The Custom of the Country (25 page)

Moffatt reappeared two days after the dinner, presenting himself in West End Avenue in the late afternoon with the explanation that the business in hand necessitated discretion, and that he preferred not to be seen in Ralph’s office. It was a question of negotiating with the utmost privacy for the purchase of a small strip of land between two large plots already acquired by purchasers cautiously designated by Moffatt as his ‘parties’. How far he ‘stood in’ with the parties he left it to Ralph to conjecture; but it was plain that he had a large stake in the transaction, and that it offered him his first chance of recovering himself since Driscoll had ‘thrown’ him. The owners of the coveted plot did not seem anxious to sell, and there were personal reasons for Moffatt’s not approaching them through Ralph’s partners, who were the regular agents of the estate: so that Ralph’s acquaintance with the conditions, combined with his detachment from the case, marked him out as a useful intermediary.

Their first talk left Ralph with a dazzled sense of Moffatt’s strength and keenness, but with a vague doubt as to the ‘straightness’ of the proposed transaction. Ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the
surface. He knew that ‘business’ has created its own special morality; and his musings on man’s relation to his self-imposed laws had shown him how little human conduct is generally troubled about its own sanctions. He had a vivid sense of the things a man of his kind didn’t do; but his inability to get a mental grasp on large financial problems made it hard to apply to them so simple a measure as this inherited standard. He only knew, as Moffatt’s plan developed, that it seemed all right while he talked of it with its originator, but vaguely wrong when he thought it over afterward. It occurred to him to consult his grandfather; and if he renounced the idea for the obvious reason that Mr Dagonet’s ignorance of business was as fathomless as his own, this was not his sole motive. Finally it occurred to him to put the case hypothetically to Mr Spragg. As far as Ralph knew, his father-in-law’s business record was unblemished; yet one felt in him an elasticity of adjustment not allowed for in the Dagonet code.

Mr Spragg listened thoughtfully to Ralph’s statement of the case, growling out here and there a tentative correction, and turning his cigar between his lips as he seemed to turn the problem over in the loose grasp of his mind.

‘Well, what’s the trouble with it?’ he asked at length, stretching his big square-toed shoes against the grate of his son-in-law’s dining-room, where, in the after-dinner privacy of a family evening, Ralph had seized the occasion to consult him.

‘The trouble?’ Ralph considered. ‘Why, that’s just what I should like you to explain to me.’

Mr Spragg threw back his head and stared at the garlanded French clock on the chimney-piece. Mrs Spragg was sitting upstairs in her daughter’s bedroom, and the silence of the house seemed to hang about the two men like a listening presence.

‘Well, I dunno but what I agree with the doctor who said there warn’t any diseases, but only sick people. Every case is different, I guess.’ Mr Spragg, munching his cigar, turned a
ruminating glance on Ralph. ‘Seems to me it all boils down to one thing. Was this fellow we’re supposing about under any obligation to the other party – the one he was trying to buy the property from?’

Ralph hesitated. ‘Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently.’

Mr Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest questions.

‘Any personal obligation, I meant. Had the other fellow done him a good turn any time?’

‘No – I don’t imagine them to have had any previous relations at all.’

His father-in-law stared. ‘Where’s your trouble, then?’ He sat for a moment frowning at the embers. ‘Even when it’s the other way round it ain’t always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing’s binding … and they say shipwrecked fellows’ll make a meal of a friend as quick as they would of a total stranger.’ He drew himself together with a shake of his shoulders and pulled back his feet from the grate. ‘But I don’t see the conundrum in your case, I guess it’s up to both parties to take care of their own skins.’

He rose from his chair and wandered upstairs to Undine.

That was the Wall Street code: it all ‘boiled down’ to the personal obligation, to the salt eaten in the enemy’s tent. Ralph’s fancy wandered off on a long trail of speculation from which he was pulled back with a jerk by the need of immediate action. Moffatt’s ‘deal’ could not wait: quick decisions were essential to effective action, and brooding over ethical shades of difference might work more ill than good in a world committed to swift adjustments. The arrival of several unforeseen bills confirmed this view, and once Ralph had adopted it he began to take a detached interest in the affair.

