“THIS man…THIS man…” he couldn’t get beyond the thought: whichever way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the perspective…Ralph’s eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on the desk beside Moffatt’s hand. Faugh! That such a hand should have touched it!
Suddenly he heard himself speaking. “Before my marriage—did you know they hadn’t told me?”
“Why, I understood as much…”
Ralph pushed on: “You knew it the day I met you in Mr. Spragg’s office?”
Moffatt considered a moment, as if the incident had escaped him. “Did we meet there?” He seemed benevolently ready for enlightenment. But Ralph had been assailed by another memory; he recalled that Moffatt had dined one night in his house, that he and the man who now faced him had sat at the same table, their wife between them… He was seized with another dumb gust of fury; but it died out and left him face to face with the uselessness, the irrelevance of all the old attitudes of appropriation and defiance. He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in mediaeval armour… Moffatt still sat at his desk, unmoved and apparently uncomprehending. “He doesn’t even know what I’m feeling,” flashed through Ralph; and the whole archaic structure of his rites and sanctions tumbled down about him.
Through the noise of the crash he heard Moffatt’s voice going on without perceptible change of tone: “About that other matter now…you can’t feel any meaner about it than I do, I can tell you that… but all we’ve got to do is to sit tight…”
Ralph turned from the voice, and found himself outside on the landing, and then in the street below.
XXXVI
He stood at the corner of Wall Street, looking up and down its hot summer perspective. He noticed the swirls of dust in the cracks of the pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring faces that poured by under tilted hats.
He found himself, next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of the Subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual wail. The blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of these offenses was a complete indifference to them, as though he were some vivisected animal deprived of the power of discrimination.
Now he had turned into Waverly Place, and was walking westward toward Washington Square. At the corner he pulled himself up, saying half-aloud: “The office—I ought to be at the office.” He drew out his watch and stared at it blankly. What the devil had he taken it out for? He had to go through a laborious process of readjustment to find out what it had to say…. Twelve o’clock…. Should he turn back to the office? It seemed easier to cross the square, go up the steps of the old house and slip his key into the door….
The house was empty. His mother, a few days previously, had departed with Mr. Dagonet for their usual two months on the Maine coast, where Ralph was to join them with his boy…. The blinds were all drawn down, and the freshness and silence of the marble-paved hall laid soothing hands on him…. He said to himself: “I’ll jump into a cab presently, and go and lunch at the club—” He laid down his hat and stick and climbed the carpetless stairs to his room. When he entered it he had the shock of feeling himself in a strange place: it did not seem like anything he had ever seen before. Then, one by one, all the old stale usual things in it confronted him, and he longed with a sick intensity to be in a place that was really strange.
“How on earth can I go on living here?” he wondered.
A careless servant had left the outer shutters open, and the sun was beating on the window-panes. Ralph pushed open the windows, shut the shutters, and wandered toward his armchair. Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead: the temperature of the room reminded him of the heat under the ilexes of the Sienese villa where he and Undine had sat through a long July afternoon. He saw her before him, leaning against the tree-trunk in her white dress, limpid and inscrutable…. “We were made one at Opake, Nebraska….” Had she been thinking of it that afternoon at Siena, he wondered? Did she ever think of it at all?… It was she who had asked Moffatt to dine. She had said: “Father brought him home one day at Apex…. I don’t remember ever having seen him since”—and the man she spoke of had had her in his arms … and perhaps it was really all she remembered!
She had lied to him—lied to him from the first … there hadn’t been a moment when she hadn’t lied to him, deliberately, ingeniously and inventively. As he thought of it, there came to him, for the first time in months, that overwhelming sense of her physical nearness which had once so haunted and tortured him. Her freshness, her fragrance, the luminous haze of her youth, filled the room with a mocking glory; and he dropped his head on his hands to shut it out….
The vision was swept away by another wave of hurrying thoughts. He felt it was intensely important that he should keep the thread of every one of them, that they all represented things to be said or done, or guarded against; and his mind, with the unwondering versatility and tireless haste of the dreamer’s brain, seemed to be pursuing them all simultaneously. Then they became as unreal and meaningless as the red specks dancing behind the lids against which he had pressed his fists clenched, and he had the feeling that if he opened his eyes they would vanish, and the familiar daylight look in on him….
A knock disturbed him. The old parlour-maid who was always left in charge of the house had come up to ask if he wasn’t well, and if there was anything she could do for him. He told her no … he was perfectly well … or, rather, no, he wasn’t … he supposed it must be the heat; and he began to scold her for having forgotten to close the shutters.
It wasn’t her fault, it appeared, but Eliza’s: her tone implied that he knew what one had to expect of Eliza … and wouldn’t he go down to the nice cool shady dining-room, and let her make him an iced drink and a few sandwiches?
“I’ve always told Mrs. Marvell I couldn’t turn my back for a second but what Eliza’d find a way to make trouble,” the old woman continued, evidently glad of the chance to air a perennial grievance. “It’s not only the things she FORGETS to do,” she added significantly; and it dawned on Ralph that she was making an appeal to him, expecting him to take sides with her in the chronic conflict between herself and Eliza. He said to himself that perhaps she was right … that perhaps there was something he ought to do … that his mother was old, and didn’t always see things; and for a while his mind revolved this problem with feverish intensity….
“Then you’ll come down, sir?”
“Yes.”
The door closed, and he heard her heavy heels along the passage.
