The Custom of the Country (53 page)

‘You’re not the beauty you were,’ he said irrelevantly; ‘but you’re a lot more fetching.’

The oddly qualified phrase made her laugh with mingled pleasure and annoyance.

‘I suppose I must be dreadfully changed –’

‘You’re all right! – But I’ve got to go back home,’ he broke off abruptly. ‘I’ve put it off too long.’

She paled and looked away, helpless in her sudden disappointment. ‘I knew you’d say that … And I shall just be left here …’ She sat down on the sofa near which they had been standing, and two tears formed on her lashes and fell.

Moffatt sat down beside her, and both were silent. She had never seen him at a loss before. She made no attempt to draw nearer, or to use any of the arts of cajolery; but presently she said, without rising: ‘I saw you look at your watch when I came in. I suppose somebody else is waiting for you.’

‘It don’t matter.’

‘Some other woman?’

‘It don’t matter.’

‘I’ve wondered so often – but of course I’ve got no right to ask.’ She stood up slowly, understanding that he meant to let her go.

‘Just tell me one thing – did you never miss me?’

‘Oh, damnably!’ he brought out with sudden bitterness.

She came nearer, sinking her voice to a low whisper. ‘It’s the only time I ever really cared – all through!’

He had risen too, and they stood intensely gazing at each other. Moffatt’s face was fixed and grave, as she had seen it in hours she now found herself rapidly reliving.

‘I believe you
did
,’ he said.

‘Oh, Elmer – if I’d known – if I’d only known!’

He made no answer, and she turned away, touching with an unconscious hand the edge of the lapis bowl among his papers.

‘Elmer, if you’re going away it can’t do any harm to tell me – is there any one else?’

He gave a laugh that seemed to shake him free. ‘In that kind of way? Lord, no! Too busy!’

She came close again and laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘Then why not – why shouldn’t we –?’ She leaned her head back so that her gaze slanted up through her wet lashes. ‘I can do as I please – my husband does. They think so differently about marriage over here: it’s just a business contract. As long as a woman doesn’t make a show of herself no one cares.’ She put her other hand up, so that she held him facing her. ‘I’ve always felt, all through everything, that I belonged to you.’

Moffatt left her hands on his shoulders, but did not lift his own to clasp them. For a moment she thought she had mistaken him, and a leaden sense of shame descended on her. Then he asked: ‘You say your husband goes with other women?’

Lili Estradina’s taunt flashed through her and she seized on it. ‘People have told me so – his own relations have. I’ve never stooped to spy on him …’

‘And the women in your set – I suppose it’s taken for granted they all do the same?’

She laughed.

‘Everything fixed up for them, same as it is for the husbands, eh? Nobody meddles or makes trouble if you know the ropes?’

‘No, nobody … it’s all quite easy …’ She stopped, her faint smile checked, as his backward movement made her hands drop from his shoulders.

‘And that’s what you’re proposing to me? That you and I should do like the rest of ’em?’ His face had lost its comic roundness and grown harsh and dark, as it had when her father had taken her away from him at Opake. He turned on his heel, walked the length of the room and halted with his back to her in the embrasure of the window. There he paused a full minute, his hands in his pockets, staring out at the perpetual interweaving of motors in the luminous setting of the square. Then he turned and spoke from where he stood.

‘Look here, Undine, if I’m to have you again I don’t want to have you that way. That time out in Apex, when everybody in the place was against me, and I was down and
out, you stood up to them and stuck by me. Remember that walk down Main Street? Don’t I! And the way the people glared and hurried by; and how you kept on alongside of me, talking and laughing, and looking your Sunday best. When Abner Spragg came out to Opake after us and pulled you back I was pretty sore at your deserting; but I came to see it was natural enough. You were only a spoilt girl, used to having everything you wanted; and I couldn’t give you a thing then, and the folks you’d been taught to believe in all told you I never would. Well, I did look like a back number, and no blame to you for thinking so. I used to say it to myself over and over again, laying awake nights and totting up my mistakes … and then there were days when the wind set another way, and I knew I’d pull it off yet, and I thought you might have held on …’ He stopped, his head a little lowered, his concentrated gaze on her flushed face. ‘Well, anyhow,’ he broke out, ‘you were my wife once, and you were my wife first – and if you want to come back you’ve got to come that way: not slink through the back way when there’s no one watching, but walk in by the front door, with your head up, and your Main Street look.’

