The Custom of the Country Read online

  ‘That’s a fact. And you went on being one a good while afterward. The Apex Eagle always headlined you “The child-bride” –’

  ‘I can’t see what’s the use – now –’

  ‘That ruled out of court too? See here, Undine – what can we talk about? I understood that was what we were here for.’

  ‘Of course.’ She made an effort at recovery. ‘I only meant to say – what’s the use of raking up things that are over?’

  ‘Rake up? That’s the idea, is it? Was that why you tried to cut me last night?’

  ‘I – oh, Elmer! I didn’t mean to; only, you see, I’m engaged.’

  ‘Oh, I saw that fast enough. I’d have seen it even if I didn’t read the papers.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘He was feeling pretty good, sitting there alongside of you, wasn’t he? I don’t wonder he was. I remember. But I don’t see that that was a reason for cold-shouldering me. I’m a respectable member of society now – I’m one of Harmon B. Driscoll’s private secretaries.’ He brought out the fact with mock solemnity.

  But to Undine, though undoubtedly impressive, the statement did not immediately present itself as a subject for pleasantry.

  ‘Elmer Moffatt – you are?’

  He laughed again. ‘Guess you’d have remembered me last night if you’d known it.’

  She was following her own train of thought with a look of pale intensity. ‘You’re living in New York, then – you’re going to live here right along?’

  ‘Well, it looks that way; as long as I can hang on to this job. Great men always gravitate to the metropolis. And I gravitated here just as Uncle Harmon B. was looking round for somebody who could give him an inside tip on the Eubaw Mine deal – you know the Driscolls are pretty deep in Eubaw. I happened to go out there after our little unpleasantness at Apex, and it was just the time the deal went through. So in one way your folks did me a good turn when they made Apex too hot for me: funny to think of, ain’t it?’

  Undine, recovering herself, held out her hand impulsively.

  ‘I’m real glad of it – I mean I’m real glad you’ve had such a stroke of luck!’

  ‘Much obliged,’ he returned. ‘By the way, you might mention the fact to Abner E. Spragg next time you run across him.’

  ‘Father’ll be real glad too, Elmer.’ She hesitated, and then went on: ‘You must see now that it was natural father and mother should have felt the way they did –’

  ‘Oh, the only thing that struck me as unnatural was their making you feel so too. But I’m free to admit I wasn’t a promising case in those days.’ His glance played over her for a moment. ‘Say, Undine – it was good while it lasted, though, wasn’t it?’

  She shrank back with a burning face and eyes of misery.

  ‘Why, what’s the matter? That ruled out too? Oh, all right. Look at here, Undine, suppose you let me know what you are here to talk about, anyhow.’

  She cast a helpless glance down the windings of the wooded glen in which they had halted.

  ‘Just to ask you – to beg you – not to say anything of this kind again – ever –’

  ‘Anything about you and me?’

  She nodded mutely.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong? Anybody been saying anything against me?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s not that!’

  ‘What on earth is it, then – except that you’re ashamed of me, one way or another?’ She made no answer, and he stood digging the tip of his walking-stick into a fissure of the asphalt. At length he went on in a tone that showed a first faint trace of irritation: ‘I don’t want to break into your gilt-edged crowd, if it’s that you’re scared of.’

  His tone seemed to increase her distress. ‘No, no – you don’t understand. All I want is that nothing shall be known.’

  ‘Yes; but why? It was all straight enough, if you come to that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter … whether it was straight … or … not …’ He interpolated a whistle which made her add: ‘What I mean is that out here in the East they don’t even like it if a girl’s been engaged before.’

  This last strain on his credulity wrung a laugh from Moffatt. ‘Gee! How’d they expect her fair young life to pass? Playing “Holy City” on the melodeon, and knitting tidies for church fairs?’

  ‘Girls are looked after here. It’s all different. Their mothers go round with them.’

  This increased her companion’s hilarity and he glanced about him with a pretence of compunction. ‘Excuse me! I ought to have remembered. Where’s your chaperon, Miss Spragg?’ He crooked his arm with mock ceremony. ‘Allow me to escort you to the bewfay. You see I’m on to the New York style myself.’

