The Custom of the Country Part 27

Mr. Spragg, by a slight lift of his brooding brows, seemed to convey a deep if unspoken response.

"Well, I'd let her do it this time--I'd let her do it," he said as he turned down the steps of the Subway.

Ralph was surprised, for he had gathered from some frightened references of Mrs. Spragg's that Undine's parents had wind of her European plan and were strongly opposed to it. He concluded that Mr. Spragg had long since measured the extent of profitable resistance, and knew just when it became vain to hold out against his daughter or advise others to do so.

Ralph, for his own part, had no inclination to resist. As he left Moffatt's office his inmost feeling was one of relief. He had reached the point of recognizing that it was best for both that his wife should go. When she returned perhaps their lives would readjust themselves--but for the moment he longed for some kind of benumbing influence, something that should give relief to the dull daily ache of feeling her so near and yet so inaccessible. Certainly there were more urgent uses for their brilliant wind-fall: heavy arrears of household debts had to be met, and the summer would bring its own burden. But perhaps another stroke of luck might befall him: he was getting to have the drifting dependence on "luck" of the man conscious of his inability to direct his life. And meanwhile it seemed easier to let Undine have what she wanted.

Undine, on the whole, behaved with discretion. She received the good news languidly and showed no unseemly haste to profit by it. But it was as hard to hide the light in her eyes as to dissemble the fact that she had not only thought out every detail of the trip in advance, but had decided exactly how her husband and son were to be disposed of in her absence. Her suggestion that Ralph should take Paul to his grandparents, and that the West End Avenue house should be let for the summer, was too practical not to be acted on; and Ralph found she had already put her hand on the Harry Lips...o...b.., who, after three years of neglect, were to be dragged back to favour and made to feel, as the first step in their reinstatement, the necessity of hiring for the summer months a cool airy house on the West Side. On her return from Europe, Undine explained, she would of course go straight to Ralph and the boy in the Adirondacks; and it seemed a foolish extravagance to let the house stand empty when the Lips...o...b.. were so eager to take it.

As the day of departure approached it became harder for her to temper her beams; but her pleasure showed itself so amiably that Ralph began to think she might, after all, miss the boy and himself more than she imagined. She was tenderly preoccupied with Paul's welfare, and, to prepare for his translation to his grandparents' she gave the household in Washington Square more of her time than she had accorded it since her marriage. She explained that she wanted Paul to grow used to his new surroundings; and with that object she took him frequently to his grandmother's, and won her way into old Mr. Dagonet's sympathies by her devotion to the child and her pretty way of joining in his games.

Undine was not consciously acting a part: this new phase was as natural to her as the other. In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.

These thoughts were in her mind when, a day or two before sailing, she came out of the Washington Square house with her boy. It was a late spring afternoon, and she and Paul had lingered on till long past the hour sacred to his grandfather's nap. Now, as she came out into the square she saw that, however well Mr. Dagonet had borne their protracted romp, it had left his playmate flushed and sleepy; and she lifted Paul in her arms to carry him to the nearest cab-stand.

As she raised herself she saw a thick-set figure approaching her across the square; and a moment later she was shaking hands with Elmer Moffatt.

In the bright spring air he looked seasonably glossy and prosperous; and she noticed that he wore a bunch of violets in his b.u.t.tonhole. His small black eyes twinkled with approval as they rested on her, and Undine reflected that, with Paul's arms about her neck, and his little flushed face against her own, she must present a not unpleasing image of young motherhood.

"That the heir apparent?" Moffatt asked; adding "Happy to make your acquaintance, sir," as the boy, at Undine's bidding, held out a fist sticky with sugarplums.

"He's been spending the afternoon with his grandfather, and they played so hard that he's sleepy," she explained. Little Paul, at that stage in his career, had a peculiar grace of wide-gazing deep-lashed eyes and arched cherubic lips, and Undine saw that Moffatt was not insensible to the picture she and her son composed. She did not dislike his admiration, for she no longer felt any shrinking from him--she would even have been glad to thank him for the service he had done her husband if she had known how to allude to it without awkwardness. Moffatt seemed equally pleased at the meeting, and they looked at each other almost intimately over Paul's tumbled curls.

"He's a mighty fine fellow and no mistake--but isn't he rather an armful for you?" Moffatt asked, his eyes lingering with real kindliness on the child's face.

"Oh, we haven't far to go. I'll pick up a cab at the corner."

"Well, let me carry him that far anyhow," said Moffatt.

Undine was glad to be relieved of her burden, for she was unused to the child's weight, and disliked to feel that her skirt was dragging on the pavement. "Go to the gentleman, Pauly--he'll carry you better than mother," she said.

The little boy's first movement was one of recoil from the ruddy sharp-eyed countenance that was so unlike his father's delicate face; but he was an obedient child, and after a moment's hesitation he wound his arms trustfully about the red gentleman's neck.

"That's a good fellow--sit tight and I'll give you a ride," Moffatt cried, hoisting the boy to his shoulder.

