The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  ‘Not this time, anyhow. We’re high and dry.’

  Something seemed to snap in Ralph’s head, and he sat down in the nearest chair. ‘Has the common stock dropped a lot?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to lean over to see it.’ Moffatt pressed his finger-tips together and added thoughtfully: ‘But it’s there all right. We’re bound to get our charter in the end.’

  ‘What do you call the end?’

  ‘Oh, before the Day of Judgement, sure: next year, I guess.’

  ‘Next year?’ Ralph flushed. ‘What earthly good will that do me?’

  ‘I don’t say it’s as pleasant as driving your best girl home by moonlight. But that’s how it is. And the stuff’s safe enough anyway – I’ve told you that right along.’

  ‘But you’ve told me all along I could count on a rise before August. You knew I had to have the money now.’

  ‘I knew you wanted to have the money now; and so did I, and several of my friends. I put you on to it because it was the only thing in sight likely to give you the return you wanted.’

  ‘You ought at least to have warned me of the risk!’

  ‘Risk? I don’t call it much of a risk to lie back in your chair and wait another few months for fifty thousand to drop into your lap. I tell you the thing’s as safe as a bank.’

  ‘How do I know it is? You’ve misled me about it from the first.’

  Moffatt’s face grew dark red to the forehead: for the first time in their acquaintance Ralph saw him on the verge of anger.

  ‘Well, if you get stuck so do I. I’m in it a good deal deeper than you. That’s about the best guarantee I can give; unless you won’t take my word for that either.’ To control himself Moffatt spoke with extreme deliberation, separating his syllables like a machine cutting something into even lengths.

  Ralph listened through a cloud of confusion; but he saw the madness of offending Moffatt, and tried to take a more conciliatory tone. ‘Of course I take your word for it. But I can’t – I simply can’t afford to lose …’

  ‘You ain’t going to lose: I don’t believe you’ll even have to put up any margin. It’s there safe enough, I tell you …’

  ‘Yes, yes; I understand. I’m sure you wouldn’t have advised me –’ Ralph’s tongue seemed swollen, and he had difficulty in bringing out the words. ‘Only, you see – I can’t wait; it’s not possible; and I want to know if there isn’t a way –’

  Moffatt looked at him with a sort of resigned compassion, as a doctor looks at a despairing mother who will not understand what he has tried to imply without uttering the word she dreads. Ralph understood the look, but hurried on.

  ‘You’ll think I’m mad, or an ass, to talk like this; but the fact is, I must have the money.’ He waited and drew a hard breath. ‘I must have it: that’s all. Perhaps I’d better tell you –’

  Moffatt, who had risen, as if assuming that the interview was over, sat down again and turned an attentive look on him. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, more humanly than he had hitherto spoken.

  ‘My boy … you spoke of him the other day … I’m awfully fond of him –’ Ralph broke off, deterred by the impossibility of confiding his feeling for Paul to this coarse-grained man with whom he hadn’t a sentiment in common.

  Moffatt was still looking at him. ‘I should say you would be! He’s as smart a little chap as I ever saw; and I guess he’s the kind that gets better every day.’

  Ralph had collected himself, and went on with sudden resolution: ‘Well, you see – when my wife and I separated, I never dreamed she’d want the boy: the question never came up. If it had, of course – but she’d left him with me when she went away two years before, and at the time of the divorce I was a fool … I didn’t take the proper steps …’

  ‘You mean she’s got sole custody?’

  Ralph made a sign of assent, and Moffatt pondered. ‘That’s bad – bad.’

  ‘And now I understand she’s going to marry again – and of course I can’t give up my son.’

  ‘She wants you to, eh?’

  Ralph again assented.

  Moffatt swung his chair about and leaned back in it, stretching out his plump legs and contemplating the tips of his varnished boots. He hummed a low tune behind inscrutable lips.

  ‘That’s what you want the money for?’ he finally raised his head to ask.

