The Custom of the Country (32 page)

Ralph suspected that the constraint shown by his mother
and sister was partly due to their having but a dim and confused view of what had happened. In their vocabulary the word ‘divorce’ was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no lady-like hand would care to lift. They had not reached the point of differentiating divorces but classed them indistinctively as disgraceful incidents, in which the woman was always to blame, but the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably contaminated. The time involved in the ‘proceedings’ was viewed as a penitential season during which it behoved the family of the persons concerned to behave as if they were dead; yet any open allusion to the reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the height of indelicacy.

Mr Dagonet’s notion of the case was almost as remote from reality. All he asked was that his grandson should ‘thrash’ somebody, and he could not be made to understand that the modern drama of divorce is sometimes cast without a Lovelace.

‘You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when Eve picked the apple. You say your wife was discontented? No woman ever knows she’s discontented till some man tells her so. My God! I’ve seen smash-ups before now; but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership. Divorce without a lover? Why, it’s – it’s as unnatural as getting drunk on lemonade.’

After this first explosion Mr Dagonet also became silent; and Ralph perceived that what annoyed him most was the fact of the ‘scandal’ not being one in any gentlemanly sense of the word. It was like some nasty business mess, about which Mr Dagonet couldn’t pretend to have an opinion, since such things didn’t happen to men of his kind. That such a thing should have happened to his only grandson was probably the bitterest experience of his pleasantly uneventful life; and it added a touch of irony to Ralph’s unhappiness to know how little, in the whole affair, he was cutting the figure Mr Dagonet expected him to cut.

At first he had chafed under the taciturnity surrounding
him: had passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his despair. Then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence; and the next stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. There were thoughts and thoughts: they bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery, they stole on him in the darkness of night, they blotted out the light of day; but when it came to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it. One more white and sun-touched glory had gone from his sky; but there seemed no way of connecting that with such practical issues as his being called on to decide whether Paul was to be put in knickerbockers or trousers, and whether he should go back to Washington Square for the winter or hire a small house for himself and his son.

The latter question was ultimately decided by his remaining under his grandfather’s roof. November found him back in the office again, in fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming over his lacerated soul. There had been a hard minute to live through when he came back to his old brown room in Washington Square. The walls and tables were covered with photographs of Undine: effigies of all shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the photographic tradition. Ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved from West End Avenue after Undine’s departure for Europe, and they throned over his other possessions as her image had throned over his future the night he had sat in that very room and dreamed of soaring up with her into the blue …

It was impossible to go on living with her photographs about him; and one evening, going up to his room after dinner, he began to unhang them from the walls, and to gather them up from bookshelves and mantelpiece and tables. Then he looked about for some place in which to hide them. There were drawers under his bookcases; but they were full of old discarded things, and even if he emptied the drawers, the photographs, in their heavy frames, were almost
all too large to fit into them. He turned next to the top shelf of his cupboard; but here the nurse had stored Paul’s old toys, his sand-pails, shovels and croquet-box. Every corner was packed with the vain impedimenta of living, and the mere thought of clearing a space in the chaos was too great an effort.

He began to replace the pictures one by one; and the last was still in his hand when he heard his sister’s voice outside. He hurriedly put the portrait back in its usual place on his writing-table, and Mrs Fairford, who had been dining in Washington Square, and had come up to bid him goodnight, flung her arms about him in a quick embrace and went down to her carriage.

The next afternoon, when he came home from the office, he did not at first see any change in his room; but when he had lit his pipe and thrown himself into his armchair he noticed that the photograph of his wife’s picture by Popple no longer faced him from the mantelpiece. He turned to his writing-table, but her image had vanished from there too; then his eye, making the circuit of the walls, perceived that they also had been stripped. Not a single photograph of Undine was left; yet so adroitly had the work of elimination been done, so ingeniously the remaining objects readjusted, that the change attracted no attention.

Ralph was angry, sore, ashamed. He felt as if Laura, whose hand he instantly detected, had taken a cruel pleasure in her work, and for an instant he hated her for it. Then a sense of relief stole over him. He was glad he could look about him without meeting Undine’s eyes, and he understood that what had been done to his room he must do to his memory and his imagination: he must so readjust his mind that, whichever way he turned his thoughts, her face should no longer confront him. But that was a task that Laura could not perform for him, a task to be accomplished only by the hard continuous tension of his will.

With the setting in of the mood of silence all desire to fight his wife’s suit died out. The idea of touching publicly on
anything that had passed between himself and Undine had become unthinkable. Insensibly he had been subdued to the point of view about him, and the idea of calling on the law to repair his shattered happiness struck him as even more grotesque than it was degrading. Nevertheless, some contradictory impulse of his divided spirit made him resent, on the part of his mother and sister, a too-ready acceptance of his attitude. There were moments when their tacit assumption that his wife was banished and forgotten irritated him like the hushed tread of sympathizers about the bed of an invalid who will not admit that he suffers.

His irritation was aggravated by the discovery that Mrs Marvell and Laura had already begun to treat Paul as if he were an orphan. One day, coming unnoticed into the nursery, Ralph heard the boy ask when his mother was coming back; and Mrs Fairford, who was with him, answered: ‘She’s not coming back, dearest; and you’re not to speak of her to father.’

Ralph, when the boy was out of hearing, rebuked his sister for her answer. ‘I don’t want you to talk of his mother as if she were dead. I don’t want you to forbid Paul to speak of her.’

Laura, though usually so yielding, defended herself. ‘What’s the use of encouraging him to speak of her when he’s never to see her? The sooner he forgets her the better.’

Ralph pondered. ‘Later – if she asks to see him – I shan’t refuse.’