In Paris, in his younger days, he had once attended a lesson in acting given at the Conservatoire by one of the great lights of the theatre, and had seen an apparently uncomplicated role of the classic repertory, familiar to him through repeated performances, taken to pieces before his eyes, dissolved into
its component elements, and built up again with a minuteness of elucidation and a range of reference that made him feel as though he had been let into the secret of some age-long natural process. As he listened to Moffatt the remembrance of that lesson came back to him. At the outset the ‘deal’, and his own share in it, had seemed simple enough: he would have put on his hat and gone out on the spot in the full assurance of being able to transact the affair. But as Moffatt talked he began to feel as blank and blundering as the class of dramatic students before whom the great actor had analysed his part. The affair was in fact difficult and complex, and Moffatt saw at once just where the difficulties lay and how the personal idiosyncrasies of ‘the parties’ affected them. Such insight fascinated Ralph, and he strayed off into wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts.

Both men had strong incentives for hastening the affair; and within a fortnight after Moffatt’s first advance Ralph was able to tell him that his offer was accepted. Over and above his personal satisfaction he felt the thrill of the agent whom some powerful negotiator has charged with a delicate mission: he might have been an eager young Jesuit carrying compromising papers to his superior. It had been stimulating to work with Moffatt, and to study at close range the large powerful instrument of his intelligence.

As he came out of Moffatt’s office at the conclusion of this visit Ralph met Mr Spragg descending from his eyrie. He stopped short with a backward glance at Moffatt’s door.

‘Hallo – what were you doing in there with those cut-throats?’

Ralph judged discretion to be essential. ‘Oh, just a little business for the firm.’

Mr Spragg said no more, but resorted to the soothing labial motion of revolving his phantom toothpick.

‘How’s Undie getting along?’ he merely asked, as he and his son-in-law descended together in the elevator.

‘She doesn’t seem to feel much stronger. The doctor wants
her to run over to Europe for a few weeks. She thinks of joining her friends the Shallums in Paris.’

Mr Spragg was again silent, but he left the building at Ralph’s side, and the two walked along together toward Wall Street.

Presently the older man asked: ‘How did you get acquainted with Moffatt?’

‘Why, by chance – Undine ran across him somewhere and asked him to dine the other night.’

‘Undine asked him to dine?’

‘Yes: she told me you used to know him out at Apex.’

Mr Spragg appeared to search his memory for confirmation of the fact. ‘I believe he used to be round there at one time. I’ve never heard any good of him yet.’ He paused at a crossing and looked probingly at his son-in-law. ‘Is she terribly set on this trip to Europe?’

Ralph smiled. ‘You know how it is when she takes a fancy to do anything –’

Mr Spragg, by a slight lift of his brooding brows, seemed to convey a deep if unspoken response.

‘Well, I’d let her do it this time – I’d let her do it,’ he said as he turned down the steps of the Subway.

Ralph was surprised, for he had gathered from some frightened references of Mrs Spragg’s that Undine’s parents had wind of her European plan and were strongly opposed to it. He concluded that Mr Spragg had long since measured the extent of profitable resistance, and knew just when it became vain to hold out against his daughter or advise others to do so.

Ralph, for his own part, had no inclination to resist. As he left Moffatt’s office his inmost feeling was one of relief. He had reached the point of recognizing that it was best for both that his wife should go. When she returned perhaps their lives would readjust themselves – but for the moment he longed for some kind of benumbing influence, something that should give relief to the dull daily ache of feeling her so near and yet so inaccessible. Certainly there were more urgent uses for their brilliant windfall: heavy arrears of
household debts had to be met, and the summer would bring its own burden. But perhaps another stroke of luck might befall him: he was getting to have the drifting dependence on ‘luck’ of the man conscious of his inability to direct his life. And meanwhile it seemed easier to let Undine have what she wanted.