  A sigh of discouragement escaped her. ‘Elmer – if you really believe I never wanted to act mean to you, don’t you act mean to me now!’

  ‘Act mean?’ He grew serious again and moved nearer to her.

  ‘What is it you want, Undine? Why can’t you say it right out?’

  ‘What I told you. I don’t want Ralph Marvell – or any of them – to know anything. If any of his folks found out, they’d never let him marry me – never! And he wouldn’t want to: he’d be so horrified. And it would kill me, Elmer – it would just kill me!’

  She pressed close to him, forgetful of her new reserves and repugnances, and impelled by the passionate absorbing desire to wring from him some definite pledge of safety.

  ‘Oh, Elmer, if you ever liked me, help me now, and I’ll help you if I get the chance!’

  He had recovered his coolness as hers forsook her, and stood his ground steadily, though her entreating hands, her glowing face, were near enough to have shaken less sturdy nerves.

  ‘That so, Puss? You just ask me to pass the sponge over Elmer Moffatt of Apex City? Cut the gentleman when we meet? That the size of it?’

  ‘Oh, Elmer, it’s my first chance – I can’t lose it!’ she broke out, sobbing.

  ‘Nonsense, child! Of course you shan’t. Here, look up, Undine – why, I never saw you cry before. Don’t you be afraid of me – I ain’t going to interrupt the wedding march.’ He began to whistle a bar of Lohengrin. ‘I only just want one little promise in return.’

  She threw a startled look at him and he added reassuringly: ‘Oh, don’t mistake me. I don’t want to butt into your set – not for social purposes, anyhow; but if ever it should come handy to know any of ’em in a business way, would you fix it up for me – after you’re married?’

  Their eyes met, and she remained silent for a tremulous moment or two; then she held out her hand. ‘Afterward – yes. I promise. And you promise, Elmer?’

  ‘Oh, to have and to hold!’ he sang out, swinging about to follow her as she hurriedly began to retrace her steps.

  The March twilight had fallen, and the Stentorian façade was all aglow, when Undine regained its monumental threshold. She slipped through the marble vestibule and soared skyward in the mirror-lined lift, hardly conscious of the direction she was taking. What she wanted was solitude, and the time to put some order into her thoughts; and she hoped to steal into her room without meeting her mother. Through her thick veil the clusters of lights in the Spragg drawing-room dilated and flowed together in a yellow blur, from which, as she entered, a figure detached itself; and with a start of annoyance she saw Ralph Marvell rise from the perusal of the ‘fiction number’ of a magazine which had replaced The Hound of the Baskervilles on the onyx table.

  ‘Yes; you told me not to come – and here I am.’ He lifted her hand to his lips as his eyes tried to find hers through the veil.

  She drew back with a nervous gesture. ‘I told you I’d be awfully late.’

  ‘I know – trying on! And you’re horribly tired, and wishing with all your might I wasn’t here.’

  ‘I’m not so sure I’m not!’ she rejoined, trying to hide her vexation in a smile.

  ‘What a tragic little voice! You really are done up. I couldn’t help dropping in for a minute; but of course if you say so I’ll be off.’ She was removing her lo
ng gloves, and he took her hands and drew her close. ‘Only take off your veil, and let me see you.’

  A quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her hands.

  ‘Please don’t tease. I never could bear it,’ she stammered, drawing away.

  ‘Till tomorrow, then; that is, if the dress-makers permit.’

  She forced a laugh. ‘If I showed myself now you might not come back tomorrow. I look perfectly hideous – it was so hot and they kept me so long.’

  ‘All to make yourself more beautiful for a man who’s blind with your beauty already?’

  The words made her smile, and moving nearer she bent her head and stood still while he undid her veil. As he put it back their lips met, and his look of passionate tenderness was incense to her.

  But the next moment his expression passed from worship to concern. ‘Dear! Why, what’s the matter? You’ve been crying!’

  She put both hands to her hat in the instinctive effort to hide her face. His persistence was as irritating as her mother’s.

  ‘I told you it was frightfully hot – and all my things were horrid; and it made me so cross and nervous!’ She turned to the looking-glass with a feint of smoothing her hair.

