He had assumed that Undine’s allowance, with the addition of his own small income, would be enough to satisfy their needs. His own were few, and had always been within his means; but his wife’s daily requirements, combined with her intermittent outbreaks of extravagance, had thrown out all his calculations, and they were already seriously exceeding their income.
If any one had prophesied before his marriage that he would find it difficult to tell this to Undine he would have smiled at the suggestion; and during their first days together it had seemed as though pecuniary questions were the last likely to be raised between them. But his marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided. If Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral insouciance with Sheban elegance.
She had met Ralph’s first note of warning with the assurance that she “didn’t mean to worry”; and her tone implied that it was his business to do so for her. He certainly wanted to guard her from this as from all other cares; he wanted also, and still more passionately after the topic had once or twice recurred between them, to guard himself from the risk of judging where he still adored. These restraints to frankness kept him silent during the remainder of the drive, and when, after dinner, Undine again complained of her headache, he let her go up to her room and wandered out into the dimly lit streets to renewed communion with his problems.
They hung on him insistently as darkness fell, and Siena grew vocal with that shrill diversity of sounds that breaks, on summer nights, from every cleft of the masonry in old Italian towns. Then the moon rose, unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and Ralph, leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle distance, felt his spirit enlarged and pacified. For the first time, as his senses thrilled to the deep touch of beauty, he asked himself if out of these floating and fugitive vibrations he might not build something concrete and stable, if even such dull common cares as now oppressed him might not become the motive power of creation. If he could only, on the spot, do something with all the accumulated spoils of the last months—something that should both put money into his pocket and harmony into the rich confusion of his spirit! “I’ll write—I’ll write: that must be what the whole thing means,” he said to himself, with a vague clutch at some solution which should keep him a little longer hanging half-way down the steep of disenchantment.
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.
To-night, 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 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.”