The Custom of the Country Read online

  All his life, and at ever-diminishing intervals, Mr Spragg had been called on by his womenkind to “see what he could do”; and the seeing had almost always resulted as they wished. Undine did not have to send back her ring, and in her state of trance-like happiness she hardly asked by what means her path had been smoothed, but merely accepted her mother’s assurance that ‘father had fixed everything all right’.

  Mr Spragg accepted the situation also. A son-in-law who expected to be pensioned like a Grand Army veteran was a phenomenon new to his experience; but if that was what Undine wanted she should have it. Only two days later, however, he was met by a new demand – the young people had decided to be married ‘right off’, instead of waiting till June. This change of plan was made known to Mr Spragg at a moment when he was peculiarly unprepared for the financial readjustment it necessitated. He had always declared himself able to cope with any crisis if Undine and her mother would ‘go steady’; but he now warned them of his inability to keep up with the new pace they had set.

  Undine, not deigning to return to the charge, had commissioned her mother to speak for her; and Mr Spragg was surprised to meet in his wife a firmness as inflexible as his daughter’s.

  ‘I can’t do it, Loot – can’t put my hand on the cash,’ he had protested; but Mrs Spragg fought him inch by inch, her back to the wall – flinging out at last, as he pressed her closer: ‘Well, if you want to know, she’s seen Elmer.’

  The bolt reached its mark, and her husband turned an agitated face on her.

  ‘Elmer? What on earth – he didn’t come here?’

  ‘No; but he sat next to her the other night at the theatre, and she’s wild with us for not having warned her.’

  Mr Spragg’s scowl drew his projecting brows together. ‘Warned her of what? What’s Elmer to her? Why’s she afraid of Elmer Moffatt?’

  ‘She’s afraid of his talking.’

  ‘Talking? What on earth can he say that’ll hurt her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mrs Spragg wailed. ‘She’s so nervous I can hardly get a word out of her.’

  Mr Spragg’s whitening face showed the touch of a new fear. ‘Is she afraid he’ll get round her again – make up to her? Is that what she means by “talking”?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I only know she is afraid – she’s afraid as death of him.’

  For a long interval they sat silently looking at each other while their heavy eyes exchanged conjectures: then Mr Spragg rose from his chair, saying, as he took up his hat: ‘Don’t you fret, Leota; I’ll see what I can do.’

  He had been ‘seeing’ now for an arduous fortnight; and the strain on his vision had resulted in a state of tension such as he had not undergone since the epic days of the Pure Water Move at Apex. It was not his habit to impart his fears to Mrs Spragg and Undine, and they continued the bridal preparations, secure in their invariable experience that, once ‘father’ had been convinced of the impossibility of evading their demands, he might be trusted to satisfy them by means with which his womenkind need not concern themselves. Mr Spragg, as he approached his office on the morning in question, felt reasonably sure of fulfilling these expectations; but he reflected that a few more such victories would mean disaster.

  He entered the vast marble vestibule of the Ararat Trust Building and walked toward the express elevator that was to carry him up to his office. At the door of the elevator a man turned to him, and he recognized Elmer Moffatt, who put out his hand with an easy gesture.

  Mr Spragg did not ignore the gesture: he did not even withhold his hand. In his code the cut, as a conscious sign of disapproval, did not exist. In the south, if you had a grudge against a man you tried to shoot him; in the west, you tried to do him in a mean turn in business; but in neither region was the cut among the social weapons of offence. Mr Spragg, therefore, seeing Moffatt in his path, extended a lifeless hand while he faced the young man scowlingly. Moffatt met the hand and the scowl with equal coolness.

  ‘Going up to your office? I was on my way there.’

  The elevator door rolled back, and Mr Spragg, entering it, found his companion at his side. They remained silent during the ascent to Mr Spragg’s threshold; but there the latter turned to inquire ironically of Moffatt: ‘Anything left to say?’

  Moffatt smiled. ‘Nothing left – no; I’m carrying a whole new line of goods.’

  Mr Spragg pondered the reply; then he opened the door and suffered Moffatt to follow him in. Behind an inner glazed enclosure, with its one window dimmed by a sooty perspective barred with chimneys, he seated himself at a dusty littered desk, and groped instinctively for the support of the scrap-basket. Moffatt, uninvited, dropped into the nearest chair, and Mr Spragg said, after another silence: ‘I’m pretty busy this morning.’

  ‘I know you are: that’s why I’m here,’ Moffatt serenely answered. He leaned back, crossing his legs, and twisting his small stiff moustache with a plump hand adorned by a cameo.

  ‘Fact is,’ he went on, ‘this is a coals-of-fire call. You think I owe you a grudge, and I’m going to show you I’m not that kind. I’m going to put you on to a good thing – oh, not because I’m so fond of you; just because it happens to hit my sense of a joke.’

  While Moffatt talked Mr Spragg took up the pile of letters on his desk and sat shuffling them like a pack of cards. He dealt them deliberately to two imaginary players; then he pushed them aside and drew out his watch.

  ‘All right – I carry one too,’ said the young man easily. ‘But you’ll find it’s time gained to hear what I’ve got to say.’

