an actual love-story.