  Marvell laid his hand on her arm. ‘I can’t bear to see you so done up. Why can’t we be married tomorrow, and escape all these ridiculous preparations? I shall hate your fine clothes if they’re going to make you so miserable.’

  She dropped her hands, and swept about on him, her face lit up by a new idea. He was extraordinarily handsome and appealing, and her heart began to beat faster.

  ‘I hate it all too! I wish we could be married right away!’

  Marvell caught her to him joyously. ‘Dearest – dearest! Don’t, if you don’t mean it! The thought’s too glorious!’

  Undine lingered in his arms, not with any intent of tenderness, but as if too deeply lost in a new train of thought to be conscious of his hold.

  ‘I suppose most of the things could be got ready sooner – if I said they must,’ she brooded, with a fixed gaze that travelled past him. ‘And the rest – why shouldn’t the rest be sent over to Europe after us? I want to go straight off with you, away from everything – ever so far away, where there’ll be nobody but you and me alone!’ She had a flash of illumination which made her turn her lips to his.

  ‘Oh, my darling – my darling!’ Marvell whispered.

  X

  MR AND Mrs Spragg were both given to such long periods of ruminating apathy that the student of inheritance might have wondered whence Undine derived her overflowing activity. The answer would have been obtained by observing her father’s business life. From the moment he set foot in Wall Street Mr Spragg became another man. Physically the change revealed itself only by the subtlest signs. As he steered his way to his office through the jostling crowd of William Street his relaxed muscles did not grow more taut or his lounging gait less desultory. His shoulders were hollowed by the usual droop, and his rusty black waistcoat showed the same creased concavity at the waist, the same flabby prominence below. It was only in his face that the difference was perceptible, though even here it rather lurked behind the features than openly modified them: showing itself now and then in the cautious glint of half-closed eyes, the forward thrust of black brows, or a tightening of the lax lines of the mouth – as the gleam of a night-watchman’s light might flash across the darkness of a shuttered house-front.

  The shutters were more tightly barred than usual, when, on a morning some two weeks later than the date of the incidents last recorded, Mr Spragg approached the steel and concrete tower in which his office occupied a lofty pigeonhole. Events had moved rapidly and somewhat surprisingly in the interval, and Mr Spragg had already accustomed himself to the fact that his daughter was to be married within the week, instead of awaiting the traditional post-Lenten date. Conventionally the change meant little to him; but on the practical side it presented unforeseen difficulties. Mr Spragg had learned within the last weeks that a New York marriage involved material obligations unknown to Apex. Marvell, indeed, had been loftily careless of such questions; but his grandfather, on the announcement of the engagement, had called on Mr Spragg and put before him, with polished precision, the young man’s financial situation.

  Mr Spragg, at the moment, had been inclined to deal with his visitor in a spirit of indulgent irony. As he leaned back in his revolving chair, with feet adroitly balanced against a tilted scrap-basket, his air of relaxed power made Mr Dagonet’s venerable elegance seem as harmless as that of an ivory jack-straw – and his first replies to his visitor were made with the mildness of a kindly giant.

  ‘Ralph don’t make a living out of the law, you say? No, it didn’t strike me he’d be likely to, from the talks I’ve had with him. Fact is, the law’s a business that wants –’ Mr Spragg broke off, checked by a protest from Mr Dagonet. ‘Oh, a profession, you call it? It ain’t a business?’ His smile grew more indulgent as this novel distinction dawned on him. ‘Why, I guess that’s the whole trouble with Ralph. Nobody expects to make money in a profession; and if you’ve taught him to regard the law that way, he’d better go right into cooking-stoves and done with it.’

  Mr Dagonet, within a narrower range, had his own play of humour; and it met Mr Spragg’s with a leap. ‘It’s because I knew he would manage to make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that I saved him from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law.’

  The retort drew a grunt of amusement from Mr Spragg; and the eyes of the two men met in unexpected understanding.

  ‘That so? What can he do, then?’ the future father-in-law inquired.

  ‘He can write poetry – at least he tells me he can.’ Mr Dagonet hesitated, as if aware of the inadequacy of the alternative, and then added: ‘And he can count on three thousand a year from me.’

