The Custom of the Country (44 page)

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 medieval 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.

H
E 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 offences 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.

‘But the money – where’s the money to come from?’ The question sprang out from some denser fold of the fog in his brain. The money – how on earth was he to pay it back? How could he have wasted his time in thinking of anything else while that central difficulty existed?

‘But I can’t … I can’t … it’s gone … and even if it weren’t …’

He dropped back in his chair and took his head between his hands. He had forgotten what he wanted the money for. He made a great effort to regain hold of the idea, but all the
whirring, shuttling, flying had abruptly ceased in his brain, and he sat with his eyes shut, staring straight into darkness …

The clock struck, and he remembered that he had said he would go down to the dining-room. ‘If I don’t she’ll come up –’ He raised his head and sat listening for the sound of the old woman’s step: it seemed to him perfectly intolerable that any one should cross the threshold of the room again.

‘Why can’t they leave me alone?’ he groaned … At length through the silence of the empty house, he fancied he heard a door opening and closing far below; and he said to himself: ‘She’s coming.’

He got to his feet and went to the door. He didn’t feel anything now except the insane dread of hearing the woman’s steps come nearer. He bolted the door and stood looking about the room. For a moment he was conscious of seeing it in every detail with a distinctness he had never before known; then everything in it vanished but the single narrow panel of a drawer under one of the bookcases. He went up to the drawer, knelt down and slipped his hand into it.

As he raised himself he listened again, and this time he distinctly heard the old servant’s steps on the stairs. He passed his left hand over the side of his head, and down the curve of the skull behind the ear. He said to himself: ‘My wife … this will make it all right for her …’ and a last flash of irony twitched through him. Then he felt again, more deliberately, for the spot he wanted, and put the muzzle of his revolver against it.

I
N A
drawing-room hung with portraits of high-nosed personages in perukes and orders, a circle of ladies and gentlemen, looking not unlike everyday versions of the official figures above their heads, sat examining with friendly interest a little boy in mourning.

The boy was slim, fair and shy, and his small black figure, islanded in the middle of the wide lustrous floor, looked curiously lonely and remote. This effect of remoteness seemed to strike his mother as something intentional, and almost naughty, for after having launched him from the door, and waited to judge of the impression he produced, she came forward and, giving him a slight push, said impatiently: ‘Paul! Why don’t you go and kiss your new granny?’

The boy, without turning to her, or moving, sent his blue glance gravely about the circle. ‘Does she want me to?’ he asked, in a tone of evident apprehension; and on his mother’s answering: ‘Of course, you silly!’ he added earnestly: ‘How many more do you think there’ll be?’

Undine blushed to the ripples of her brilliant hair. ‘I never knew such a child! They’ve turned him into a perfect little savage!’

Raymond de Chelles advanced from behind his mother’s chair.

‘He won’t be a savage long with me,’ he said, stooping down so that his fatigued finely drawn face was close to Paul’s. Their eyes met and the boy smiled. ‘Come along, old chap,’ Chelles continued in English, drawing the little boy after him.

‘
Il est bien beau
,’ the Marquise de Chelles observed, her eyes turning from Paul’s grave face to her daughter-in-law’s vivid countenance.

‘Do be nice, darling! Say,
“bonjour, Madame”
,’ Undine urged.

An odd mingling of emotions stirred in her while she stood watching Paul make the round of the family group under her husband’s guidance. It was ‘lovely’ to have the child back, and to find him, after their three years’ separation, grown into so endearing a figure: her first glimpse of him when, in Mrs Heeny’s arms, he had emerged that morning from the steamer train, had shown what an acquisition he would be. If she had had any lingering doubts on the point, the impression produced on her husband would have dispelled them. Chelles had been instantly charmed, and Paul, in a shy confused way, was already responding to his advances. The Count and Countess Raymond had returned but a few weeks before from their protracted wedding-journey, and were staying – as they were apparently to do whenever they came to Paris – with the old Marquis, Raymond’s father, who had amicably proposed that little Paul Marvell should also share the hospitality of the Hôtel de Chelles. Undine, at first, was somewhat dismayed to find that she was expected to fit the boy and his nurse into a corner of her contracted
entresol
. But the possibility of a mother’s not finding room for her son, however cramped her own quarters, seemed not to have occurred to her new relations, and the preparing of her dressing-room and boudoir for Paul’s occupancy was carried on by the household with a zeal which obliged her to dissemble her lukewarmness.

Undine had supposed that on her marriage one of the great suites of the Hôtel de Chelles would be emptied of its tenants and put at her husband’s disposal; but she had since learned that, even had such a plan occurred to her parents-in-law, considerations of economy would have hindered it. The old Marquis and his wife, who were content, when they came up from Burgundy in the spring, with a modest set of rooms looking out on the court of their ancestral residence, expected their son and his wife to fit themselves into the still smaller apartment which had served as Raymond’s bachelor lodging. The rest of the fine old mouldering house – the tall-windowed
premier
on the garden, and the whole of the floor above – had been let for years to old-fashioned tenants who would have been more surprised than their landlord had he suddenly proposed to dispossess them. Undine, at first, had regarded these arrangements as merely provisional. She was persuaded that, under her influence, Raymond would soon convert his parents to more modern ideas, and meanwhile she was still in the flush of a completer well-being than she had ever known, and disposed, for the moment, to make light of any inconveniences connected with it. The three months since her marriage had been more nearly like what she had dreamed of than any of her previous experiments in happiness. At last she had what she wanted, and for the first time the glow of triumph was warmed by a deeper feeling. Her husband was really charming (it was odd how he reminded her of Ralph!), and after her bitter two years of loneliness and humiliation it was delicious to find herself once more adored and protected.

The very fact that Raymond was more jealous of her than Ralph had ever been – or at any rate less reluctant to show it – gave her a keener sense of recovered power. None of the men who had been in love with her before had been so frankly possessive, or so eager for reciprocal assurances of constancy. She knew that Ralph had suffered deeply from her intimacy with Van Degen, but he had betrayed his feeling only by a more studied detachment; and Van Degen, from the first, had been contemptuously indifferent to what she did or felt when she was out of his sight. As to her earlier experiences, she had frankly forgotten them: her sentimental memories went back no farther than the beginning of her New York career.

Raymond seemed to attach more importance to love, in all its manifestations, than was usual or convenient in a husband; and she gradually began to be aware that her domination over him involved a corresponding loss of independence. Since their return to Paris she had found that she was expected to give a circumstantial report of every
hour she spent away from him. She had nothing to hide, and no designs against his peace of mind except those connected with her frequent and costly sessions at the dress-makers’; but she had never before been called upon to account to any one for the use of her time, and after the first amused surprise at Raymond’s always wanting to know where she had been and whom she had seen she began to be oppressed by so exacting a devotion. Her parents, from her tenderest youth, had tacitly recognized her inalienable right to ‘go round’, and Ralph – though from motives which she divined to be different – had shown the same respect for her freedom. It was therefore disconcerting to find that Raymond expected her to choose her friends, and even her acquaintances, in conformity not only with his personal tastes but with a definite and complicated code of family prejudices and traditions; and she was especially surprised to discover that he viewed with disapproval her intimacy with the Princess Estradina.