“Dear, tell me what’s the matter,” he pleaded.
She sobbed on unheedingly and he waited for her agitation to subside. He shrank from the phrases considered appropriate to the situation, but he wanted to hold her close and give her the depth of his heart in long kiss.
Suddenly she sat upright and turned a desperate face on him. “Why on earth are you staring at me like that? Anybody can see what’s the matter!”
He winced at her tone, but managed to get one of her hands in his; and they stayed thus in silence, eye to eye.
“Are you as sorry as all that?” he began at length conscious of the flatness of his voice.
“Sorry—sorry? I’m—I’m—” She snatched her hand away, and went on weeping.
“But, Undine—dearest—bye and bye you’ll feel differently—I know you will!”
“Differently? Differently? When? In a year? It TAKES a year—a whole year out of life! What do I care how I shall feel in a year?”
The chill of her tone struck in. This was more than a revolt of the nerves: it was a settled, a reasoned resentment. Ralph found himself groping for extenuations, evasions—anything to put a little warmth into her! “Who knows? Perhaps, after all, it’s a mistake.”
There was no answering light in her face. She turned her head from him wearily.
“Don’t you think, dear, you may be mistaken?”
“Mistaken? How on earth can I be mistaken?”
Even in that moment of confusion he was struck by the cold competence of her tone, and wondered how she could be so sure.
“You mean you’ve asked—you’ve consulted—?” The irony of it took him by the throat. They were the very words he might have spoken in some miserable secret colloquy—the words he was speaking to his wife!
She repeated dully: “I know I’m not mistaken.”
There was another long silence. Undine lay still, her eyes shut, drumming on the arm of the sofa with a restless hand. The other lay cold in Ralph’s clasp, and through it there gradually stole to him the benumbing influence of the thoughts she was thinking: the sense of the approach of illness, anxiety, and expense, and of the general unnecessary disorganization of their lives.
“That’s all you feel, then?” he asked at length a little bitterly, as if to disguise from himself the hateful fact that he felt it too. He stood up and moved away. “That’s all?” he repeated.
“Why, what else do you expect me to feel? I feel horribly ill, if that’s what you want.” He saw the sobs trembling up through her again.
“Poor dear—poor girl…I’m so sorry—so dreadfully sorry!”
The senseless reiteration seemed to exasperate her. He knew it by the quiver that ran through her like the premonitory ripple on smooth water before the coming of the wind. She turned about on him and jumped to her feet.
“Sorry—you’re sorry? YOU’RE sorry? Why, what earthly difference will it make to YOU?” She drew back a few steps and lifted her slender arms from her sides. “Look at me—see how I look—how I’m going to look! YOU won’t hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see yourself in the glass! YOUR life’s going on just as usual! But what’s mine going to be for months and months? And just as I’d been to all this bother—fagging myself to death about all these things—” her tragic gesture swept the disordered room—“just as I thought I was going home to enjoy myself, and look nice, and see people again, and have a little pleasure after all our worries—” She dropped back on the sofa with another burst of tears. “For all the good this rubbish will do me now! I loathe the very sight of it!” she sobbed with her face in her hands.
XIV
It was one of the distinctions of Mr. Claud Walsingham Popple that his studio was never too much encumbered with the attributes of his art to permit the installing, in one of its cushioned corners, of an elaborately furnished tea-table flanked by the most varied seductions in sandwiches and pastry.
Mr. Popple, like all great men, had at first had his ups and downs; but his reputation had been permanently established by the verdict of a wealthy patron who, returning from an excursion into other fields of portraiture, had given it as the final fruit of his experience that Popple was the only man who could “do pearls.” To sitters for whom this was of the first consequence it was another of the artist’s merits that he always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well as in his portraits. The “messy” element of production was no more visible in his expensively screened and tapestried studio than its results were perceptible in his painting; and it was often said, in praise of his work, that he was the only artist who kept his studio tidy enough for a lady to sit to him in a new dress.
Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette. Ralph Marvell had once said of him that when he began a portrait he always turned back his cuffs and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, you can see there’s absolutely nothing here,” and Mrs. Fairford supplemented the description by defining his painting as “chafing-dish” art. On a certain late afternoon of December, some four years after Mr. Popple’s first meeting with Miss Undine Spragg of Apex, even the symbolic chafing-dish was nowhere visible in his studio; the only evidence of its recent activity being the full-length portrait of Mrs. Ralph Marvell, who, from her lofty easel and her heavily garlanded frame, faced the doorway with the air of having been invited to “receive” for Mr. Popple.
The artist himself, becomingly clad in mouse-coloured velveteen, had just turned away from the picture to hover above the tea-cups; but his place had been taken by the considerably broader bulk of Mr. Peter Van Degen, who, tightly moulded into a coat of the latest cut, stood before the portrait in the attitude of a first arrival.
“Yes, it’s good—it’s damn good, Popp; you’ve hit the hair off ripplingly; but the pearls ain’t big enough,” he pronounced.
A slight laugh sounded from the raised dais behind the easel.
“Of course they’re not! But it’s not HIS fault, poor man; HE didn’t give them to me!” As she spoke Mrs. Ralph Marvell rose from a monumental gilt armchair of pseudo-Venetian design and swept her long draperies to Van Degen’s side.
“He might, then—for the privilege of painting you!” the latter rejoined, transferring his bulging stare from the counterfeit to the original. His eyes rested on Mrs. Marvell’s in what seemed a quick exchange of understanding; then they passed on to a critical inspection of her person. She was dressed for the sitting in something faint and shining, above which the long curves of her neck looked dead white in the cold light of the studio; and her hair, all a shadowless rosy gold, was starred with a hard glitter of diamonds.
“The privilege of painting me? Mercy, I have to pay for being painted! He’ll tell you he’s giving me the picture—but what do you suppose this cost?” She laid a finger-tip on her shimmering dress.
Van Degen’s eye rested on her with cold enjoyment. “Does the price come higher than the dress?”
She ignored the allusion. “Of course what they charge for is the cut—”
“What they cut away? That’s what they ought to charge for, ain’t it, Popp?”
Undine took this with cool disdain, but Mr. Popple’s sensibilities were offended.
“My dear Peter—really—the artist, you understand, sees all this as a pure question of colour, of pattern; and it’s a point of honour with the MAN to steel himself against the personal seduction.”