The Custom of the Country (41 page)

To escape his mother’s silent anguish of interrogation he stood up and said: ‘I’ll see Mr Spragg – of course it’s a mistake.’ But as he spoke he retravelled the hateful months during the divorce proceedings, remembering his incomprehensible lassitude, his acquiescence in his family’s determination to ignore the whole episode, and his gradual lapse into the same state of apathy. He recalled all the old family catchwords, the full and elaborate vocabulary of evasion: ‘delicacy’, ‘pride’, ‘personal dignity’, ‘preferring not to know about such things’; Mrs Marvell’s: ‘All I ask is that you won’t mention the subject to your grandfather,’ Mr Dagonet’s: ‘Spare your mother, Ralph, whatever happens,’ and even Laura’s terrified: ‘Of course, for Paul’s sake, there must be no scandal.’

For Paul’s sake! And it was because, for Paul’s sake, there must be no scandal, that he, Paul’s father, had tamely abstained from defending his rights and contesting his wife’s charges, and had thus handed the child over to her keeping!

As his cab whirled him up Fifth Avenue, Ralph’s whole body throbbed with rage against the influences that had reduced him to such weakness. Then, gradually, he saw that the weakness was innate in him. He had been eloquent enough, in his free youth, against the conventions of his class; yet when the moment came to show his contempt for them they had mysteriously mastered him, deflecting his course
like some hidden hereditary failing. As he looked back it seemed as though even his great disaster had been conventionalized and sentimentalized by this inherited attitude: that the thoughts he had thought about it were only those of generations of Dagonets, and that there had been nothing real and his own in his life but the foolish passion he had been trying so hard to think out of existence.

Half-way to the Malibran he changed his direction, and drove to the house of the lawyer he had consulted at the time of his divorce. The lawyer had not yet come up town, and Ralph had a half-hour of bitter meditation before the sound of a latch-key brought him to his feet. The visit did not last long. His host, after an affable greeting, listened without surprise to what he had to say, and when he had ended reminded him with somewhat ironic precision that, at the time of the divorce, he had asked for neither advice nor information – had simply declared that he wanted to ‘turn his back on the whole business’ (Ralph recognized the phrase as one of his grandfather’s), and, on hearing that in that case he had only to abstain from action, and was in no need of legal services, had gone away without further inquiries.

‘You led me to infer you had your reasons –’ the slighted counsellor concluded; and, in reply to Ralph’s breathless question he subjoined, ‘Why, you see, the case is closed, and I don’t exactly know on what ground you can reopen it – unless, of course, you can bring evidence showing that the irregularity of the mother’s life is such …’

‘She’s going to marry again,’ Ralph threw in.

‘Indeed? Well, that in itself can hardly be described as irregular. In fact, in certain circumstances it might be construed as an advantage to the child.’

‘Then I’m powerless?’

‘Why – unless there’s an ulterior motive – through which pressure might be brought to bear.’

‘You mean that the first thing to do is to find out what she’s up to?’

‘Precisely. Of course, if it should prove to be a genuine case of maternal feeling, I won’t conceal from you that the outlook’s bad. At most, you could probably arrange to see your boy at stated intervals.’

To see his boy at stated intervals! Ralph wondered how a sane man could sit there, looking responsible and efficient, and talk such rubbish … As he got up to go the lawyer detained him to add: ‘Of course there’s no immediate cause for alarm. It will take time to enforce the provision of the Dakota decree in New York, and till it’s done your son can’t be taken from you. But there’s sure to be a lot of nasty talk in the papers; and you’re bound to lose in the end.’

Ralph thanked him and left.

He sped northward to the Malibran, where he learned that Mr and Mrs Spragg were at dinner. He sent his name down to the subterranean restaurant, and Mr Spragg presently appeared between the limp portières of the ‘Adam’ writing-room. He had grown older and heavier, as if illness instead of health had put more flesh on his bones, and there were greyish tints in the hollows of his face.

‘What’s this about Paul?’ Ralph exclaimed. ‘My mother’s had a message we can’t make out.’

Mr Spragg sat down, with the effect of immersing his spinal column in the depths of the armchair he selected. He crossed his legs, and swung one foot to and fro in its high wrinkled boot with elastic sides.