  The word came out of the depths of Ralph’s anguish: ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why you want it in such a hurry. I see.’ Moffatt reverted to the study of his boots. ‘It’s a lot of money.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the difficulty. And I … she …’

  Ralph’s tongue was again too thick for his mouth. ‘I’m afraid she won’t wait … or take less …’

  Moffatt, abandoning the boots, was scrutinizing him through half-shut lids. ‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘I don’t believe Undine Spragg’ll take a single cent less.’

  Ralph felt himself whiten. Was it insolence or ignorance that had prompted Moffatt’s speech? Nothing in his voice or face showed the sense of any shades of expression or of feeling: he seemed to apply to everything the measure of the same crude flippancy. But such considerations could not curb Ralph now. He said to himself ‘Keep your temper – keep your temper –’ and his anger suddenly boiled over.

  ‘Look here, Moffatt,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘the fact that I’ve been divorced from Mrs Marvell doesn’t authorize any one to take that tone to me in speaking of her.’

  Moffatt met the challenge with a calm stare under which there were dawning signs of surprise and interest. ‘That so? Well, if that’s the case I presume I ought to feel the same way: I’ve been divorced from her myself.’

  For an instant the words conveyed no meaning to Ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. ‘This man … this man …’ was the one fiery point in his darkened consciousness … ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he brought out.

  ‘Why, facts,’ said Moffatt, in a cool half-humorous voice. ‘You didn’t know? I understood from Mrs Marvell your folks had a prejudice against divorce, so I suppose she kept quiet about that early episode. The truth is,’ he continued amicably, ‘I wouldn’t have alluded to it now if you hadn’t taken rather a high tone with me about our little venture; but now it’s out I guess you may as well hear the whole story. It’s mighty wholesome for a man to have a round now and then with a few facts. Shall I go on?’

  Ralph had stood listening without a sign, but as Moffatt ended he made a slight motion of acquiescence. He did not otherwise change his attitude, except to grasp with one hand the back of the chair that Moffatt pushed toward him.

  ‘Rather stand? … Moffatt himself dropped back into his seat and took the pose of easy narrative. ‘Well, it was this way. Undine Spragg and I were made one at Opake, Nebraska, just nine years ago last month. My! She was a beauty then. Nothing much had happened to her before but being engaged for a year or two to a soft called Millard Binch; the same she passed on to Indiana Rolliver; and – well, I guess she liked the change. We didn’t have what you’d called a society wedding: no best man or bridesmaids or Voice that Breathed o’er Eden. Fact is, Pa and Ma didn’t know about it till it was over. But it was a marriage fast enough, as they found out when they tried to undo it. Trouble was, they caught on too soon; we only had a fortnight. Then they hauled Undine back to Apex, and – well, I hadn’t the cash or the pull to fight ’em. Uncle Abner was a pretty big man out there then; and he had James J. Rolliver behind him. I always know when I’m licked; and I was licked that time. So we unlooped the loop, and they fixed it up for me to make a trip to Alaska. Let me see – that was the year before they moved over to New York. Next time I saw Undine I sat alongside of her at the theatre the day your engagement was announced.’

  He still kept to his half-hu
morous minor key, as though he were in the first stages of an after-dinner speech; but as he went on his bodily presence, which hitherto had seemed to Ralph the mere average garment of vulgarity, began to loom, huge and portentous as some monster released from a magician’s bottle. His redness, his glossiness, his baldness, and the carefully brushed ring of hair encircling it; the square line of his shoulders, the too careful fit of his clothes, the prominent lustre of his scarf-pin, the growth of short black hair on his manicured hands, even the tiny cracks and crow’s-feet beginning to show in the hard close surface of his complexion: all these solid witnesses to his reality and his proximity pressed on Ralph with the mounting pang of physical nausea.

  ‘This man … this man …’ he couldn’t get beyond the thought: whichever way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the perspective … Ralph’s eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on the desk beside Moffatt’s hand. Faugh! That such a hand should have touched it!

  Suddenly he heard himself speaking. ‘Before my marriage – did you know they hadn’t told me?’

