The Greatest Works of Edith Wharton - 31 Books in One Edition. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of 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 seances—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 Celeste 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.

      XII

      In 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 headwaiters; 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 СКАЧАТЬ