  Mr Spragg tilted himself farther back without disturbing his subtly calculated relation to the scrap-basket.

  ‘Does it cost anything like that to print his poetry?’

  Mr Dagonet smiled again: he was clearly enjoying his visit. ‘Dear, no – he doesn’t go in for “luxe” editions. And now and then he gets ten dollars from a magazine.’

  Mr Spragg mused. ‘Wasn’t he ever taught to work?’

  ‘No; I really couldn’t have afforded that.’

  ‘I see. Then they’ve got to live on two hundred and fifty dollars a month.’

  Mr Dagonet remained pleasantly unmoved. ‘Does it cost anything like that to buy your daughter’s dresses?’

  A subterranean chuckle agitated the lower folds of Mr Spragg’s waistcoat.

  ‘I might put him in the way of something – I guess he’s smart enough.’

  Mr Dagonet made a gesture of friendly warning. ‘It will pay us both in the end to keep him out of business,’ he said, rising as if to show that his mission was accomplished.

  The results of this friendly conference had been more serious than Mr Spragg could have foreseen – and the victory remained with his antagonist. It had not entered into Mr Spragg’s calculations that he would have to give his daughter any fixed income on her marriage. He meant that she should have the ‘handsomest’ wedding the New York press had ever celebrated, and her mother’s fancy was already afloat on a sea of luxuries – a motor, a Fifth Avenue house, and a tiara that should out-blaze Mrs Van Degen’s; but these were movable benefits, to be conferred whenever Mr Spragg happened to be ‘on the right side’ of the market. It was a different matter to be called on, at such short notice, to bridge the gap between young Marvell’s allowance and Undine’s requirements; and her father’s immediate conclusion was that the engagement had better be broken off. Such scissions were almost painless in Apex, and he had fancied it would be easy, by an appeal to the girl’s pride, to make her see that she owed it to herself to do better.

  ‘You’d better wait awhile and look round again,’ was the way he had put it to her at the opening of the talk of which, even now, he could not
recall the close without a tremor.

  Undine, when she took his meaning, had been terrible. Everything had gone down before her, as towns and villages went down before one of the tornadoes of her native state. Wait awhile? Look round? Did he suppose she was marrying for money? Didn’t he see it was all a question, now and here, of the kind of people she wanted to ‘go with’? Did he want to throw her straight back into the Lipscomb set, to have her marry a dentist and live in a West Side flat? Why hadn’t they stayed in Apex, if that was all he thought she was fit for? She might as well have married Millard Binch, instead of handing him over to Indiana Frusk! Couldn’t her father understand that nice girls, in New York, didn’t regard getting married like going on a buggy-ride? It was enough to ruin a girl’s chances if she broke her engagement to a man in Ralph Marvell’s set. All kinds of spiteful things would be said about her, and she would never be able to go with the right people again. They had better go back to Apex right off – it was they and not she who had wanted to leave Apex, anyhow – she could call her mother to witness it. She had always, when it came to that, done what her father and mother wanted, but she’d given up trying to make out what they were after, unless it was to make her miserable; and if that was it, hadn’t they had enough of it by this time? She had, anyhow. But after this she meant to lead her own life; and they needn’t ask her where she was going, or what she meant to do, because this time she’d die before she told them – and they’d made life so hateful to her that she only wished she was dead already.

  Mr Spragg heard her out in silence, pulling at his beard with one sallow wrinkled hand, while the other dragged down the armhole of his waistcoat. Suddenly he looked up and said: ‘Ain’t you in love with the fellow, Undie?’

  The girl glared back at him, her splendid brows beetling like an Amazon’s. ‘Do you think I’d care a cent for all the rest of it if I wasn’t?’

  ‘Well, if you are, you and he won’t mind beginning in a small way.’

  Her look poured contempt on his ignorance. ‘Do you s’pose I’d drag him down?’ With a magnificent gesture she tore Marvell’s ring from her finger. ‘I’ll send this back this minute. I’ll tell him I thought he was a rich man, and now I see I’m mistaken –’ She burst into shattering sobs, rocking her beautiful body back and forward in all the abandonment of young grief; and her father stood over her, stroking her shoulder and saying helplessly: ‘I’ll see what I can do, Undine –’