The Custom of the Country (40 page)

‘You ought to write’; they had one and all said it to him from the first; and he fancied he might have begun sooner if he had not been urged on by their watchful fondness. Everybody wanted him to write – everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement – the assumption of those about him that because it would be good for him to write he must naturally be able to – acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval.

Even Clare had fallen into the same mistake; and one day, as he sat talking with her on the verandah of Laura Fairford’s
house on the Sound – where they now most frequently met – Ralph had half impatiently rejoined: ‘Oh, if you think it’s literature I need –!’

Instantly he had seen her face change, and the speaking hands tremble on her knee. But she achieved the feat of not answering him, or turning her steady eyes from the dancing midsummer water at the foot of Laura’s lawn. Ralph leaned a little nearer, and for an instant his hand imagined the flutter of hers. But instead of clasping it he drew back, and rising from his chair wandered away to the other end of the verandah … No, he didn’t feel as Clare felt. If he loved her – as he sometimes thought he did – it was not in the same way. He had a great tenderness for her, he was more nearly happy with her than with any one else; he liked to sit and talk with her, and watch her face and her hands, and he wished there were some way – some different way – of letting her know it; but he could not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him: such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on which his life had gone aground.

‘I shall write – of course I shall write some day,’ he said, turning back to his seat. ‘I’ve had a novel in the back of my head for years; and now’s the time to pull it out.’

He hardly knew what he was saying; but before the end of the sentence he saw that Clare had understood what he meant to convey, and henceforth he felt committed to letting her talk to him as much as she pleased about his book. He himself, in consequence, took to thinking about it more consecutively; and just as his friends ceased to urge him to write, he sat down in earnest to begin.

The vision that had come to him had no likeness to any of his earlier imaginings. Two or three subjects had haunted him, pleading for expression, during the first years of his marriage; but these now seemed either too lyrical or too tragic. He no longer saw life on the heroic scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than the insects they were. He contrived in the course of time to
reduce one of his old subjects to these dimensions, and after nights of brooding he made a dash at it, and wrote an opening chapter that struck him as not too bad. In the exhilaration of this first attempt he spent some pleasant evenings revising and polishing his work; and gradually a feeling of authority and importance developed in him. In the morning, when he woke, instead of his habitual sense of lassitude, he felt an eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task was a necessary part of the world’s machinery. He kept his secret with the beginner’s deadly fear of losing his hold on his half-real creations if he let in any outer light on them; but he went about with a more assured step, shrank less from meeting his friends, and even began to dine out again, and to laugh at some of the jokes he heard.

Laura Fairford, to get Paul away from town, had gone early to the country; and Ralph, who went down to her every Saturday, usually found Clare Van Degen there. Since his divorce he had never entered his cousin’s pinnacled palace; and Clare had never asked him why he stayed away. This mutual silence had been their sole allusion to Van Degen’s share in the catastrophe, though Ralph had spoken frankly of its other aspects. They talked, however, most often of impersonal subjects – books, pictures, plays, or whatever the world that interested them was doing – and she showed no desire to draw him back to his own affairs. She was again staying late in town – to have a pretext, as he guessed, for coming down on Sundays to the Fairfords’ – and they often made the trip together in her motor; but he had not yet spoken to her of having begun his book. One May evening, however, as they sat alone on the verandah, he suddenly told her that he was writing. As he spoke his heart beat like a boy’s; but once the words were out they gave him a feeling of self-confidence, and he began to sketch his plan, and then to go into its details. Clare listened devoutly, her eyes burning on him through the dusk like the stars deepening above the garden; and when
she got up to go in he followed her with a new sense of reassurance.

The dinner that evening was unusually pleasant. Charles Bowen, just back from his usual spring travels, had come straight down to his friends from the steamer; and the fund of impressions he brought with him gave Ralph a desire to be up and wandering. And why not – when the book was done? He smiled across the table at Clare.

‘Next summer you’ll have to charter a yacht, and take us all off to the Aegean. We can’t have Charles condescending to us about the out-of-the-way places he’s been seeing.’