‘Didn’t you get a letter?’ he asked.

‘From my – from Undine’s lawyers? Yes.’ Ralph held it out. ‘It’s queer reading. She hasn’t hitherto been very keen to have Paul with her.’

Mr Spragg, adjusting his glasses, read the letter slowly, restored it to the envelope and gave it back. ‘My daughter has intimated that she wishes these gentlemen to act for her. I haven’t received any additional instructions from her,’ he said, with none of the curtness of tone that his stiff legal vocabulary implied.

‘But the first communication I received was from you – at least from Mrs Spragg.’

Mr Spragg drew his beard through his hand. ‘The ladies are apt to be a trifle hasty. I believe Mrs Spragg had a letter yesterday instructing her to select a reliable escort for Paul; and I suppose she thought –’

‘Oh, this is all too preposterous!’ Ralph burst out, springing from his seat. ‘You don’t for a moment imagine, do you – any of you – that I’m going to deliver up my son like a bale of goods in answer to any instructions in God’s world? – Oh, yes, I know – I let him go – I abandoned my right to him … but I didn’t know what I was doing … I was sick with grief and misery. My people were awfully broken up over the whole business, and I wanted to spare them. I wanted, above all, to spare my boy when he grew up. If I’d contested the case you know what the result would have been. I let it go by default – I made no conditions – all I wanted was to keep Paul, and never to let him hear a word against his mother!’

Mr Spragg received this passionate appeal in a silence that implied not so much disdain or indifference, as the total inability to deal verbally with emotional crises. At length he said, a slight unsteadiness in his usually calm tones: ‘I presume at the time it was optional with you to demand Paul’s custody.’

‘Oh, yes – it was optional,’ Ralph sneered.

Mr Spragg looked at him compassionately. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t do it,’ he said.

T
HE UPSHOT
of Ralph’s visit was that Mr Spragg, after considerable deliberation, agreed, pending farther negotiations between the opposing lawyers, to undertake that no attempt should be made to remove Paul from his father’s custody. Nevertheless, he seemed to think it quite natural that Undine, on the point of making a marriage which would put it in her power to give her child a suitable home, should assert her claim on him. It was more disconcerting to
Ralph to learn that Mrs Spragg, for once departing from her attitude of passive impartiality, had eagerly abetted her daughter’s move; he had somehow felt that Undine’s desertion of the child had established a kind of mute understanding between himself and his mother-in-law.

‘I thought Mrs Spragg would know there’s no earthly use trying to take Paul from me,’ he said with a desperate awkwardness of entreaty, and Mr Spragg startled him by replying: ‘I presume his grandma thinks he’ll belong to her more if we keep him in the family.’

Ralph, abruptly awakened from his dream of recovered peace, found himself confronted on every side by indifference or hostility: it was as though the June fields in which his boy was playing had suddenly opened to engulf him. Mrs Marvell’s fears and tremors were almost harder to bear than the Spraggs’ antagonism; and for the next few days Ralph wandered about miserably, dreading some fresh communication from Undine’s lawyers, yet racked by the strain of hearing nothing more from them. Mr Spragg had agreed to cable his daughter asking her to await a letter before enforcing her demands; but on the fourth day after Ralph’s visit to the Malibran a telephone message summoned him to his father-in-law’s office.

Half an hour later their talk was over and he stood once more on the landing outside Mr Spragg’s door. Undine’s answer had come and Paul’s fate was sealed. His mother refused to give him up, refused to await the arrival of her lawyer’s letter, and reiterated, in more peremptory language, her demand that the child should be sent immediately to Paris in Mrs Heeny’s care.

Mr Spragg, in face of Ralph’s entreaties, remained pacific but remote. It was evident that, though he had no wish to quarrel with Ralph, he saw no reason for resisting Undine. ‘I guess she’s got the law on her side,’ he said; and in response to Ralph’s passionate remonstrances he added fatalistically: ‘I presume you’ll have to leave the matter to my daughter.’

Ralph had gone to the office resolved to control his
temper and keep on the watch for any shred of information he might glean; but it soon became clear that Mr Spragg knew as little as himself of Undine’s projects, or of the stage her plans had reached. All she had apparently vouchsafed her parent was the statement that she intended to remarry, and the command to send Paul over; and Ralph reflected that his own betrothal to her had probably been announced to Mr Spragg in the same curt fashion.