  ‘Why, I understood as much …’

  Ralph pushed on: ‘You knew it the day I met you in Mr Spragg’s office?’

  Moffatt considered a moment, as if the incident had escaped him. ‘Did we meet there?’ He seemed benevolently ready for enlightenment. But Ralph had been assailed by another memory; he recalled that Moffatt had dined one night in his house, that he and the man who now faced him had sat at the same table, their wife between them …

  He was seized with another dumb gust of fury; but it died out and left him face to face with the uselessness, the irrelevance of all the old attitudes of appropriation and defiance. He seemed to be stumbling about in his inherited prejudices like a modern man in medieval armour … Moffatt still sat at his desk, unmoved and apparently uncomprehending. ‘He doesn’t even know what I’m feeling,’ flashed through Ralph; and the whole archaic structure of his rites and sanctions tumbled down about him.

  Through the noise of the crash he heard Moffatt’s voice going on without perceptible change of tone: ‘About that other matter now … you can’t feel any meaner about it than I do, I can tell you that … but all we’ve got to do is to sit tight …’

  Ralph turned from the voice, and found himself outside on the landing, and then in the street below.

  XXXVI

  HE STOOD at the corner of Wall Street, looking up and down its hot summer perspective. He noticed the swirls of dust in the cracks of the pavement, the rubbish in the gutters, the ceaseless stream of perspiring faces that poured by under tilted hats.

  He found himself, next, slipping northward between the glazed walls of the Subway, another languid crowd in the seats about him and the nasal yelp of the stations ringing through the car like some repeated ritual wail. The blindness within him seemed to have intensified his physical perceptions, his sensitiveness to the heat, the noise, the smells of the dishevelled midsummer city; but combined with the acuter perception of these offences was a complete indifference to them, as though he were some vivisected animal deprived of the power of discrimination.

  Now he had turned into Waverly Place, and was walking westward toward Washington Square. At the corner he pulled himself up, saying half-aloud: ‘The office – I ought to be at the office.’ He drew out his watch and stared at it blankly. What the devil had he taken it out for? He had to go through a laborious process of readjustment to find out what it had to say … Twelve o’clock … Should he turn back to the office? It seemed easier to cross the square, go up the steps of the old house and slip his key into the door …

  The house was empty. His mother, a few days previously, had departed with Mr Dagonet for their usual two months on the Maine coast, where Ralph was to join them with his boy … The blinds were all drawn down, and the freshness and silence of the marble-paved hall laid soothing hands on him … He said to himself: ‘I’ll jump into a cab presently, and go and lunch at the club –’ He laid down his hat and stick and climbed the carpetless stairs to his room. When he entered it he had the shock of feeling himself in a strange place: it did not seem like anything he had ever seen before. Then, one by one, all the old stale usual things in it confronted him, and he longed with a sick intensity to be in a place that was really strange.

  ‘How on earth can I go on living here?’ he wondered.

  A careless servant had left the outer shutters open, and the sun was beating on the window-panes. Ralph pushed open the windows, shut the shutters, and wandered toward his armchair. Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead: the temperature of the room reminded him of the heat under the ilexes of the Sienese villa where he and Undine had sat through a long July afternoon. He saw her before him, leaning against the tree-trunk in her white dress, limpid and inscrutable … ‘We were made one at Opake, Nebraska …’ Had she been thinking of it that afternoon at Siena, he wondered? Did she ever think of it at all? … It was she who had asked Moffatt to dine. She had said: ‘Father brought him home one day at Apex … I don’t remember ever having seen him since’ – and the man she spoke of had had her in his arms … and perhaps it was really all she remembered!