Since the days when he had poured out to her his great fortune-building projects she had never heard him make so long a speech; and her heart, as she listened, beat with a new joy and terror. It seemed to her that the great moment of her life had come at last – the moment all her minor failures and successes had been building up with blind indefatigable hands.

‘Elmer – Elmer –’ she sobbed out.

She expected to find herself in his arms, shut in and shielded from all her troubles; but he stood his ground across the room, immovable.

‘Is it yes?’

She faltered the word after him: ‘Yes –?’

‘Are you going to marry me?’

She stared, bewildered. ‘Why, Elmer – marry you? You forget!’

‘Forget what? That you don’t want to give up what you’ve got?’

‘How can I? Such things are not done out here. Why, I’m a Catholic; and the Catholic Church –’ She broke off, reading the end in his face. ‘But later, perhaps … things might change. Oh, Elmer, if only you’d stay over here and let me see you sometimes!’

‘Yes – the way your friends see each other. We’re differently made out in Apex. When I want that sort of thing I go down to North Fifth Street for it.’

She paled under the retort, but her heart beat high with it. What he asked was impossible – and she gloried in his asking it. Feeling her power, she tried to temporize. ‘At least if you stayed we could be friends – I shouldn’t feel so terribly alone.’

He laughed impatiently. ‘Don’t talk magazine stuff to me, Undine Spragg. I guess we want each other the same way. Only our ideas are different. You’ve got all muddled, living out here among a lot of loafers who call it a career to run round after every petticoat. I’ve got my job out at home, and I belong where my job is.’

‘Are you going to be tied to business all your life?’ Her smile was faintly depreciatory.

‘I guess business is tied to
me
: Wall Street acts as if it couldn’t get along without me.’ He gave his shoulders a shake and moved a few steps nearer. ‘See here, Undine – you’re the one that don’t understand. If I was to sell out tomorrow, and spend the rest of my life reading art magazines in a pink villa, I wouldn’t do what you’re asking me. And I’ve about as much idea of dropping business as you have of taking to district nursing. There are things a man doesn’t do. I understand why your husband won’t sell those tapestries – till he’s got to. His ancestors are
his
business: Wall Street’s mine.’

He paused, and they silently faced each other. Undine made no attempt to approach him: she understood that if he yielded it would be only to recover his advantage and deepen
her feeling of defeat. She put out her hand and took up the sunshade she had dropped on entering. ‘I suppose it’s good-bye then,’ she said.

‘You haven’t got the nerve?’

‘The nerve for what?’

‘To come where you belong: with me.’

She laughed a little and then sighed. She wished he would come nearer, or look at her differently: she felt, under his cool eye, no more compelling than a woman of wax in a show-case.

‘How could I get a divorce? With my religion –’

‘Why, you were born a Baptist, weren’t you? That’s where you used to attend church when I waited round the corner, Sunday mornings, with one of old Hober’s buggies.’ They both laughed, and he went on: ‘If you’ll come along home with me I’ll see you get your divorce all right. Who cares what they do over here? You’re an American, ain’t you? What you want is the home-made article.’

She listened, discouraged yet fascinated by his sturdy inaccessibility to all her arguments and objections. He knew what he wanted, saw his road before him, and acknowledged no obstacles. Her defence was drawn from reasons he did not understand, or based on difficulties that did not exist for him; and gradually she felt herself yielding to the steady pressure of his will. Yet the reasons he brushed away came back with redoubled tenacity whenever he paused long enough for her to picture the consequences of what he exacted.

‘You don’t know – you don’t understand –’ she kept repeating; but she knew that his ignorance was part of his terrible power, and that it was hopeless to try to make him feel the value of what he was asking her to give up.

‘See here, Undine,’ he said slowly, as if he measured her resistance though he couldn’t fathom it, ‘I guess it had better be yes or no right here. It ain’t going to do either of us any good to drag this thing out. If you want to come back to me, come – if you don’t, we’ll shake hands on it now. I’m due in Apex for a directors’ meeting on the twentieth, and as it is I’ll
have to cable for a special to get me out there. No, no, don’t cry – it ain’t that kind of a story … but I’ll have a deck-suite for you on the
Semantic
if you’ll sail with me the day after tomorrow.’