Was it really he who was speaking, and his cousin who was sending him back her dusky smile? Well – why not, again? The seasons renewed themselves, and he too was putting out a new growth. ‘My book – my book – my book,’ kept repeating itself under all his thoughts, as Undine’s name had once perpetually murmured there. That night as he went up to bed he said to himself that he was actually ceasing to think about his wife …

As he passed Laura’s door she called him in, and put her arms about him.

‘You look so well, dear!’

‘But why shouldn’t I?’ he answered gaily, as if ridiculing the fancy that he had ever looked otherwise. Paul was sleeping behind the next door, and the sense of the boy’s nearness gave him a warmer glow. His little world was rounding itself out again, and once more he felt safe and at peace in its circle.

His sister looked as if she had something more to say; but she merely kissed him good night, and he went up whistling to his room.

The next morning he was to take a walk with Clare, and while he lounged about the drawing-room, waiting for her to come down, a servant came in with the Sunday papers. Ralph picked one up, and was absently unfolding it when his eye fell on his own name: a sight he had been spared since the last echoes of his divorce had subsided. His impulse was to
fling the paper down, to hurl it as far from him as he could; but a grim fascination tightened his hold and drew his eyes back to the hated headline.

NEW YORK BEAUTY WEDS FRENCH NOBLEMAN

MRS. UNDINE MARVELL CONFIDENT POPE WILL ANNUL
PREVIOUS MARRIAGE
MRS. MARVELL TALKS ABOUT HER CASE

There it was before him in all its long-drawn horror – an ‘interview’ – an ‘interview’ of Undine’s about her coming marriage! Ah, she talked about her case indeed! Her confidences filled the greater part of a column, and the only detail she seemed to have omitted was the name of her future husband, who was referred to by herself as ‘my fiancé’ and by the interviewer as ‘the Count’ or ‘a prominent scion of the French nobility’.

Ralph heard Laura’s step behind him. He threw the paper aside and their eyes met.

‘Is that what you wanted to tell me last night?’

‘Last night? – Is it in the papers?’

‘Who told you? Bowen? What else has he heard?’

‘Oh, Ralph, what does it matter – what can it matter?’

‘Who’s the man? Did he tell you that?’ Ralph insisted. He saw her growing agitation. ‘Why can’t you answer? Is it anyone I know?’

‘He was told in Paris it was his friend Raymond de Chelles.’

Ralph laughed, and his laugh sounded in his own ears like an echo of the dreary mirth with which he had filled Mr Spragg’s office the day he had learned that Undine intended to divorce him. But now his wrath was seasoned with a wholesome irony. The fact of his wife’s having reached another stage in her ascent fell into its place as a part of the huge human buffoonery.

‘Besides,’ Laura went on, ‘it’s all perfect nonsense, of course.
How in the world can she have her marriage annulled?’

Ralph pondered: this put the matter into another light. ‘With a great deal of money I suppose she might.’

‘Well, she certainly won’t get that from Chelles. He’s far from rich, Charles tells me.’ Laura waited, watching him, before she risked: ‘That’s what convinces me she wouldn’t have him if she could.’

Ralph shrugged. ‘There may be other inducements. But she won’t be able to manage it.’ He heard himself speaking quite collectedly. Had Undine at last lost her power of wounding him?

Clare came in, dressed for their walk, and under Laura’s anxious eyes he picked up the newspaper and held it out with a careless: ‘Look at this!’

His cousin’s glance flew down the column, and he saw the tremor of her lashes as she read. Then she lifted her head. ‘But you’ll be free!’ Her face was as vivid as a flower.

‘Free? I’m free now, as far as that goes!’

‘Oh, but it will go so much farther when she has another name – when she’s a different person altogether! Then you’ll really have Paul to yourself

‘Paul?’ Laura intervened with a nervous laugh. ‘But there’s never been the least doubt about his having Paul!’

They heard the boy’s laughter on the lawn, and she went out to join him. Ralph was still looking at his cousin.

