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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a change—you’re looking awfully pulled down. Why can’t you coax your mother to run over to Paris with you? Ralph couldn’t object to that.”

      She shook her head. “I don’t believe she could afford it, even if I could persuade her to leave father. You know father hasn’t done very well lately: I shouldn’t like to ask him for the money.”

      “You’re so confoundedly proud!” He was edging nearer. “It would all be so easy if you’d only be a little fond of me…”

      She froze to her sofa-end. “We women can’t repair our mistakes. Don’t make me more miserable by reminding me of mine.”

      “Oh, nonsense! There’s nothing cash won’t do. Why won’t you let me straighten things out for you?”

      Her colour rose again, and she looked him quickly and consciously in the eye. It was time to play her last card. “You seem to forget that I am—married,” she said.

      Van Degen was silent—for a moment she thought he was swaying to her in the flush of surrender. But he remained doggedly seated, meeting her look with an odd clearing of his heated gaze, as if a shrewd businessman had suddenly replaced the pining gentleman at the window.

      “Hang it—so am I!” he rejoined; and Undine saw that in the last issue he was still the stronger of the two.

      XVII

      Nothing was bitterer to her than to confess to herself the failure of her power; but her last talk with Van Degen had taught her a lesson almost worth the abasement. She saw the mistake she had made in taking money from him, and understood that if she drifted into repeating that mistake her future would be irretrievably compromised. What she wanted was not a hand-to-mouth existence of precarious intrigue: to one with her gifts the privileges of life should come openly. Already in her short experience she had seen enough of the women who sacrifice future security for immediate success, and she meant to lay solid foundations before she began to build up the light superstructure of enjoyment.

      Nevertheless it was galling to see Van Degen leave, and to know that for the time he had broken away from her. Over a nature so insensible to the spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail. If she could have been with him again in Paris, where, in the shining spring days, every sight and sound ministered to such influences, she was sure she could have regained her hold. And the sense of frustration was intensified by the fact that every one she knew was to be there: her potential rivals were crowding the east-bound steamers. New York was a desert, and Ralph’s seeming unconsciousness of the fact increased her resentment. She had had but one chance at Europe since her marriage, and that had been wasted through her husband’s unaccountable perversity. She knew now with what packed hours of Paris and London they had paid for their empty weeks in Italy.

      Meanwhile the long months of the New York spring stretched out before her in all their social vacancy to the measureless blank of a summer in the Adirondacks. In her girlhood she had plumbed the dim depths of such summers; but then she had been sustained by the hope of bringing some capture to the surface. Now she knew better: there were no “finds” for her in that direction. The people she wanted would be at Newport or in Europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too sternly animated by her father’s business instinct, to turn aside in quest of casual distractions.

      The chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches of dulness and privation. She had begun to see this, but she could not always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of Mrs. Heeny’s “Go slow. Undine!” Her imagination was incapable of long flights. She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally void. But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York world that was reforming itself in London and Paris was fortified by reasons which seemed urgent enough to justify an appeal to her father.

      She went down to his office to plead her case, fearing Mrs. Spragg’s intervention. For some time past Mr. Spragg had been rather continuously overworked, and the strain was beginning to tell on him. He had never quite regained, in New York, the financial security of his Apex days. Since he had changed his base of operations his affairs had followed an uncertain course, and Undine suspected that his breach with his old political ally, the Representative Rolliver who had seen him through the muddiest reaches of the Pure Water Move, was not unconnected with his failure to get a footing in Wall Street. But all this was vague and shadowy to her Even had “business” been less of a mystery, she was too much absorbed in her own affairs to project herself into her father’s case; and she thought she was sacrificing enough to delicacy of feeling in sparing him the “bother” of Mrs. Spragg’s opposition. When she came to him with a grievance he always heard her out with the same mild patience; but the long habit of “managing” him had made her, in his own language, “discount” this tolerance, and when she ceased to speak her heart throbbed with suspense as he leaned back, twirling an invisible toothpick under his sallow moustache. Presently he raised a hand to stroke the limp beard in which the moustache was merged; then he groped for the Masonic emblem that had lost itself in one of the folds of his depleted waistcoat.

      He seemed to fish his answer from the same rusty depths, for as his fingers closed about the trinket he said: “Yes, the heated term IS trying in New York. That’s why the Fresh Air Fund pulled my last dollar out of me last week.”

      Undine frowned: there was nothing more irritating, in these encounters with her father, than his habit of opening the discussion with a joke.

      “I wish you’d understand that I’m serious, father. I’ve never been strong since the baby was born, and I need a change. But it’s not only that: there are other reasons for my wanting to go.”

      Mr. Spragg still held to his mild tone of banter. “I never knew you short on reasons, Undie. Trouble is you don’t always know other people’s when you see ‘em.”

      His daughter’s lips tightened. “I know your reasons when I see them, father: I’ve heard them often enough. But you can’t know mine because I haven’t told you—not the real ones.”

      “Jehoshaphat! I thought they were all real as long as you had a use for them.”

      Experience had taught her that such protracted trifling usually concealed an exceptional vigour of resistance, and the suspense strengthened her determination.

      “My reasons are all real enough,” she answered; “but there’s one more serious than the others.”

      Mr. Spragg’s brows began to jut. “More bills?”

      “No.” She stretched out her hand and began to finger the dusty objects on his desk. “I’m unhappy at home.”

      “Unhappy—!” His start overturned the gorged waste-paper basket and shot a shower of paper across the rug. He stooped to put the basket back; then he turned his slow fagged eyes on his daughter. “Why, he worships the ground you walk on, Undie.”

      “That’s not always a reason, for a woman—” It was the answer she would have given to Popple or Van Degen, but she saw in an instant the mistake of thinking it would impress her father. In the atmosphere of sentimental casuistry to which she had become accustomed, she had forgotten that Mr. Spragg’s private rule of conduct was as simple as his business morality was complicated.

      He glowered at her under thrust-out brows. “It isn’t a reason, isn’t it? I can seem to remember the time when you used to think it was equal to a whole carload of whitewash.”

      She СКАЧАТЬ