  Mr Spragg considered the vista of chimneys without speaking, and Moffatt continued: ‘I don’t suppose you care to hear the story of my life, so I won’t refer you to the back numbers. You used to say out in Apex that I spent too much time loafing round the bar of the Mealey House; that was one of the things you had against me. Well, maybe I did – but it taught me to talk, and to listen to the other fellows too. Just at present I’m one of Harmon B. Driscoll’s private secretaries, and some of that Mealey House loafing has come in more useful than any job I ever put my hand to. The old man happened to hear I knew something about the inside of the Eubaw deal, and took me on to have the information where he could get at it. I’ve given him good talk for his money; but I’ve done some listening too. Eubaw ain’t the only commodity the Driscolls deal in.’

  Mr Spragg restored his watch to his pocket and shifted his drowsy gaze from the window to his visitor’s face.

  ‘Yes,’ said Moffatt, as if in reply to the movement, ‘the Driscolls are getting busy out in Apex. Now they’ve got all the street railroads in their pocket they want the water-supply too – but you know that as well as I do. Fact is, they’ve got to have it; and there’s where you and I come in.’

  Mr Spragg thrust his hands in his waistcoat armholes and turned his eyes back to the window.

  ‘I’m out of that long ago,’ he said indifferently.

  ‘Sure,’ Moffatt acquiesced; ‘but you know what went on when you were in it.’

  ‘Well?’ said Mr Spragg, shifting one hand to the Masonic emblem on his watch-chain.

  ‘Well, Representative James J. Rolliver, who was in it with you, ain’t out of it yet. He’s the man the Driscolls are up against. What d’you know about him?’

  Mr Spragg twirled the emblem thoughtfully. ‘Driscoll tell you to come here?’

  Moffatt laughed. ‘No, sir – not by a good many miles.’

  Mr Spragg removed his feet from the scrap-basket and straightened himself in his chair.

  ‘Well – I didn’t either; good morning, Mr Moffatt.’

  The young man stared a moment, a humorous glint in his small black eyes; but he made no motion to leave his seat.

  ‘Undine’s to be married next week, isn’t she?’ he asked in a conversational tone.

  Mr Spragg’s face blackened and he swung about in his revolving chair.

  ‘You go to –’

  Moffatt raised a deprecat
ing hand. ‘Oh, you needn’t warn me off. I don’t want to be invited to the wedding. And I don’t want to forbid the banns.’

  There was a derisive sound in Mr Spragg’s throat.

  ‘But I do want to get out of Driscoll’s office,’ Moffatt imperturbably continued. ‘There’s no future there for a fellow like me. I see things big. That’s the reason Apex was too tight a fit for me. It’s only the little fellows that succeed in little places. New York’s my size – without a single alteration. I could prove it to you tomorrow if I could put my hand on fifty thousand dollars.’

  Mr Spragg did not repeat his gesture of dismissal: he was once more listening guardedly but intently. Moffatt saw it and continued.

  ‘And I could put my hand on double that sum – yes, sir, double – if you’d just step round with me to old Driscoll’s office before five p.m. See the connection, Mr Spragg?’

  The older man remained silent while his visitor hummed a bar or two of ‘In the Gloaming’; then he said: ‘You want me to tell Driscoll what I know about James J. Rolliver?’

  ‘I want you to tell the truth – I want you to stand for political purity in your native state. A man of your prominence owes it to the community, sir,’ cried Moffatt.

  Mr Spragg was still tormenting his Masonic emblem.

  ‘Rolliver and I always stood together,’ he said at last, with a tinge of reluctance.

  ‘Well, how much have you made out of it? Ain’t he always been ahead of the game?’

  ‘I can’t do it – I can’t do it,’ said Mr Spragg, bringing his clenched hand down on the desk, as if addressing an invisible throng of assailants.

  Moffatt rose without any evidence of disappointment in his ruddy countenance. ‘Well, so long,’ he said, moving toward the door. Near the threshold he paused to add carelessly: ‘Excuse my referring to a personal matter – but I understand Miss Spragg’s wedding takes place next Monday.’

  Mr Spragg was silent.

  ‘How’s that?’ Moffatt continued unabashed. ‘I saw in the papers the date was set for the end of June.’

  Mr Spragg rose heavily from his seat. ‘I presume my daughter has her reasons,’ he said, moving toward the door in Moffatt’s wake.

  ‘I guess she has – same as I have for wanting you to step round with me to old Driscoll’s. If Undine’s reasons are as good as mine –’

  ‘Stop right here, Elmer Moffatt!’ the older man broke out with lifted hand.

  Moffatt made a burlesque feint of evading a blow; then his face grew serious, and he moved close to Mr Spragg, whose arm had fallen to his side.