‘You’re glad, then?’ came from him involuntarily; and she startled him by bursting into tears. He bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

R
ALPH
, as the days passed, felt that Clare was right: if Undine married again he would possess himself more completely, be more definitely rid of his past. And he did not doubt that she would gain her end: he knew her violent desires and her cold tenacity. If she had failed to capture Van Degen it was probably because she lacked experience of that
particular type of man, of his huge immediate wants and feeble vacillating purposes; most of all, because she had not yet measured the strength of the social considerations that restrained him. It was a mistake she was not likely to repeat, and her failure had probably been a useful preliminary to success. It was a long time since Ralph had allowed himself to think of her, and as he did so the overwhelming fact of her beauty became present to him again, no longer as an element of his being but as a power dispassionately estimated. He said to himself: ‘Any man who can feel at all will feel it as I did’; and the conviction grew in him that Raymond de Chelles, of whom he had formed an idea through Bowen’s talk, was not the man to give her up, even if she failed to obtain the release his religion exacted.

Meanwhile Ralph was gradually beginning to feel himself freer and lighter. Undine’s act, by cutting the last link between them, seemed to have given him back to himself and the mere fact that he could consider his case in all its bearings, impartially and ironically, showed him the distance he had travelled, the extent to which he had renewed himself. He had been moved, too, by Clare’s cry of joy at his release. Though the nature of his feeling for her had not changed he was aware of a new quality in their friendship. When he went back to his book again his sense of power had lost its asperity, and the spectacle of life seemed less like a witless dangling of limp dolls. He was well on in his second chapter now.

This lightness of mood was still on him when, returning one afternoon to Washington Square, full of projects for a long evening’s work, he found his mother awaiting him with a strange face. He followed her into the drawing-room, and she explained that there had been a telephone message she didn’t understand – something perfectly crazy about Paul – of course it was all a mistake …

Ralph’s first thought was of an accident, and his heart contracted. ‘Did Laura telephone?’

‘No, no; not Laura. It seemed to be a message from Mrs Spragg: something about sending some one here to fetch him – a
queer name like Heeny – to fetch him to a steamer on Saturday. I was to be sure to have his things packed … but of course it’s a misunderstanding …’ She gave an uncertain laugh, and looked up at Ralph as though entreating him to return the reassurance she had given him.

‘Of course, of course,’ he echoed.

He made his mother repeat her statement; but the unforeseen always flurried her, and she was confused and inaccurate. She didn’t actually know who had telephoned: the voice hadn’t sounded like Mrs Spragg’s … A woman’s voice; yes – oh, not a lady’s! And there was certainly something about a steamer … but he knew how the telephone bewildered her … and she was sure she was getting a little deaf. Hadn’t he better call up the Malibran? Of course it was all a mistake – but … well, perhaps he
had
better go there himself …

As he reached the front door a letter clinked in the box, and he saw his name on an ordinary-looking business envelope. He turned the door-handle, paused again, and stooped to take out the letter. It bore the address of the firm of lawyers who had represented Undine in the divorce proceedings and as he tore open the envelope Paul’s name started out at him.

Mrs Marvell had followed him into the hall, and her cry broke the silence. ‘Ralph – Ralph – is it anything she’s done?’

‘Nothing – it’s nothing.’ He stared at her. ‘What’s the day of the week?’

‘Wednesday. Why, what –?’ She suddenly seemed to understand. ‘She’s not going to take him away from us?’

Ralph dropped into a chair, crumpling the letter in his hand. He had been in a dream, poor fool that he was – a dream about his child! He sat gazing at the type-written phrases that spun themselves out before him. ‘My client’s circumstances now happily permitting … at last in a position to offer her son a home … long separation … a mother’s feelings … every social and educational advantage’ … and then, at the end, the poisoned dart that struck him speechless: ‘The courts having awarded her the sole custody …’

The sole custody! But that meant that Paul was hers, hers only, hers for always: that his father had no more claim on him than any casual stranger in the street! And he, Ralph Marvell, a sane man, young, able-bodied, in full possession of his wits, had assisted at the perpetration of this abominable wrong, had passively forfeited his right to the flesh of his body, the blood of his being! But it couldn’t be – of course it couldn’t be. The preposterousness of it proved that it wasn’t true. There was a mistake somewhere; a mistake his own lawyer would instantly rectify. If a hammer hadn’t been drumming in his head he could have recalled the terms of the decree – but for the moment all the details of the agonizing episode were lost in a blur of uncertainty.