Mrs Fairford pressed her lips together to check the answer: ‘She never will!’

Ralph heard it, nevertheless, and let it pass. Nothing gave him so profound a sense of estrangement from his former life as the conviction that his sister was probably right. He did not really believe that Undine would ever ask to see her boy; but if she did he was determined not to refuse her request.

Time wore on, the Christmas holidays came and went, and the winter continued to grind out the weary measure of
its days. Toward the end of January Ralph received a registered letter, addressed to him at his office, and bearing in the corner of the envelope the names of a firm of Sioux Falls attorneys. He instantly divined that it contained the legal notification of his wife’s application for divorce, and as he wrote his name in the postman’s book he smiled grimly at the thought that the stroke of his pen was doubtless signing her release. He opened the letter, found it to be what he had expected, and locked it away in his desk without mentioning the matter to any one.

He supposed that with the putting away of this document he was thrusting the whole subject out of sight; but not more than a fortnight later, as he sat in the Subway on his way down town, his eye was caught by his own name on the first page of the heavily headlined paper which the unshaved occupant of the next seat held between grimy fists. The blood rushed to Ralph’s forehead as he looked over the man’s arm and read: ‘Society Leader Gets Decree’, and beneath it the subordinate clause: ‘Says Husband Too Absorbed In Business To Make Home Happy’. For weeks afterward, wherever he went, he felt that blush upon his forehead. For the first time in his life the coarse fingering of public curiosity had touched the secret places of his soul, and nothing that had gone before seemed as humiliating as this trivial comment on his tragedy. The paragraph continued on its way through the press, and whenever he took up a newspaper he seemed to come upon it, slightly modified, variously developed, but always reverting with a kind of unctuous irony to his financial preoccupations and his wife’s consequent loneliness. The phrase was even taken up by the paragraph writer, called forth excited letters from similarly situated victims, was commented on in humorous editorials and served as a text for pulpit denunciations of the growing craze for wealth; and finally, at his dentist’s, Ralph came across it in a
Family Weekly
, as one of the ‘Heart problems’ propounded to subscribers, with a Gramophone, a Straight-front Corset and a Vanity-box among the prizes offered for its solution.

‘I
F YOU’D
only had the sense to come straight to me, Undine Spragg! There isn’t a tip I couldn’t have given you – not one!’

This speech, in which a faintly contemptuous compassion for her friend’s case was blent with the frankest pride in her own, probably represented the nearest approach to ‘tact’ that Mrs James J. Rolliver had yet acquired. Undine was impartial enough to note in it a distinct advance on the youthful methods of Indiana Frusk; yet it required a good deal of self-control to take the words to herself with a smile, while they seemed to be laying a visible scarlet welt across the pale face she kept valiantly turned to her friend. The fact that she must permit herself to be pitied by Indiana Frusk gave her the uttermost measure of the depth to which her fortunes had fallen.

This abasement was inflicted on her in the staring gold apartment of the Hôtel Nouveau Luxe in which the Rollivers had established themselves on their recent arrival in Paris. The vast drawing-room, adorned only by two high-shouldered gilt baskets of orchids drooping on their wires, reminded Undine of the ‘Looey suite’ in which the opening scenes of her own history had been enacted; and the resemblance and the difference were emphasized by the fact that the image of her past self was not inaccurately repeated in the triumphant presence of Indiana Rolliver.

‘There isn’t a tip I couldn’t have given you – not one!’ Mrs Rolliver reproachfully repeated; and all Undine’s superiorities and discriminations seemed to shrivel up in the crude blaze of the other’s solid achievement.

There was little comfort in noting, for one’s private delectation, that Indiana spoke of her husband as ‘Mr Rolliver’, that she twanged a piercing
r
, that one of her shoulders was still higher than the other, and that her striking
dress was totally unsuited to the hour, the place and the occasion. She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was but to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.

Not much more than a year had elapsed since Undine Marvell, sitting in the drawing-room of another Parisian hotel, had heard the immense orchestral murmur of Paris rise through the open windows like the ascending movement of her own hopes. The immense murmur still sounded on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force; and the discord in her fate no more disturbed it than the motor wheels rolling by under the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to finer powder as they passed.

‘I could have told you one thing right off,’ Mrs Rolliver went on with her ringing energy. ‘And that is, to get your divorce first thing. A divorce is always a good thing to have: you never can tell when you may want it. You ought to have attended to that before you even
began
with Peter Van Degen.’

Undine listened, irresistibly impressed. ‘Did
you
?’ she asked; but Mrs Rolliver, at this, grew suddenly veiled and sibylline. She wound her big bejewelled hand through her pearls – there were ropes and ropes of them – and leaned back, modestly sinking her lids.

‘I’m here, anyhow,’ she rejoined, with ‘
Circumspice!
’ in look and tone.

Undine, obedient to the challenge, continued to gaze at the pearls. They were real; there was no doubt about that. And so was Indiana’s marriage – if she kept out of certain states.

‘Don’t you see,’ Mrs Rolliver continued, ‘that having to leave him when you did, and rush off to Dakota for six months, was – was giving him too much time to think; and giving it at the wrong time, too?’

‘Oh, I see. But what could I do? I’m not an immoral woman.’

‘Of course not, dearest. You were merely thoughtless – that’s what I meant by saying you ought to have had your divorce ready.’

A flicker of self-esteem caused Undine to protest. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. His wife would never have given him up.’

‘She’s so crazy about him?’

‘No: she hates him so. And she hates me too, because she’s in love with my husband.’

Indiana bounced out of her lounging attitude and struck her hands together with a rattle of rings.