I
N THE
great high-ceilinged library of a private
hôtel
overlooking one of the new quarters of Paris, Paul Marvell stood listlessly gazing out into the twilight.

The trees were budding symmetrically along the avenue below; and Paul, looking down, saw, between windows and tree-tops, a pair of tall iron gates with gilt ornaments, the marble kerb of a semi-circular drive, and bands of spring flowers set in turf. He was now a big boy of nearly nine, who went to a fashionable private school, and he had come home that day for the Easter holidays. He had not been back since Christmas, and it was the first time he had seen the new
hôtel
which his step-father had bought, and in which Mr and Mrs Moffatt had hastily established themselves, a few weeks earlier, on their return from a flying trip to America. They were always coming and going; during the two years since their marriage they had been perpetually dashing over to New York and back, or rushing down to Rome or up to the Engadine: Paul never knew where they were except when a telegram announced that they were going somewhere else. He did not even know that there was any method of communication between mothers and sons less laconic than that of the electric wire; and once, when a boy at school asked him if his mother often wrote, he had answered in all sincerity: ‘Oh yes – I got a telegram last week.’

He had been almost sure – as sure as he ever was of anything – that he should find her at home when he arrived; but a message (for she hadn’t had time to telegraph) apprised him that she and Mr Moffatt had run down to Deauville to look at a house they thought of hiring for the summer; they were taking an early train back, and would be at home for
dinner – were in fact having a lot of people to dine.

It was just what he ought to have expected, and had been used to ever since he could remember; and generally he didn’t much mind, especially since his mother had become Mrs Moffatt, and the father he had been most used to, and liked best, had abruptly disappeared from his life. But the new
hotel
was big and strange, and his own room, in which there was not a toy or a book, or one of his dear battered relics (none of the new servants – they were always new – could find his things, or think where they had been put), seemed the loneliest spot in the whole house. He had gone up there after his solitary luncheon, served in the immense marble dining-room by a footman on the same scale, and had tried to occupy himself with pasting postcards into his album; but the newness and sumptuousness of the room embarrassed him – the white fur rugs and brocade chairs seemed maliciously on the watch for smears and ink-spots – and after a while he pushed the album aside and began to roam through the house.

He went to all the rooms in turn: his mother’s first, the wonderful lacy bedroom, all pale silks and velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps, and the boudoir as big as a drawing-room, with pictures he would have liked to know about, and tables and cabinets holding things he was afraid to touch. Mr Moffatt’s rooms came next. They were soberer and darker, but as big and splendid; and in the bedroom, on the brown wall, hung a single picture – the portrait of a boy in grey velvet – that interested Paul most of all. The boy’s hand rested on the head of a big dog, and he looked infinitely noble and charming, and yet (in spite of the dog) so sad and lonely that he too might have come home that very day to a strange house in which none of his old things could be found.

From these rooms Paul wandered downstairs again. The library attracted him most: there were rows and rows of books, bound in dim browns and golds, and old faded reds as rich as velvet: they all looked as if they might have had stories in them as splendid as their bindings. But the bookcases were closed with gilt trellising, and when Paul reached
up to open one, a servant told him that Mr Moffatt’s secretary kept them locked because the books were too valuable to be taken down. This seemed to make the library as strange as the rest of the house, and he passed on to the ballroom at the back. Through its closed doors he heard a sound of hammering, and when he tried the door-handle a servant passing with a tray full of glasses told him that ‘they’ hadn’t finished, and wouldn’t let anybody in.

The mysterious pronoun somehow increased Paul’s sense of isolation, and he went on to the drawing-rooms, steering his way prudently between the gold armchairs and shining tables, and wondering whether the wigged and corseleted heroes on the walls represented Mr Moffatt’s ancestors, and why, if they did, he looked so little like them. The dining-room beyond was more amusing, because busy servants were already laying the long table. It was too early for the florist, and the centre of the table was empty, but down the sides were gold baskets heaped with pulpy summer fruits – figs, strawberries and big blushing nectarines. Between them stood crystal decanters with red and yellow wine, and little dishes full of sweets; and against the walls were sideboards with great pieces of gold and silver, ewers and urns and branching candelabra, which sprinkled the green marble walls with star-like reflections.