  ‘See here, I know Undine’s reasons. I’ve had a talk with her – didn’t she tell you? She don’t beat about the bush the way you do. She told me straight out what was bothering her. She wants the Marvells to think she’s right out of Kindergarten. “No goods sent out on approval from this counter.” And I see her point – I don’t mean to publish my meemo’rs. Only a deal’s a deal.’ He paused a moment, twisting his fingers about the heavy gold watch-chain that crossed his waistcoat. ‘Tell you what, Mr Spragg, I don’t bear malice – not against Undine, anyway – and if I could have afforded it I’d have been glad enough to oblige her and forget old times. But you didn’t hesitate to kick me when I was down and it’s taken me a day or two to get on my legs again after that kicking. I see my way now to get there and keep there; and there’s a kinder poetic justice in your being the man to help me up. If I can get hold of fifty thousand dollars within a day or so I don’t care who’s got the start of me. I’ve got a dead sure thing in sight, and you’re the only man that can get it for me. Now do you see where we’re coming out?’

  Mr Spragg, during this discourse, had remained motionless, his hands in his pockets, his jaws moving mechanically, as though he mumbled a toothpick under his beard. His sallow cheek had turned a shade paler, and his brows hung threateningly over his half-closed eyes. But there was no threat – there was scarcely more than a note of dull curiosity – in the voice with which he said: ‘You mean to talk?’

  Moffatt’s rosy face grew as hard as a steel safe. ‘I mean you to talk – to old Driscoll.’ He paused, and then added: ‘It’s a hundred thousand down, between us.’

  Mr Spragg once more consulted his watch. ‘I’ll see you again,’ he said with an effort.

  Moffatt struck one fist against the other. ‘No, sir – you won’t! You’ll only hear from me – through the Marvell family. Your news ain’t worth a dollar to Driscoll if he don’t get it today.’

  He was checked by the sound of steps in the outer office, and Mr Spragg’s stenographer appeared in the doorway.

  ‘It’s Mr Marvell,’ she announced; and Ralph Marvell, glowing with haste and happiness, stood between the two men, holding out his hand to Mr Spragg.

  ‘Am I awfully in the way, sir? Turn me out if I am – but first let me just say a word about this necklace I’ve ordered for Un –’

  He broke off, made aware by Mr Spragg’s glance of the presence of Elmer Moffatt, who, with unwonted discretion, had dropped back into the shadow of the door.

  Marvell turned on Moffatt a bright gaze full of the instinctive hospitality of youth; but Moffatt looked straight past him at Mr Spragg.

  The latter, as if in response to an imperceptible signal, mechanically pronounced his visitor’s name; and the two young men moved toward each other.

  ‘I beg your pardon most awfully – am I breaking up an important conference?’ Ralph asked as he shook hands.

  ‘Why, no – I guess we’re pretty nearly through. I’ll step outside and woo the blonde while you’re talking,’ Moffatt rejoined in the same key.

  ‘Thanks so much – I shan’t take two seconds.’ Ralph broke off to scrutinize him. ‘But haven’t we met before? It seems to me I’ve seen you – just lately –’

  Moffatt seemed about to answer, but his reply was checked by an abrupt movement on the part of Mr Spragg. There was a perceptible pause, during which Moffatt’s bright black glance rested questioningly on Ralph; then he looked again at the older man, and their eyes held each other for a silent moment.

  ‘Why, no – not as I’m aware of, Mr Marvell,’ Moffatt said, addressing himself amicably to Ralph. ‘Better late than never, though – and I hope to have the pleasure soon again.’

  He divided a nod between the two men, and passed into the outer office, where they heard him addressing the stenographer in a strain of exaggerated gallantry.

  BOOK II

  XI

  THE JULY sun enclosed in a ring of fire the ilex grove of a villa in the hills near Siena. Below, by the roadside the long yellow house seemed to waver and palpitate in the glare; but steep by steep, behind it, the cool ilex-dust mounted to the ledge where Ralph Marvell, stretched on his back in the grass, lay gazing up at a black reticulation of branches between which bits of sky gleamed with the hardness and brilliancy of blue enamel.

  Up there too the air was thick with heat; but compared with the white fire below it was a dim and tempered warmth, like that of the churches in which he and Undine sometimes took refuge at the height of the torrid days.

  Ralph loved the heavy Italian summer, as he had loved the light spring days leading up to it: the long line of dancing days that had drawn them on and on ever since they had left their ship at Naples four months earlier. Four months of beauty, changeful, inexhaustible, weaving itself about him in shapes of softness and strength; and beside him, hand in hand with him, embodying that spirit of shifting magic, the radiant creature through whose eyes he saw it. This was what their hastened marriage had blessed them with, giving them leisure, before summer came, to penetrate to remote folds of the southern mountains, to linger in the shade of Sicilian orange-groves, and finally, travelling by slow stages to the Adriatic, to reach the central hill-country where even in July they might hope for a breathable air.

  To Ralph the Sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating. The sun, treading the earth like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances, cru
shed out of it new colours. All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were white, but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars. Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield.

  As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt oneself a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie.

  He stared up at the pattern they made till his eyes ached with excess of light; then he changed his position and looked at his wife.

  Undine, near by, leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. Her beautiful back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk, and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier position. But her expression was serene, and Ralph, looking up at her through drowsy lids, thought her face had never been more exquisite.