Mr. Spragg listened thoughtfully to Ralph’s statement of the case, growling out here and there a tentative correction, and turning his cigar between his lips as he seemed to turn the problem over in the loose grasp of his mind.
“Well, what’s the trouble with it?” he asked at length, stretching his big square-toed shoes against the grate of his son-in-law’s dining-room, where, in the after-dinner privacy of a family evening, Ralph had seized the occasion to consult him.
“The trouble?” Ralph considered. “Why, that’s just what I should like you to explain to me.”
Mr. Spragg threw back his head and stared at the garlanded French clock on the chimney-piece. Mrs. Spragg was sitting upstairs in her daughter’s bedroom, and the silence of the house seemed to hang about the two men like a listening presence.
“Well, I dunno but what I agree with the doctor who said there warn’t any diseases, but only sick people. Every case is different, I guess.” Mr. Spragg, munching his cigar, turned a ruminating glance on Ralph. “Seems to me it all boils down to one thing. Was this fellow we’re supposing about under any obligation to the other party—the one he was trying to buy the property from?”
Ralph hesitated. “Only the obligation recognized between decent men to deal with each other decently.” Mr. Spragg listened to this with the suffering air of a teacher compelled to simplify upon his simplest questions.
“Any personal obligation, I meant. Had the other fellow done him a good turn any time?”
“No—I don’t imagine them to have had any previous relations at all.”
His father-in-law stared. “Where’s your trouble, then?” He sat for a moment frowning at the embers. “Even when it’s the other way round it ain’t always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing’s binding… and they say shipwrecked fellows’ll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger.” He drew himself together with a shake of his shoulders and pulled back his feet from the grate. “But I don’t see the conundrum in your case, I guess it’s up to both parties to take care of their own skins.”
He rose from his chair and wandered upstairs to Undine.
That was the Wall Street code: it all “boiled down” to the personal obligation, to the salt eaten in the enemy’s tent. Ralph’s fancy wandered off on a long trail of speculation from which he was pulled back with a jerk by the need of immediate action. Moffatt’s “deal” could not wait: quick decisions were essential to effective action, and brooding over ethical shades of difference might work more ill than good in a world committed to swift adjustments. The arrival of several unforeseen bills confirmed this view, and once Ralph had adopted it he began to take a detached interest in the affair.
In Paris, in his younger days, he had once attended a lesson in acting given at the Conservatoire by one of the great lights of the theatre, and had seen an apparently uncomplicated role of the classic repertory, familiar to him through repeated performances, taken to pieces before his eyes, dissolved into its component elements, and built up again with a minuteness of elucidation and a range of reference that made him feel as though he had been let into the secret of some age-long natural process. As he listened to Moffatt the remembrance of that lesson came back to him. At the outset the “deal,” and his own share in it, had seemed simple enough: he would have put on his hat and gone out on the spot in the full assurance of being able to transact the affair. But as Moffatt talked he began to feel as blank and blundering as the class of dramatic students before whom the great actor had analyzed his part. The affair was in fact difficult and complex, and Moffatt saw at once just where the difficulties lay and how the personal idiosyncrasies of “the parties” affected them. Such insight fascinated Ralph, and he strayed off into wondering why it did not qualify every financier to be a novelist, and what intrinsic barrier divided the two arts.
Both men had strong incentives for hastening the affair; and within a fortnight after Moffatt’s first advance Ralph was able to tell him that his offer was accepted. Over and above his personal satisfaction he felt the thrill of the agent whom some powerful negotiator has charged with a delicate mission: he might have been an eager young Jesuit carrying compromising papers to his superior. It had been stimulating to work with Moffatt, and to study at close range the large powerful instrument of his intelligence.
As he came out of Moffatt’s office at the conclusion of this visit Ralph met Mr. Spragg descending from his eyrie. He stopped short with a backward glance at Moffatt’s door.
“Hallo—what were you doing in there with those cut-throats?”
Ralph judged discretion to be essential. “Oh, just a little business for the firm.”
Mr. Spragg said no more, but resorted to the soothing labial motion of revolving his phantom toothpick.
“How’s Undie getting along?” he merely asked, as he and his son-in-law descended together in the elevator.
“She doesn’t seem to feel much stronger. The doctor wants her to run over to Europe for a few weeks. She thinks of joining her friends the Shallums in Paris.”
Mr. Spragg was again silent, but he left the building at Ralph’s side, and the two walked along together toward Wall Street.
Presently the older man asked: “How did you get acquainted with Moffatt?”
“Why, by chance—Undine ran across him somewhere and asked him to dine the other night.”
“Undine asked him to dine?”
“Yes: she told me you used to know him out at Apex.”
Mr. Spragg appeared to search his memory for confirmation of the fact. “I believe he used to be round there at one time. I’ve never heard any good of him yet.” He paused at a crossing and looked probingly at his son-in-law. “Is she terribly set on this trip to Europe?”
Ralph smiled. “You know how it is when she takes a fancy to do anything—”
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 windfalclass="underline" 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 Lipscombs, 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 Lipscombs were so eager to take it.