  She had lied to him – lied to him from the first … there hadn’t been a moment when she hadn’t lied to him, deliberately, ingeniously and inventively. As he thought of it, there came to him, for the first time in months, that overwhelming sense of her physical nearness which had once so haunted and tortured him. Her freshness, her fragrance, the luminous haze of her youth, filled the room with a mocking glory; and he dropped his head on his hands to shut it out …

  The vision was swept away by another wave of hurrying thoughts. He felt it was intensely important that he should keep the thread of every one of them, that they all represented things to be said or done, or guarded against; and his mind, with the unwondering versatility and tireless haste of the dreamer’s brain, seemed to be pursuing them all simultaneously. Then they became as unreal and meaningless as the red specks dancing behind the lids against which he had pressed his fists clenched, and he had the feeling that if he opened his eyes they would vanish, and the familiar daylight look in on him …

  A knock disturbed him. The old parlour-maid who was always left in charge of the house had come up to ask if he wasn’t well, and if there was anything she could do for him. He told her no … he was perfectly well … or, rather, no, he wasn’t … he supposed it must be the heat; and he began to scold her for having forgotten to close the shutters.

  It wasn’t her fault, it appeared, but Eliza’s: her tone implied that he knew what one had to expect of Eliza … and wouldn’t he go down to the nice cool shady dining-room, and let her make him an iced drink and a few sandwiches?

  ‘I’ve always told Mrs Marvell I couldn’t turn my back for a second but what Eliza’d find a way to make trouble,’ the old woman continued, evidently glad of the chance to air a perennial grievance. ‘It’s not only the things she forgets to do,’ she added significantly; and it dawned on Ralph that she was making an appeal to him, expecting him to take sides with her in the chronic conflict between herself and Eliza. He said to himself that perhaps she was right … that perhaps there was something he ought to do … that his mother was old, and didn’t always see things; and for a while his mind revolved this problem with feverish intensity …

  ‘Then you’ll come down, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The door closed, and he heard her heavy heels along the passage.

  ‘But the money – where’s the money to come from?’ The question sprang out from some denser fold of the fog in his brain. The money – how on earth was he to pay it back? How could he have wasted his time in thinking of anything else while that central difficulty existed?

  ‘But I can’t … I can’t … it’s gone … and even if it weren’t …’

  He dropped back in his chair and took his head between his hands. He had forgotten what he wanted the money for. He made a great effort to regain
hold of the idea, but all the whirring, shuttling, flying had abruptly ceased in his brain, and he sat with his eyes shut, staring straight into darkness …

  The clock struck, and he remembered that he had said he would go down to the dining-room. ‘If I don’t she’ll come up –’ He raised his head and sat listening for the sound of the old woman’s step: it seemed to him perfectly intolerable that any one should cross the threshold of the room again.

  ‘Why can’t they leave me alone?’ he groaned … At length through the silence of the empty house, he fancied he heard a door opening and closing far below; and he said to himself: ‘She’s coming.’

  He got to his feet and went to the door. He didn’t feel anything now except the insane dread of hearing the woman’s steps come nearer. He bolted the door and stood looking about the room. For a moment he was conscious of seeing it in every detail with a distinctness he had never before known; then everything in it vanished but the single narrow panel of a drawer under one of the bookcases. He went up to the drawer, knelt down and slipped his hand into it.

  As he raised himself he listened again, and this time he distinctly heard the old servant’s steps on the stairs. He passed his left hand over the side of his head, and down the curve of the skull behind the ear. He said to himself: ‘My wife … this will make it all right for her …’ and a last flash of irony twitched through him. Then he felt again, more deliberately, for the spot he wanted, and put the muzzle of his revolver against it.

  BOOK V

  XXXVII

  IN A drawing-room hung with portraits of high-nosed personages in perukes and orders, a circle of ladies and gentlemen, looking not unlike everyday versions of the official figures above their heads, sat examining with friendly interest a little boy in mourning.

  The boy was slim, fair and shy, and his small black figure, islanded in the middle of the wide lustrous floor, looked curiously lonely and remote. This effect of remoteness seemed to strike his mother as something intentional, and almost naughty, for after having launched him from the door, and waited to judge of the impression he produced, she came forward and, giving him a slight push, said impatiently: ‘Paul! Why don’t you go and kiss your new granny?’