Undine, on the whole, behaved with discretion. She received the good news languidly and showed no unseemly haste to profit by it. But it was as hard to hide the light in her eyes as to dissemble the fact that she had not only thought out every detail of the trip in advance, but had decided exactly how her husband and son were to be disposed of in her absence. Her suggestion that Ralph should take Paul to his grandparents, and that the West End Avenue house should be let for the summer, was too practical not to be acted on; and Ralph found she had already put her hand on the Harry Lipscombs, who, after three years of neglect, were to be dragged back to favour and made to feel, as the first step in their reinstatement, the necessity of hiring for the summer months a cool airy house on the West Side. On her return from Europe, Undine explained, she would of course go straight to Ralph and the boy in the Adirondacks; and it seemed a foolish extravagance to let the house stand empty when the Lipscombs were so eager to take it.

As the day of departure approached it became harder for her to temper her beams; but her pleasure showed itself so amiably that Ralph began to think she might, after all, miss the boy and himself more than she imagined. She was tenderly preoccupied with Paul’s welfare, and, to prepare for his translation to his grandparents’ she gave the household in Washington Square more of her time than she had accorded it since her marriage. She explained that she wanted Paul to grow used to his new surroundings; and with that object she took him frequently to his grandmother’s, and won her way into old Mr Dagonet’s sympathies by her devotion to the child and her pretty way of joining in his games.

Undine was not consciously acting a part: this new phase
was as natural to her as the other. In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only every one would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.

These thoughts were in her mind when, a day or two before sailing, she came out of the Washington Square house with her boy. It was a late spring afternoon, and she and Paul had lingered on till long past the hour sacred to his grandfather’s nap. Now, as she came out into the square she saw that, however well Mr Dagonet had borne their protracted romp, it had left his playmate flushed and sleepy; and she lifted Paul in her arms to carry him to the nearest cab-stand.

As she raised herself she saw a thick-set figure approaching her across the square; and a moment later she was shaking hands with Elmer Moffatt. In the bright spring air he looked seasonably glossy and prosperous; and she noticed that he wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. His small black eyes twinkled with approval as they rested on her, and Undine reflected that, with Paul’s arms about her neck, and his little flushed face against her own, she must present a not unpleasing image of young motherhood.

‘That the heir apparent?’ Moffatt asked; adding ‘Happy to make your acquaintance, sir,’ as the boy, at Undine’s bidding, held out a fist sticky with sugar plums.

‘He’s been spending the afternoon with his grandfather, and they played so hard that he’s sleepy,’ she explained. Little Paul, at that stage in his career, had a peculiar grace of wide-gazing deep-lashed eyes and arched cherubic lips, and Undine saw that Moffatt was not insensible to the picture she and her son composed. She did not dislike his admiration, for she no longer felt any shrinking from him – she would even have been glad to thank him for the service he had done her husband if she had known how to allude to it without awkwardness. Moffatt seemed equally pleased at the meeting, and they looked at each other almost intimately over Paul’s tumbled curls.

‘He’s a mighty fine fellow and no mistake – but isn’t he rather an armful for you?’ Moffatt asked, his eyes lingering with real kindliness on the child’s face.

‘Oh, we haven’t far to go. I’ll pick up a cab at the corner.’

‘Well, let me carry him that far anyhow,’ said Moffatt.

Undine was glad to be relieved of her burden, for she was unused to the child’s weight, and disliked to feel that her skirt was dragging on the pavement. ‘Go to the gentleman, Pauly – he’ll carry you better than mother,’ she said.

The little boy’s first movement was one of recoil from the ruddy sharp-eyed countenance that was so unlike his father’s delicate face; but he was an obedient child, and after a moment’s hesitation he wound his arms trustfully about the red gentleman’s neck.

‘That’s a good fellow – sit tight and I’ll give you a ride,’ Moffatt cried, hoisting the boy to his shoulder.