The thought brought back an overwhelming sense of the past. One by one the details of that incredible moment revived, and he felt in his veins the glow of rapture with which he had first approached the dingy threshold he was now leaving. There came back to him with peculiar vividness the memory of his rushing up to Mr Spragg’s office to consult him about a necklace for Undine. Ralph recalled the incident because his eager appeal for advice had been received by Mr Spragg with the very phrase he had just used: ‘I presume you’ll have to leave the matter to my daughter.’

Ralph saw him slouching in his chair, swung sideways from the untidy desk, his legs stretched out, his hands in his pockets, his jaws engaged on the phantom toothpick; and, in a corner of the office, the figure of a middle-sized red-faced young man who seemed to have been interrupted in the act of saying something disagreeable.

‘Why, it must have been then that I first saw Moffatt,’ Ralph reflected; and the thought suggested the memory of other, subsequent meetings in the same building, and of frequent ascents to Moffatt’s office during the ardent weeks of their mysterious and remunerative ‘deal’.

Ralph wondered if Moffatt’s office were still in the Ararat; and on the way out he paused before the black tablet affixed to the wall of the vestibule and sought and found the name in its familiar place.

The next moment he was again absorbed in his own cares. Now that he had learned the imminence of Paul’s danger, and the futility of pleading for delay, a thousand fantastic projects were contending in his head. To get the boy away – that
seemed the first thing to do: to put him out of reach, and then invoke the law, get the case reopened, and carry the fight from court to court till his rights should be recognized. It would cost a lot of money – well, the money would have to be found. The first step was to secure the boy’s temporary safety; after that, the question of ways and means would have to be considered … Had there ever been a time, Ralph wondered, when that question hadn’t been at the root of all the others?

He had promised to let Clare Van Degen know the result of his visit, and half an hour later he was in her drawing-room. It was the first time he had entered it since his divorce; but Van Degen was tarpon-fishing in California – and besides, he had to see Clare. His one relief was in talking to her; in feverishly turning over with her every possibility of delay and obstruction; and he marvelled at the intelligence and energy she brought to the discussion of these questions. It was as if she had never before felt strongly enough about anything to put her heart or her brains into it; but now everything in her was at work for him.

She listened intently to what he told her; then she said: ‘You tell me it will cost a great deal; but why take it to the courts at all? Why not give the money to Undine instead of to your lawyers?’

Ralph looked at her in surprise, and she continued: ‘Why do you suppose she’s suddenly made up her mind she must have Paul?’

‘That’s comprehensible enough to any one who knows her. She wants him because he’ll give her the appearance of respectability. Having him with her will prove, as no mere assertions can, that all the rights are on her side and the “wrongs” on mine.’

Clare considered. ‘Yes; that’s the obvious answer. But shall I tell you what I think, my dear? You and I are both completely out-of-date. I don’t believe Undine cares a straw for “the appearance of respectability”. What she wants is the money for her annulment.’

Ralph uttered an incredulous exclamation. ‘But don’t you see?’ she hurried on. ‘It’s her only hope – her last chance. She’s much too clever to burden herself with the child merely to annoy you. What she wants is to make you buy him back from her.’ She stood up and came to him with outstretched hands. ‘Perhaps I can be of use to you at last!’

‘You?’ He summoned up a haggard smile. ‘As if you weren’t always – letting me load you with all my bothers!’

‘Oh, if only I’ve hit on the way out of this one! Then there wouldn’t be any others left!’ Her eyes followed him intently as he turned away to the window and stood staring down at the sultry prospect of Fifth Avenue. As he turned over her conjecture its probability became more and more apparent. It put into logical relation all the incoherencies of Undine’s recent conduct, completed and defined her anew as if a sharp line had been drawn about her fading image.

‘If it’s that, I shall soon know,’ he said, turning back into the room. His course had instantly become plain. He had only to resist and Undine would have to show her hand. Simultaneously with this thought there sprang up in his mind the remembrance of the autumn afternoon in Paris when he had come home and found her, among her half-packed finery, desperately bewailing her coming motherhood.