Paul was not used to being perched at such a height, and his nature was hospitable to new impressions. "Oh, I like it up here--you're higher than father!" he exclaimed; and Moffatt hugged him with a laugh.

"It must feel mighty good to come uptown to a fellow like you in the evenings," he said, addressing the child but looking at Undine, who also laughed a little.

"Oh, they're a dreadful nuisance, you know; but Paul's a very good boy."

"I wonder if he knows what a friend I've been to him lately," Moffatt went on, as they turned into Fifth Avenue.

Undine smiled: she was glad he should have given her an opening. "He shall be told as soon as he's old enough to thank you. I'm so glad you came to Ralph about that business."

"Oh I gave him a leg up, and I guess he's given me one too. Queer the way things come round--he's fairly put me in the way of a fresh start."

Their eyes met in a silence which Undine was the first to break. "It's been awfully nice of you to do what you've done--right along. And this last thing has made a lot of difference to us."

"Well, I'm glad you feel that way. I never wanted to be anything but 'nice,' as you call it." Moffatt paused a moment and then added: "If you're less scared of me than your father is I'd be glad to call round and see you once in a while."

The quick blood rushed to her cheeks. There was nothing challenging, demanding in his tone--she guessed at once that if he made the request it was simply for the pleasure of being with her, and she liked the magnanimity implied. Nevertheless she was not sorry to have to answer: "Of course I'll always be glad to see you--only, as it happens, I'm just sailing for Europe."

"For Europe?" The word brought Moffatt to a stand so abruptly that little Paul lurched on his shoulder.

"For Europe?" he repeated. "Why, I thought you said the other evening you expected to stay on in town till July. Didn't you think of going to the Adirondacks?"

Flattered by his evident disappointment, she became high and careless in her triumph. "Oh, yes,--but that's all changed. Ralph and the boy are going, but I sail on Sat.u.r.day to join some friends in Paris--and later I may do some motoring in Switzerland an Italy."

She laughed a little in the mere enjoyment of putting her plans into words and Moffatt laughed too, but with an edge of sarcasm.

"I see--I see: everything's changed, as you say, and your husband can blow you off to the trip. Well, I hope you'll have a first-cla.s.s time."

Their glances crossed again, and something in his cool scrutiny impelled Undine to say, with a burst of candour: "If I do, you know, I shall owe it all to you!"

"Well, I always told you I meant to act white by you," he answered.

They walked on in silence, and presently he began again in his usual joking strain: "See what one of the Apex girls has been up to?"

Apex was too remote for her to understand the reference, and he went on: "Why, Millard Binch's wife--Indiana Frusk that was. Didn't you see in the papers that Indiana'd fixed it up with James J. Rolliver to marry her? They say it was easy enough squaring Millard Binch--you'd know it WOULD be--but it cost Roliver near a million to mislay Mrs. R. and the children. Well, Indiana's pulled it off, anyhow; she always WAS a bright girl. But she never came up to you."

"Oh--" she stammered with a laugh, astonished and agitated by his news.

Indiana Frusk and Rolliver! It showed how easily the thing could be done. If only her father had listened to her! If a girl like Indiana Frusk could gain her end so easily, what might not Undine have accomplished? She knew Moffatt was right in saying that Indiana had never come up to her...She wondered how the marriage would strike Van Degen...

She signalled to a cab and they walked toward it without speaking.

Undine was recalling with intensity that one of Indiana's shoulders was higher than the other, and that people in Apex had thought her lucky to catch Millard Binch, the druggist's clerk, when Undine herself had cast him off after a lingering engagement. And now Indiana Frusk was to be Mrs. James J. Rolliver!

Undine got into the cab and bent forward to take little Paul.

Moffatt lowered his charge with exaggerated care, and a "Steady there, steady," that made the child laugh; then, stooping over, he put a kiss on Paul's lips before handing him over to his mother.

XIX

"The Parisian Diamond Company--Anglo-American branch."

Charles Bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the Paris season, in a corner of the great Nouveau Luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to resolve his impressions of the scene into the phrases of a letter to his old friend Mrs. Henley Fairford.

The long habit of unwritten communion with this lady--in no way conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged--usually caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. And who but Mrs. Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested?

The dining-room of the Nouveau Luxe was at its fullest, and, having contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that Bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the close-packed tables. He had come half an hour before the time he had named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed amus.e.m.e.nt of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes.

During some forty years' perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special t.i.tillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe: the same sense of putting his hand on human nature's pa.s.sion for the fact.i.tious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation.

As he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising tide of arrival--for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not--he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom "society," with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new cla.s.s of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence.

With this thought in his mind he looked up to greet his guest. The Comte Raymond de Ch.e.l.les, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as he seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene: "Il n'y a pas a dire, my dear Bowen, it's charming and sympathetic and original--we owe America a debt of grat.i.tude for inventing it!"

Bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction: they were the very words to complete his thought.